Common questions about competitive intelligence

Lightspace Labs is an automated competitive intelligence platform for small businesses. After you sign up, our AI researches your brand, builds a profile of your business and industry, then scans Perplexity AI, ChatGPT, and Gemini to find the competitors that share space with you in AI search results. It builds a full intelligence profile for each competitor — covering their marketing messaging, pricing, tech stack, and product strategy — and keeps every profile updated on a rolling schedule. All of it runs without any manual research or configuration from you.

When you sign up, our AI automatically generates a set of search queries tailored to your business, industry, and target market. It runs those queries across the three major AI search engines — Perplexity AI, ChatGPT, and Gemini — and records which domains co-appear with your business in the generated results. Competitors are ranked by co-citation frequency: the more often a domain appears alongside your brand in AI-generated answers, the higher it ranks on your candidate list. You review the list, star the competitors that matter, and the full analysis schedule kicks in automatically for each starred competitor.

Every starred competitor is tracked across five modules: (1) Citation Visibility — how often the competitor appears as a cited source in AI-generated answers across Perplexity, ChatGPT, and Gemini, updated daily; (2) Marketing Strategy — messaging themes, positioning, calls to action, and content strategy, updated weekly; (3) Pricing Intelligence — current pricing tiers, pricing model, and any public pricing changes, updated weekly; (4) Tech Stack Detection — the frameworks, platforms, and tools detected on their site, updated weekly; (5) Product Deep-Dive — an in-depth analysis of their product or service offering using AI vision to process screenshots and page content, updated monthly.

Citation visibility refreshes every day. Marketing strategy, pricing intelligence, and tech stack detection update weekly. The product deep-dive — the most compute-intensive module, which processes screenshots using AI vision — runs monthly. You can also trigger a fresh analysis on any competitor at any time from your portal without waiting for the scheduled run.

Citation visibility measures how often a competitor's website appears as a cited source in AI-generated search responses — per engine (Perplexity AI, ChatGPT Search, Gemini), per query. As AI search becomes a primary way customers discover businesses, appearing in those generated answers is a direct signal of authority in your market. Citation visibility tracking shows you exactly how each competitor stacks up against your own site in that dimension — updated every day so you can see the impact of any changes they (or you) make.

After sign-up, your competitor candidate list is populated automatically. Starring a competitor tells the platform that you want to actively track them — it activates all five intelligence modules for that competitor and counts one slot toward your plan's tracked-competitor limit. You can add unlimited candidates to your list; only the ones you star consume a slot. Unstarring a competitor pauses tracking and frees up the slot for another.

Onboarding is fully automated and starts immediately after sign-up. Our AI researches your brand and runs the initial visibility scan within hours. Most clients have a ready-to-review competitor candidate list within 24 hours of signing up. Once you star competitors, the first full intelligence pass completes within the same cycle window — citation visibility and marketing strategy data are typically ready the same day you star them.

Yes. Beyond the auto-discovered candidates, you can add any competitor by URL directly from your portal. Manually added competitors are treated identically to discovered ones — star them to activate the full five-module analysis schedule. This is useful for tracking specific regional competitors or known rivals that don't yet appear in AI search alongside your brand.

The SEO & GEO add-on runs the full optimization pipeline on your own website — separate from competitor tracking. It includes: content rewriting to improve your AI citation visibility (GEO), local SEO signal audits with NAP consistency checking and LocalBusiness schema generation, meta tag and JSON-LD structured data generation for every page, and Core Web Vitals monitoring via Google PageSpeed Insights. The add-on is available on any CI plan and runs on the same cadence as your plan — monthly on Starter, weekly on Growth, daily on Scale.

No. Competitor discovery, intelligence analysis, and rolling updates are fully automated. Your only input is reviewing the auto-generated candidate list and starring the competitors you want to track. After that, your portal updates itself on the schedule included in your plan. No spreadsheets, no manual web searches, no ongoing effort required.

You can upgrade your plan at any time — your new starred-competitor cap takes effect immediately. On any plan, you can keep an unlimited number of pending (unstarred) competitors on your candidate list; only starred competitors count against your limit. If you downgrade, the lower limit takes effect at the next billing cycle, and you'll be prompted to unstar competitors down to the new cap before the change completes.