What Deep Dive Is For
Deep Dive is a dedicated module for comparing your citation performance against one or more competitors. It replaces a manual workflow that previously required setting a custom brand filter in the Domains view and working through the data piece by piece.
The goal of Deep Dive is to give you a clear, side-by-side picture of how your brand and your competitors are being referenced by AI, where the gaps are, and what types of content are driving the differences.
Getting Started
When you open Deep Dive, you will select the brands you want to compare. Include your own brand and at least one competitor. You can add multiple competitors to compare all of them at once.
Once brands are selected, the module populates with citation and mention data for the period you have chosen.
Citations Over Time
The first chart shows citations over time for each selected brand. This lets you see whether your domain or a competitor's is trending up or down as an AI-cited source, and whether any brand has made a notable gain or loss over the period.
Adjust the date range to zoom in on a specific period or widen it to see longer-term trends.
Mentions Comparison
The mentions comparison breaks down how each brand's mentions are distributed across citation types: Owned, Earned, and Social.
Owned mentions reflect how often a brand's own pages are being cited by AI.
Earned mentions reflect how often third-party content referencing a brand is being cited.
Social mentions reflect YouTube, Reddit, and similar platform citations.
Looking at the balance between these three categories across brands can surface strategic differences. A competitor with high earned mentions may have a stronger third-party presence or press coverage that AI is picking up on. A competitor with high owned mentions may have a more comprehensive content library on their domain.
Coverage by Page Type
This view shows which content formats are driving citations for each brand. Page types include Articles, Listicles, Comparisons, Documentation, Forum Discussions, Social Media, and others.
Use this to identify content format gaps. If a competitor is generating significantly more citations from comparison pages than you are, that is a specific type of content worth evaluating. If articles are the dominant citation driver in your category and one brand is well ahead of the others, look at what they are publishing and how it is structured.
Drilling into a page type
You can click on any page type category to see the specific domains or pages contributing to that brand's citations in that format. This lets you go from a high-level gap observation directly to the content responsible for it.
Deep Dive uses the same underlying citation data as the rest of the module. The brands available in the selector are the ones you have added as tracked brands in Cognizo. If a competitor you want to compare is not appearing, add them as a tracked brand first.
Recommended Workflow
Select your brand and the competitors most relevant to your current focus.
Review Citations Over Time to see who is trending up and whether there have been any notable shifts.
Check the Mentions breakdown to understand whether competitor gains are coming from owned content, earned media, or social platforms.
Open Coverage by Page Type to identify which content formats they are winning on that you are not.
Drill into any page type where a gap exists to see the specific pages driving it.
Save any domains or pages you want to monitor to your Watchlist.
When to Use Deep Dive
At the start of a content planning cycle, to identify which formats and topics competitors are winning on.
After a competitor publishes a significant content push, to see if it is affecting their citation share.
When trying to explain a change in your own citation performance, to see whether the market shifted or a specific competitor made gains.
When presenting AEO progress to stakeholders, to show citation trends in a competitive context.