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Topics screen

Settings → Topics lists every arena you measure. A is the unit everything hangs off: belong to topics, measurement runs on prompts, and reporting rolls topics up into a .

Subject topics and brand topics

Most rows are subject topics - the competitive arenas where customers compare options, each belonging to exactly one workspace.

The rest are brand topics - reputation arenas about a single brand ("is Acme any good?"). They have no workspace, and they are edited from the brand rather than here.

Stance

Each subject topic carries a stance - your posture in that arena: Defend (you hold the top spot), Grow (present but climbing), Enter (not visible yet, but you intend to be), or Monitor (watching without competing). Defend, Grow, and Enter are measured after every run from your actual position; you do not pick them. The choice you still make is Monitor: advice then treats the topic as something you are watching, not something you failed to win.

A topic can also show No contest. That means AI answers there rarely name you or any competitor you track, so the topic's questions probably miss where people actually make their choice. Being first in a topic nobody is named in is not a win, so Silktide shows No contest instead of Defend. Reword the questions, or replace the topic with one where your competitors are actually named.

Markets

A groups topics that compete in one space, for workspaces that span several distinct ones - think Office and Xbox inside one company. Every workspace starts with one market, created when the workspace is and named for what you told us you compete in. A topic can belong to more than one market in the same workspace: it is still measured once, and each market is a lens over that shared measurement. Brand topics sit outside markets - a brand is not a competitive space.

With a single market the screen stays a flat list and you can ignore markets entirely - most workspaces never need more. The topic edit dialog's Market field is where a second one starts: pick "New market…" and name it. Once two exist the list groups under market headers, each header's menu renames or deletes its market, and the same grouping appears in the Topics filter on report screens, where checking a market selects all of its topics at once.

Deleting a market changes nothing about measurement - its topics move to your original market. The last market cannot be deleted.

What makes a good topic

A qualifier. "Nursing" is not an arena; "undergraduate nursing programs" is. "Wellness" is not an arena; "wellness centers in the Austin area" is.

Two distinct conversations should be two topics. One conversation you have split in half will just halve your sample.

Managing prompts

Opening a topic shows the questions asked inside it. This is where prompt work happens:

  • Generate more prompts for the topic and keep the ones that read like real customers.
  • Add your own questions - particularly the ones you know your sales or support teams hear.
  • Edit wording that does not match how your audience actually asks.
  • Delete prompts that are too narrow, duplicated, or no longer interesting. Deleted prompts keep their history and stop being measured. You can restore them later.

Only active prompts are measured, and every active prompt is asked of every enabled assistant on every run. That is the whole cost model, so pruning is real work with a real payoff.

View results takes you from a topic to its standings.

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Topics screen | Silktide Help