Brands and competitors

A in Silktide is a named entity you want to recognize in AI answers: the canonical name people use, plus aliases and spelling variants. It is not a website. One organization often has several brands, and one brand often spans many websites.

Your brand and your competitors are the same kind of record. What tells them apart is the : every workspace names the main brand it is about, and you can mark further brands as yours so they count toward you. Every other brand in that workspace is a competitor. Silktide can also suggest brands it keeps seeing in answers that you have not recorded yet.

Examples

Apple might track Apple itself alongside Beats and other names that appear in AI answers, plus competitors such as Samsung and Google in product arenas. A can own more than one of those names: mark them as yours so reports treat them as you, and file a product brand under its parent (iPhone under Apple) when views of the parent should include the child's mentions. One brand can still front several workspaces (iPhone, MacBook, Apple TV), which keeps a large brand family tidy without forcing every product line into one name.

A public university might own Northbridge University as the primary brand, plus a medical school or athletics name that people ask about separately - and track peer universities as competitors for admissions and research topics.

A city government might own City of Meridian as the brand residents recognize, while competitors are less about rivals and more about other cities or agencies that assistants mention when people ask about recycling, permits, or public transit.

A large corporate such as an energy or financial services group might own the parent brand plus regional or product brands that customers know by different names - each worth tracking if assistants treat them as distinct.

What to capture

Canonical name - the form you want reported ("Northbridge University", not every informal short form).
Aliases - abbreviations, former names, and common misspellings so mentions still match.
Web addresses - the URLs the brand owns, so Silktide can tell whose pages are being cited.
Workspace or locale context where it matters - the same short name can mean different organizations in different workspaces.
Which brand the workspace is about - chosen on the workspace, not on the brand, so standings and fact checking focus on the right scorecard.

Web addresses

Every brand needs at least one web address before it can go live. Without one, Silktide can recognize the brand by name in an answer but cannot tell whether a cited page belongs to you, a competitor, or a stranger.

An address covers everything beneath it. example.edu also covers www.example.edu, admissions.example.edu, and every page on all of them, so language and department subdomains need no special handling. Add further addresses for anything on a different domain - a campaign site, a help center, an acquired brand that kept its own name.

You can point a brand at a section rather than a whole site. A brand living at example.edu/nursing takes that as its address, and pages beneath it are credited to that brand instead of a brand that only claims example.edu. Where a page could belong to two brands, the more specific address wins.

A brand is still not a website. These addresses are text used to recognize your pages in citations - they do not create a monitored website, and they do not have to match how your websites are set up elsewhere in Silktide.

Separately, you can link a brand to the websites Silktide already monitors. That is how Presence knows which of your pages belong on this workspace's Pages and Tasks screens. The guess comes from the same web addresses; you can change it when you edit the brand. Pages and reports on a website linked to no brand stay out of those views.

Tracked is not the same as compared against

Adding a brand makes it tracked: Silktide recognizes it in answers, reports on it, and includes it when dividing up share of voice.

Being compared against you is a second, separate decision, and it is made one workspace at a time. Each has its own competitor roster, and you choose who is on it - usually by accepting the suggestions Overview makes from names your own answers keep offering. So a rival can sit on one workspace's roster and stay off another where it is not really a rival.

Names that appear in answers and have never been added are neither. They collect under Entities, where you can promote one to a brand or link it as an alias of a brand you already have.

Silktide Agent

Add Apple and Beats as our brands, and Samsung and Google as competitors for smartphones.

I'll create a smartphones workspace with Apple as the brand it is about, and add Samsung and Google as competitors in it. Beats is its own contest, so I'd give it a workspace of its own - wireless earbuds - unless you want it tracked as a name inside smartphones. Next I can suggest topics for either, or show current standings once measurement is running.