Competitors and brand matching

Competitors are discovered, not declared

You do not maintain a competitor list. Every brand named in an answer is recorded, so the rivals you did not know about appear on their own — usually the most useful thing on the screen in the first week.

You can still mark brands yourself when the classification is wrong.

How brands are classified

Every discovered name is sorted into one of a few kinds:

• Your brand — the one the project tracks.
• Competitor — a rival that a buyer could choose instead of you.
• Marketplace, media, other — review sites, rankings, press, platforms. These are named in answers constantly but are not choices a buyer makes instead of you.

The split matters because share of voice counts only your brand and competitors. Let a comparison portal count as a competitor and your share of voice drops for a reason that has nothing to do with your market.

Name variants

Revolut, Revolut Bank and revolut.com are one brand, and answers use all three. Variants are merged into a single brand so that its mentions are not scattered across three rows, each too small to notice.

When a merge is wrong — two genuinely different companies with similar names — you can split them, and the correction sticks for future runs.

What is never a competitor

The assistants themselves. ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity and the companies behind them are excluded from competitor lists: they are the instrument taking the measurement, and an answer that mentions "ChatGPT" is not a rival winning your customer.