How Presence works
Presence is built around a simple idea: are arenas, are contenders, and a mention is a contender observed in an arena.
Everything else - workspaces, prompts, scheduled measurement, traits, briefs, and fact checking - hangs off that model.
The hierarchy
Account
├── Brands (your brands and competitors)
├── Workspaces (one identity brand competing in one arena)
│ ├── Topics (sub-arenas - each belongs to this workspace alone)
│ │ └── Prompts (questions asked of AI assistants)
│ ├── Competitor roster (who this workspace's screens compare you against)
│ └── Traits (the patterns claims are grouped into, per workspace)
└── Measurements (recurring runs across enabled assistants)
├── Responses (each answer, stored verbatim)
├── Mentions - who was named, in what order, in what tone
├── Sources - which URLs were used as evidence
├── Ads - paid placements some assistants serve beside answers
└── Claims - what was said about each brand
Three things sit alongside this rather than inside it:
- Strategy briefs read the measurements and produce tasks, which live in your account's normal task list rather than inside Presence.
- Accuracy is a parallel track on the same brand: you declare facts, Silktide asks derived questions, and grades whether assistants agree. It does not feed share-of-voice rankings.
- Traffic is first-party visit data from Analytics on your websites. It is the payoff of being mentioned: whether search engines and AI platforms then sent people.
From setup to standings
- Record brands - your own names and the competitors you care about, with aliases so matching stays reliable.
- Define workspaces - each pairs one identity brand with the arena it competes in.
- Define topics - arenas such as "undergraduate nursing programmes" or "smartphones". Every subject topic belongs to exactly one workspace.
- Add prompts - the questions Silktide will ask. Most are generated for you, and every brand watching that topic shares them.
- Measure on a schedule - each active prompt is asked of each enabled assistant; answers are stored verbatim and analysed.
- Read standings - visibility, position, sentiment, citations, and traits, as trends rather than snapshots.
- Act - run a strategy brief, triage the tasks it proposes, and re-measure.
One pass, many numbers
Everything in Presence comes out of a single read of each stored answer. Silktide does not run separate scans for mentions, sentiment, citations, and traits - it reads the answer once and records all of it.
That is why the screens agree with each other, and why every headline number can be traced back to specific responses. Any figure you distrust can be drilled into until you are looking at the actual words an assistant wrote. Responses is where that trail ends.
Shared measurement
Prompts live on topics, not on individual brands. Ten brands watching "building permits" cost the same to measure as one - Silktide asks the questions once and traits mentions to whoever appears in the answers.
This also keeps comparisons honest. Apple and Samsung are scored from the same smartphone questions, not from two private question lists that quietly drift apart.
Tracked, rostered, and merely seen
Three populations of names are easy to confuse, and the difference explains several screens.
| What it means | |
|---|---|
| Seen | A name an assistant used in an answer. Silktide records everything it spots, which runs to thousands. These surface under Entities. |
| Tracked | A name you have added as a . Tracked brands are the ones with metrics: share of voice is divided among them, and claims are only extracted about them. |
| Rostered | A tracked brand you have put on a specific workspace's competitor list. The roster decides who appears as rows and columns on that workspace's screens. |
So a rival you have never added is visible as a discovered name but has no metrics; a rival you track but leave off a workspace's roster still counts in the arithmetic but stays off that workspace's screens.
Account scope
Presence data is account-scoped, not website-scoped. Mentions are facts about a brand, not about a page. Citations can be traced back to a website when the cited URL belongs to a site in your account, but you do not configure Presence "inside" a single website the way you configure a website's modules.