# How To Spy on Your Competitor's Best-Of Posts and Comparison Pages

The Comparison Pages tool in QueryBurst Site Intelligence crawls any website and extracts every brand and product mention from its comparison content — "best of" lists, product roundups, and ranked comparisons. For each page, see which brands are mentioned, their ranked positions, "best for" designations, and which brands consistently co-occur. Check whether your own brand appears and where it ranks relative to competitors across their entire site.

Works on your own site too — audit your comparison pages for quality, check co-occurrence patterns, and identify content that may carry risk from search quality updates targeting scaled listicle strategies.

## How to Access The QueryBurst Comparison Pages Tool

1. Open a site in [QueryBurst](/content/site-root.html)
2. Click **[Site Intelligence](/content/docs/site-intelligence/index.html)** in the sidebar
3. Select the **Comparison Pages** subtab

If no comparison data exists yet, click the extract button to run brand extraction.

## Understanding the Interface

### Stats Row

| Stat               | Description                                                                 |
|--------------------|-----------------------------------------------------------------------------|
| **Comparison pages** | Number of pages identified as containing brand/product comparisons           |
| **Unique entities** | Distinct brands or products mentioned across all comparison pages          |
| **Total mentions**  | Total brand/product mentions across all pages                               |
| **Self appearances** | How many lists include your own brand                                        |
| **Avg position**    | Your brand's average ranking position in lists                               |
| **#1 count**       | How many times your brand appears in first position                         |

### View Modes

Toggle between two views:

**By Entity:**

- Lists every brand/product found across comparison pages
- Shows how many lists each brand appears in and its average position
- **Self badge** — Marks your own brand
- **Product badge** — Distinguishes products from brands
- Click **Filter** to see only pages containing that brand
- Expand a row to see detailed appearances

**By Page:**

- Lists each comparison page with its title and list type (brands/products/mixed)
- Shows item count per page
- Expand to see the ranked list of brands/products with:
  - Position number
  - Brand name
  - Self/product badges
  - "Best for" designation (if extracted)

### Bubble Chart

A visual representation of brand frequency. Bubble size corresponds to mention count. Click a bubble to filter the list to that brand.

When a brand is selected, the chart switches to a **co-occurrence view** showing which other brands appear alongside the selected one.

### Search

Client-side search supporting `"exact phrase"` and `-exclude` syntax. Filters both the entity index and page lists.

## Interpreting Results

### What to Look For

- **Competitor programmatic content** — A large number of comparison pages may indicate a competitor is mass-producing "best of" content programmatically. This is a common tactic but generally considered low quality by search engines.
- **Your brand's representation** — Check whether your brand appears in competitor comparison pages and where it ranks. Unfair or inaccurate positioning may warrant action.
- **Co-occurrence patterns** — Which competitors consistently appear alongside your brand? This affects how AI models associate brands within a category.
- **"Best for" designations** — What differentiators are being attributed to your brand vs competitors?

### Warning Signs

- **Very high page count** — A site with dozens of templated comparison pages is likely using programmatic generation, which search engines increasingly penalise.
- **Low or no self-mentions** — If you have comparison pages, your own brand should be included where relevant.
- **Consistently low positions** — Your brand is being ranked below competitors across multiple pages.
- **Inaccurate "best for" claims** — Competitors may be misrepresenting your brand's strengths.

## Tips

1. **Use this as a monitoring tool** — Track how competitors position your brand in their comparison content over time.
2. **Don't mass-produce comparison pages** — A few genuine, well-researched comparison articles are fine, but large-scale programmatic "best of" content is a pattern search engines actively target.
3. **Include your own brand** in any comparison content you do create, with accurate "best for" qualifiers.
4. **Check competitor accuracy** — If competitors are misrepresenting your brand in their comparisons, this data helps identify it.
5. **Re-extract after crawl updates** — Click the refresh button to re-run extraction after your site has been re-crawled.

## Technical Details

Brand extraction identifies comparison-style pages during site analysis by detecting list structures, ranked comparisons, and "best of" patterns. Each brand or product mention is extracted with its position and any qualifying attributes. Self-mentions are detected by matching against the site's own brand entity.