Markets and topics

A market is one competitive space you measure, such as "UK business banking" or "Undergraduate admissions". Everything you read in Presence is a reading of one market, named at the top of the sidebar, where you switch to another. When a screen reports visibility or average position, it is reporting them for the brands that are yours in that market, across that market's topics.

Topics are the arenas inside a market where you want to be visible, and the unit of measurement. A topic includes its qualifier. "Wellness" is too vague; "wellness centers in the Austin, Texas area" is an arena with a clear conversation and a clear set of contenders. Two arenas usually mean two topics.

What belongs to the account, and what belongs to a market

Some things are true of your whole account, and every market shares them. Everything a team curates or reads belongs to one market.

Your account	Each market
Your brands, and which brand is a sub-brand of which	Which brands are yours here, and which are competitors
The regions you can measure in	Which of those regions this market is asked from
The platforms measured	Its topics, and the prompts inside them
How often you measure	Its report language, AI report, alerts, and tasks
Your plan	Who can view it, and who can manage it

The account has no screen of its own. Its brands, regions, and platforms appear under Settings in every market, and a change there shows in every market that uses them. Your plan is under Settings → Plan in account settings.

Markets are compared, never added up. Each market asks its own questions about its own brands, so no figure in Presence totals or averages two markets.

A topic can be in several markets

A topic can belong to more than one market. It is still measured once: the same prompts, asked once in each region any of those markets is asked from, with each market reading those answers through its own brands and competitors. Two teams that both care about campus housing share one topic rather than paying for it twice.

Because a change to a shared topic shows in every market that holds it:

• Editing a topic or its prompts needs admin of every market it is in. The Topics screen names the other markets that hold it, and says who can edit it when you cannot.
• Adding an existing topic to your market, or removing it, needs admin of your market only. Removing a topic from your market leaves it in the others.

Subject topics and brand topics

Most topics are subject arenas: products, services, programs, or issues people ask about without naming you.

A brand can also have a brand topic: an arena whose subject is the brand itself ("who is City of Meridian?", "is Helios Energy a good employer?"). Same measurement machinery; it answers reputation questions about the brand rather than discovery questions about a market. Your brands and your competitors can both have one, and a brand topic about one of your own brands is part of every market where that brand is yours.

Brand topics are deliberately excluded from headline visibility and position figures, so naming yourself in an answer to "who is Silktide?" cannot inflate your competitive standing. Sentiment is the exception, and that page explains why.

Your brands and competitors, market by market

Your brands belong to the account. Each market decides what each one is there:

• One of your brands counts as you. Headline figures are the combined reading of every brand that is yours in this market, and each still gets its own row in breakdowns. Every market has at least one.
• Primary competitors are measured against you, and drawn on charts by default.
• Secondary competitors are measured against you, and kept off the default charts.
• Watched brands are names you keep an eye on without measuring yourself against them.

A brand with no role in a market does not appear on that market's screens. And because each market decides for itself, the same brand can be yours in one market and a competitor in another. In a "Premium cars" market for Audi's team, Audi is yours and Porsche is a primary competitor; in a "Group" market, both are yours.

You are not left guessing who to add. The Brands screen suggests names that keep turning up in this market's answers, drawn from what assistants actually said rather than from a generic industry list, and you decide what each one is. Search in that list finds names already seen in answers; it does not invent a competitor from an unmatched query.

Two details are worth holding on to:

• Competitors decide the field, not the arithmetic. Share of voice is divided among every brand you track in scope, whether or not it has a role in this market. What a market's competitors decide is who appears - and therefore rank, which is a placing among the brands this market compares you against. A rival you leave out cannot take a place in the ranking.
• Only tracked brands get metrics at all. Names assistants use that you have never added get no share of voice, because dividing the conversation among thousands of incidental names would leave everyone near zero and tell you nothing.

Markets in practice

One organization usually runs several markets, one for each competitive space a team acts on.

Organization	Example markets	Example topics
Apple	iPhone; Mac; Apple TV	Smartphones; wireless earbuds; laptop computers; streaming devices
Northbridge University	Academic programs; Campus life; Research	Undergraduate nursing programs; campus housing (in both Academic programs and Campus life); climate research
City of Meridian	Resident services; Public safety; Mobility	Recycling collection; building permits; public transit routes
Helios Energy	Residential energy; Commercial; Group	Home solar installation; business power contracts; Helios Energy's own reputation, in Group

A holding company is an ordinary market. When a group wants to know what assistants say about the parent brand, give it a market with the parent brand as yours, beside the markets for each business. There is no market above the others, and the group market's numbers do not add up the others: they are its own answers about its own brands.

Organizations that must not see each other belong in separate accounts. Markets in one account share its brands, regions, and platforms, so they suit teams of one organization rather than unrelated clients.

Measurement runs on topics and their prompts, so the number of prompts is what you pay for. Sharing a topic with a second market costs nothing extra, unless that market is asked from a region the topic was not already asked in.

How many topics is right

Fewer than you first want. Each topic needs enough prompts to produce a trustworthy sample, and a thin sample spread across twenty arenas is worth less than a solid one across five.

Start with the arenas where you are genuinely competing for customers this year. Add more when the first set is answering questions rather than raising them. Your prompt allowance will tell you when you have overreached. It is shared by every market on the account, and setup and Settings → Plan both show where you stand.

How many markets is right

Your plan includes a number of markets. Each one has its own AI optimizer writing its own strategy brief on a schedule, so add a market for each competitive space a team will act on, not for every way you might slice the results. Looking at one region, one platform, or one topic is a filter on a market's screens, not a reason for another market.

Settings → All markets lists every market you can see. Create one there or from the bottom of the market selector with New market: it asks for a name, which brands are yours there, which rivals it compares you against, which of the account's regions it is asked from, and its topics, either new ones written for it or existing ones from your other markets.

Related

• How Presence works
• Brands and competitors
• Permissions - who can view and manage each market
• Prompts
• Market screen - name, report language, regions, and people for the market you are in
• All markets screen - every market you can see, and creating new ones
• Compare markets - how the markets stand against each other
• Topics screen - adding, sharing, and editing a market's topics and their prompts
• Topic
• Market