Brand name matching

Name matching under Presence shows every name found in your answers and what it was mapped to: you, a competitor, or nothing. It is the screen that decides whether the rest of the numbers are true.

Why this is hard

A brand in prose is not a string lookup. Names get abbreviated, spaced differently, possessive, pluralised and misspelled. Some brand names are also ordinary words, which means a naive match counts every sentence containing "monday" as a mention.

Corroboration before mapping

A candidate name seen once is a guess. A name seen across several runs, in positions where brands appear, is a brand. Automatic mapping waits for that corroboration rather than acting on a single hit.

The trade is deliberate: a new competitor takes a few runs to appear instead of a junk phrase appearing immediately and poisoning share of voice for a week.

Correcting a mapping

Everything on the screen is editable. Map a name to your brand, to a competitor, or dismiss it as not a brand. Corrections apply going forward, and dismissals stick, so a word you have ruled out does not come back.

What to check in week one

• Your own variants, including the ones you did not think of. The answers will show you how assistants actually write your name.
• Any mapped competitor you do not recognise. Usually a real company you had not thought of, occasionally a mistake.
• Anything unmapped that appears often. A rival you forgot to list.

Rank, not only presence

For the owned brand, matching also drives rank: how many brands are named before yours. That needs every competitor mapped rather than only you, which is why an unmapped rival quietly flatters both your rank and your share.

A low score that is really a mapping problem

If the Visibility Score looks impossibly low, come here before anything else. A missing name variant produces exactly the shape of a bad month, and it is a two minute fix.