Your competitors publish everything. Now you can read all of it.
Big companies pay research teams and six-figure tools to know exactly where they stand against everyone in their market. Small and mid-sized businesses get a shrug and a gut feeling. Footprint closes that gap. It audits your entire digital presence — and every competitor’s — reads the whole market the way your customers actually see it, and hands one person the picture a surveillance team used to produce by hand. The machine does the watching. Your judgment decides what to do about it.
A truthful competitive picture takes a dozen tools — or one.
To honestly answer “where do we stand against the businesses down the street?”, a consultant normally stitches together a crawler, an SEO suite, review monitors, ad libraries, and page-speed checkers — by hand, every time, and it goes stale the week after it’s done. Footprint replaces that whole stack with one pipeline. It crawls your site and each competitor’s, then enriches every one from roughly fifteen public data sources — listings, reviews across platforms, search visibility, traffic estimates, ad transparency, page performance — into a single canonical record per business. Then it scores each one across seven categories, weighted to your industry, and re-audits the entire set automatically every week so the picture never goes stale. One record. Your whole market. Refreshed while you sleep.
canonical record per business
weighted to your industry
See their ads, their social, their promotions. Then decide.
The most useful competitive question is the simplest: what are the businesses down the street actually doing to win customers right now? Footprint reads it — the ads each competitor is running and a breakdown of why a given ad works (its hook, its offer, its creative approach), their social activity and engagement, the promotions they’re pushing, their menus and pricing where it’s public. This is exactly how it earns its keep in production today: advising a family-owned bakery-café on its own ads and next moves by showing the owner what the competition is running. And it checks the newest surface of all — when a customer asks an AI assistant for a recommendation, is it naming you, or a rival? You get a read on the whole market’s moves, so your next one is informed instead of a guess.
ads and competitive moves today — a live engagement, not a roadmap
recommends you or a competitor — so you know who to displace
Measure with code. Judge with people.
Scored by code, not vibes.
Every one of the seven category scores is computed by deterministic rubric — the same inputs always produce the same number. The AI writes the plain-language summary and the prioritized recommendations; it never does the math and it never invents a score.
A human reviews everything.
Machine-discovered competitors, data conflicts, and recommendations all route through an operator’s review queue before anything reaches you. What lands on your desk is a prioritized worklist a person has checked — not a raw data dump. The expert’s resolutions stick across every future re-audit.
Only data we’re allowed to use.
Footprint reads only legitimately public or client-authorized sources — public web pages, listings, the ad transparency centers, licensed search data. No logged-in scraping, no grey-market data. Competitive intelligence you can stand behind. No staff displaced: the machine gathers and scores, a person confirms every finding before it counts.
This isn’t a roadmap. Footprint runs in production today — as the engine behind Blackfrog’s own client and prospect audits, as the competitive layer inside CoversIQ, and advising a live family-owned bakery-café on its ads and next moves from what its competitors are doing. Every tracked business is re-audited weekly, trends accumulate automatically, and every finding is reviewed by a person before a client sees it. No staff displaced. See the platform →
See your whole market in one picture.
Bring the name of the competitor that worries you — or just your own business. We’ll point Footprint at your market and walk you through the picture it builds: scored, reviewed, prioritized, and honest about where you’re winning and where you’re not.
How do I know if ChatGPT recommends my business?
When someone asks an AI assistant for a recommendation, it names a business — and increasingly that decides who gets the call. Footprint checks whether AI assistants surface you or a competitor, and pairs it with the signals that drive the answer: reviews, listings consistency, and search visibility across your market. You find out where you stand before a customer tells you.
What is a digital-presence audit?
It’s a single, scored picture of everything public about a business — website, listings, reviews across platforms, search visibility, traffic estimates, ad transparency, and page performance. Footprint unifies roughly 15 public sources into one canonical record per business, scores 7 categories weighted to your industry, and does it for you and every competitor.
How do small businesses track competitors?
Most stitch together a crawler, an SEO suite, review monitors, and ad libraries by hand — and it goes stale the week it’s done. Footprint replaces that stack with one pipeline that re-audits the whole set every week automatically, so the picture stays current. It’s the kind of competitive intelligence large companies staff research teams for, sized for a small business.
Is the competitive data trustworthy?
Every finding is reviewed by a person before you see it — 100% human-reviewed, scored by code rather than vibes, and built only from data we’re permitted to use. The measurement is deterministic and the judgment is human. You get surveillance-team output without a surveillance team, and without guessing at what’s real.
Free AI visibility check
The lead-in version of this product: your market scored, your competitors beside you, reviewed by a person. Free, once.
Why AI recommends your competitor
The seven scores that decide whether an assistant names you — and our own audit, published warts first.
Learn
Practical write-ups on the questions owners actually ask us, with verified numbers and the methods shown.
Practical AI for small and mid-sized business. Live products, verified numbers, and your experts in charge of every decision.