NearIQ includes two related sections for understanding the broader competitive landscape beyond your directly tracked competitors: the Map tab and the Market tab. Together they let you visualise where your competitors sit relative to you, see how you rank against all businesses in your area, and identify patterns in the market.
Map tab
The Map tab shows an interactive map with your business location and all your tracked competitors plotted as pins. Each pin shows the competitor’s name and health score on hover, and clicking it navigates you to their detail panel in the Competitors tab.
Use the map to:
- Understand the geographic distribution of your competition
- Identify clusters of competitors that may affect your local search visibility
- Spot areas with fewer competitors nearby — potential opportunity zones where customers are underserved
Market tab
The Market tab shows industry-wide data aggregated from across the NearIQ platform. It has two sub-views, accessible from the dropdown in the top-right corner of the tab.
Leaderboard
The leaderboard ranks businesses in your area — or any area you filter to — by their competitive strength. By default it sorts by health score descending, showing the strongest businesses at the top.
Each row shows:
| Column | Description |
|---|
| Rank | Position in the current sorted order |
| Business | Name, category badge, and address |
| Rating | Current Google star rating |
| Reviews | Total review count |
| Score | Health score (0–100) |
| Trend | Weekly review velocity (new reviews per week) and owner response rate |
- Business category
- Country, state/region, and city
- Time range (how recently data was captured)
- Minimum review count
- Sort field and direction
Quick-filter buttons above the table let you jump straight to your own industry or city.
Expanding a row: Click any row to expand a detail panel showing the health score breakdown, rating and review sparklines, and a Track competitor button that adds the business to your watched competitors.
Your own business, when it appears in the leaderboard, is highlighted with a coloured left border and a YOU badge.
Market Trends
The Trends view surfaces aggregated signals across all businesses in the current filter context:
- Category breakdown — how many businesses fall into each category
- Geographic spread — distribution by city or state
- Average rating — the mean star rating across all businesses in the filtered set
These summaries help you understand the competitive density in your market and whether your category is saturated or sparse in a given area.
Opportunity zones
An opportunity zone is an area where competitor density is low, average ratings are weak, or both. NearIQ surfaces these by:
- Showing cells on the Map tab where few or no tracked competitors exist nearby
- Showing low average ratings in the Market Trends view for specific cities or neighbourhoods
- Flagging competitor
rating_drop and status_change alerts that indicate weakening rivals
When a competitor near you closes permanently or drops significantly in rating, that is a direct signal that a customer gap has opened in that area.
Filter the leaderboard to your city and sort by Review Count ascending to find businesses in your category with low review counts. These are often less established competitors that you may be able to outpace with a sustained review-building effort.
Tracking a competitor from the leaderboard
Any business in the leaderboard that you are not already tracking shows a Track competitor button in its expanded detail row. Clicking it adds the business to your Competitors tab and starts monitoring it for changes immediately. Businesses you are already tracking show a ✓ Already tracking label instead.