How Brand Seshes Are Essential for Competitive Seshes
In the LLM-driven world of modern marketing, your brand doesn’t just compete in search rankings—it competes in AI-generated answers. Competitive Seshes (Comp Seshes) reveal how your rivals show up across GPT-4, Claude, Gemini, and others. But to make sense of that landscape, you need a baseline: that’s where Brand Seshes come in.
What’s the Difference?
- Brand Sesh: A focused LLM evaluation of how your brand appears in response to real-world prompts. It maps mentions, rankings, and sentiment.
- Comp Sesh: A broader comparison, showing how your brand stacks up against competitors in the same space or prompt cluster.
Think of the Brand Sesh as your control group—it gives you the internal benchmark. Without it, you don’t know whether a Comp Sesh result is good, bad, or alarming.
Why Brand Seshes Matter First
Running a Comp Sesh without a Brand Sesh is like checking your rival’s health stats without knowing your own. Brand Seshes:
- Provide context for interpreting visibility gaps
- Show what’s working in your current LLM presence
- Identify prompt types where you already dominate or disappear
This lets you view Comp Sesh data not just as a scoreboard, but as a strategy tool.
Example: Mobile Carriers
Let’s say you run a Brand Sesh for Mint Mobile. You appear 2nd in 60% of GPT-4 responses for “best budget phone plans.” Then you run a Comp Sesh and see Visible Wireless showing up first more often.
With the Brand Sesh baseline, you now know:
- You’re competing, but narrowly behind
- GPT-4 prefers Visible for certain phrasing (e.g. “no-contract plans”)
- Claude mentions you more often, but in neutral tone
Now you can make targeted improvements: prompt optimization, feature language, or citation strengthening.
Comp Seshes Without Brand Seshes Are Just Noise
Competitor data is powerful—but only when you know how it relates to your own performance. Brand Seshes give you that grounding. They let you:
- Separate true underperformance from natural LLM variation
- Spot gaps where you could lead but don’t
- Measure improvement across time, prompts, and models
In short: before you worry about how you rank against competitors, you need to know how you rank against yourself. Brand Seshes make every Comp Sesh actionable.
