Brand and competitors

Two lists drive most of what you see: the names that mean you, and the names that mean a rival. Both are editable, and both are worth checking in the first week.

Your brand, spelled every way

An assistant writing about you will not spell your brand the way your style guide does. It will space a compound name, abbreviate a long one, use the domain instead of the company, and occasionally misspell it the way your customers do.

Every one of those is a mention. Add them all as name variants. The cost of a missing variant is an undercounted Visibility Score that looks exactly like a bad week.

Competitors are brands

Three to eight names you actually meet in deals. Not every company in the category, and not the market leader if you never compete with them.

A competitor entry has to be a company. A generic phrase in the list turns the comparison into one about vocabulary rather than brands, which is how a share-of-voice chart ends up measuring language.

Matching is corroborated, not trusted

A candidate name found once is a guess; a name found across several runs is a brand. Matching waits for corroboration before it maps anything automatically, which is slower and avoids the failure where one odd answer invents a competitor.

Anything it gets wrong is yours to correct in Name matching under Presence, and the correction applies going forward.

Why this is the first thing to fix

Everything downstream reads these lists: the Visibility Score, share of voice, your rank among the brands named, and the source attribution. Five minutes here is worth more than any other five minutes in the product.