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Brands

Settings → Brands is every name Silktide recognizes in AI answers for this - your own brands and the competitors beside them, in one list. There is no separate screen for your own brand: open it here and edit it like any other, profile included.

Your brands lead the table, followed by primary competitors, secondary competitors, and watched brands, grouped into those bands. A workspace can own more than one brand - a sister brand, a product line - and everything reported as "you" is the combined reading of the brands you own. Watched brands are names you keep an eye on without measuring yourself against them. They never affect your rank or share of voice.

Only tracked brands get metrics. A name an assistant used that is not on this list appears under Entities and nowhere else.

Adding or editing a brand

Brands are added from names assistants already used. Open Suggested brands above the table, tick the names, and press Add brand. There is no blank form for a brand nobody has mentioned: if it is not in the answers, there is nothing to measure yet.

Track brand asks what each name is before it is tracked, because not every name an assistant offers is a rival. A sister brand or product line of your own turns up in the same list, so One of your brands sits beside the three competitor types. Pick it and the brand counts toward "you" from the moment it is added, with no second visit to its settings.

Once a brand is on the list, open it to edit:

  • Name - the canonical form you want reported. "Northbridge University", not every informal short form.
  • Type - the same four choices as Track brand. One of your brands counts toward "you" in every report. Primary competitors are measured against you and drawn on charts by default; secondary competitors are measured but stay off the default charts; watched brands are observed only. The workspace's main brand always stays one of yours.
  • Parent brand - files a sub-brand under its parent, like iPhone under Apple. Views scoped to the parent include the sub-brand's mentions; comparisons keep every brand as its own row. Unrelated brands you own should stay separate top-level brands.
  • Track reputation - an arena of questions asked about this brand by name.
  • Text we match - abbreviations, former names, and common misspellings, so mentions still match when an assistant is casual. Under Advanced. To give some of these names a brand of their own instead, see Splitting.
  • Web addresses - the domains this brand owns. This is what citations are attributed by, and a brand with no addresses cannot be credited for a cited page. Under Advanced.
  • Linked websites from Governance - the sites Silktide already monitors whose pages belong to this brand. Pages and Tasks use this list. Under Advanced, and only when Governance is on the account.
  • Color - how it appears in charts. A logo that is only black and white is stored as black, and drawn white in dark mode.

The brand profile

Every brand you own carries a profile - what the AI knows about that business when it writes questions, news, tasks, and strategy for you. It appears on the edit form for your own brands only; competitors have none. It is one field:

  • Background - what you sell, to whom, how you win, and anything advice should respect: history, constraints, plans. The more specific it is, the better the advice.

Silktide writes the main brand's background automatically from your website when the workspace is created, and you can rewrite it however you like. Your text stands: Silktide only ever writes into an empty background, and the form asks for text rather than letting it be left blank.

Competitors and topics do not belong in the background - they have their own screens, and Silktide already knows them. Stance for each arena lives on the Topics screen.

Suggested brands

Above the list sit the names that keep appearing in this workspace's own answers and are not yet on the roster, ranked by how often the assistants offer them. The row starts closed: the first two names and a count of the rest. Open it to tick names and add them - as separate brands, or folded into one when they are the same company under different names. Search reaches beyond the shortlist into every name the account has seen.

Most of these are competitors, but not all: your own sub-brands appear here too, and so do organizations that merely share a word with you. Each one is added through Track brand, where you say which it is.

Merging

When the same organization has been recorded twice - usually because a discovered name was promoted and turned out to be an alias - Merge into another brand folds one into the other. Pick the competitor it really is, and the history comes with it.

This is the right fix for "Acme", "Acme Inc", and "Acme Corporation" appearing as three rivals.

Splitting

Splitting is the reverse of merging. It is for a brand that has grown to cover things you now want to see separately: "iPhone" folded into Apple when you set the workspace up, and now you want iPhone as its own row. Choose Split brand from the brand's menu, or follow the link under Text we match on its edit form. Splitting needs a brand with more than one name.

  • Names to move - tick the names that belong to the other brand. Each name takes its mentions with it, past answers included. Search narrows the list, and Select matching ticks everything the search found.
  • Web addresses to move - the extra addresses the brand holds. A citation counts for the brand that holds its address, so tick any that belong to the names you are moving. The main address always stays.
  • Move them to - a new brand, with the same four types as Track brand, or a brand you already track. A new brand can be Part of the one you are splitting, so views of the original keep including its mentions. This is ticked by default.

A web address is never shared between brands. When the new brand lives on the original's site, give it the narrower address, like apple.com/iphone. Citations of pages under that path then count for iPhone, and everything else on apple.com stays with Apple. Leave the address blank and the new brand takes the first address you ticked.

Everything stored against the original brand itself stays with it: reputation questions, profile, linked websites, color, and backlink history.

Backlinks are measured per domain, so a brand whose address sits on another tracked brand's domain shows Shared in place of a backlink count. iPhone at apple.com/iphone reads as Apple's backlinks, because the links point at apple.com.

Stop tracking

Stop tracking takes a brand out of reports. If assistants still name them, they show up again under Suggested brands and you can add them the same way as any other name. Everything you configured is still there when you do, and whatever type you pick on the way back in is what the brand comes back as.

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