Research · buyer-intent SERPs
We analysed 1,001 high-buy-intent searches — "brand vs rival", "brand alternatives", pricing, reviews, free trial — across 119 B2B software brands, and looked at who owns the top-ranked page and what that page is made of. The pattern is stark: businesses own the searches about buying from them, and have surrendered the searches about choosing them over someone else.
| Buyer searches… | Queries | Brand's own page wins | Someone else wins |
|---|---|---|---|
| "brand pricing" | 118 | 81% | 19% |
| "brand free trial" | 118 | 81% | 19% |
| "brand cost" | 118 | 81% | 19% |
| "brand discount" | 118 | 64% | 36% |
| "brand vs rival" | 292 | 33% | 67% |
| "brand review" | 118 | 25% | 75% |
| "brand alternatives" | 118 | 16% | 84% |
Two-thirds of "you vs rival" searches — and five of six "your alternatives" searches — are answered by a page you didn't write. Often it's the rival's comparison page, an affiliate listicle, or a review aggregator. That page is what a buyer reads at the exact moment they're deciding between you and someone else.
Feature prevalence across the 941 top-ranked pages we could fully crawl — some of it cuts against popular advice:
| Feature | Share of winners | Read |
|---|---|---|
| Title contains the intent word (pricing/vs/alternatives…) | 71% | table stakes |
| Call-to-action above the fold | 79% | winners sell |
| Author byline | 77% | common… |
| Author bio | 2% | …but the "add author bios" advice? Winners skip it |
| FAQ schema | 11% | not the ranking prerequisite it's sold as |
| Visible "updated" date | 26% | intent-specific (see below) |
| Exact-match H1 | 10% | near-match beats keyword-stuffing |
| Links out to authoritative sources | ~1% of pages' links | transactional SERPs don't require it |
| Backlinks to the winning page | median 21 | page shape beats raw authority here |
Position 1 vs position 2 is where authority shows: the median #1 page has 82 backlinks to the runner-up's 6. But a median of 82 is not a moat — it means the podium is reachable with the right page and a modest citation push.
| Intent | The shape that wins |
|---|---|
| "vs" (n=274) | head-to-head comparison; 74% use a superlative ("best", "top"), H1 close to the query, honest both-ways structure. FAQ schema on just 7%. |
| "alternatives" (n=109) | the numbered listicle: 79% have a number in the title, 50% a year, 47% a visible updated date, 93% a byline. The most third-party-owned intent (84%). |
| "pricing" (n=115) | the brand's own plans page: 91% CTA above the fold, 35% an FAQ block, zero years-in-title, zero listicle theatrics. |
Own your comparison moments before a rival or an affiliate does: publish an honest page for every "you vs rival" AI names against you, and your own "alternatives to you" page. The step-by-step anatomy, drawn from these winners, is in the comparison-page playbook. Your free scan shows which rivals AI actually names against you — that's your page list.
The free scan asks the engines your buyers' questions and names names. ~60 seconds.
Run the free scan →Method & provenance: source dataset assembled by Distribb — 1,001 buyer-intent queries with the #1–2 ranked page and on-page features captured late 2025; independent analysis by Are you found by AI? (full recompute from the raw rows, July 2026). 941 of 1,001 pages fully crawled; feature stats use those 941. Sample skews B2B SaaS (119 brands, 347 winning domains). These are Google SERPs, not AI answers — we treat them as the retrieval layer AI reads, which is measured, not assumed, via the engine-run searches our scans log. Prevalence is correlation, not causation.