Skip to content
GetProfit
Log in

← All terms

Competitive visibility

Competitive visibility is a Merchant Center report on how often other shops appear on Google next to and above yours in one product category and country.

How it works

Google counts displayed impressions from Shopping ads and organic listings and groups them by country, Google product category and traffic source. The report’s columns for each competing domain include these three:

  • Relative visibility — how often the competitor’s offers are shown compared with yours.
  • Page overlap rate — how often its offers appear on the same page as yours.
  • Higher position rate — how often its offer is placed above yours on the page.

It also lists the category’s most visible domains and tracks your visibility against a category benchmark. Competitive visibility in Merchant Center explains how to read the report. For marketplaces in these results, see Amazon, Temu and Allegro in Shopping.

Formula

Relative visibility = competitor’s displayed impressions ÷ your displayed impressions (same category, country and period)

Where you see it

Eligible accounts get it in Merchant Center and through the Merchant API. In the portal, the “Competitors in your niche” block on the feed screen shows two numbers separately: how many times more often a site shows than you, and in what share of shared queries it stands above you. With several shops in one account, the portal shows competitors per shop and never adds them up.

Example

Example store, not client data.

In its main category over a month, the tableware shop had 200,000 displayed impressions. Shop A had 500,000: relative visibility 500,000 ÷ 200,000 = 2.5. Shop B had 60,000: relative visibility 0.3, but its higher position rate is 0.8. On pages where both appeared, B stood above the shop 8 times out of 10.

Not to be confused with

  • Auction insights — a Google Ads report on advertisers in the same ad auctions. Competitive visibility also counts organic listings and is split by category and country.
  • Impression share — your impressions as a share of those you were eligible for, not a comparison with a competitor.

Right and wrong readings

  • Wrong: “Shop B is shown less often than we are, so it is no threat.” Right: relative visibility shows how often; the higher position rate shows where. B is shown 0.3 times as often, yet ranks higher on 8 of 10 shared pages.

Sources