Brands and competitors

Settings → Brands is where you tell SimplyRank which brands to track. Every scan looks for mentions of your brand and your competitors in AI responses.

Your brand vs. competitors

A workspace can have one brand of your own; you can't add a second one yet. If you have several brands, see Tracking multiple brands.

Your brand

Your brand is set up during onboarding. To change it:

1. Open Settings → Brands.
2. Click the pencil on the Your Brand card.
3. Edit:
   • Brand Name — exactly as it should appear (e.g. Stripe, not stripe inc.).
   • Website Domain — your website. Used to recognise when an AI answer cites your own site.
   • Aliases (optional) — alternative names AI might use (e.g. Stripe Payments, Stripe Inc), separated by commas.
4. Click Update.

A workspace that has no brand yet shows Add Your First Brand instead. Click it, fill in the same fields, leave This is our brand ticked and click Create.

SimplyRank uses the name and aliases to match mentions in AI responses. If AI says "Stripe is great for...", that counts as a mention. If AI says "the Stripe Payments platform...", the alias matches it.

Adding competitors

1. Open Settings → Brands and click Add competitor.
2. Enter the competitor's name, website domain, and any aliases. Leave Competitor ticked.
3. Click Create.

A new competitor is counted from the next scan onwards.

How many competitors should you track?

The cap counts your own brand alongside every competitor you add. For most teams, 4–8 competitors is the sweet spot:

• Three direct competitors — the brands you lose deals to.
• 2–3 category competitors — the brands AI mentions alongside yours, even if you don't think of them as direct rivals.
• 1–2 challengers — newer brands gaining traction.

Tracking too many competitors makes the data harder to read. If a competitor never shows up in your scans, drop them.

Choosing competitors AI actually cares about

The competitors you think you have aren't always the ones AI mentions. SimplyRank only counts the brands you've added, so it won't point out the ones you're missing. Once you've run a few scans:

1. Open Overview and find Latest mentions.
2. Click a few rows to read the full answers, and note the brands named alongside yours that you aren't tracking.
3. Add the ones that keep coming up. They're real rivals in AI's view.

This usually gives you a more honest picture than starting from your sales team's view of the competitive set.

Editing or removing a brand

• Your brand — click the pencil on the Your Brand card to change its name, domain, aliases or colour. It can't be deleted: once a workspace has a brand of its own, it keeps one.
• A competitor — use the pencil or the bin on its row in the Competitors table.

Deleting a competitor stops it being counted in future scans, and it also removes that competitor's numbers from your charts and rankings for past dates. Delete only the brands you no longer want to compare against.

Tips

• Use exact spelling. AI can write Coca-Cola, Coca Cola, or coca-cola. Add the variations as aliases.
• Add abbreviations. NHS and National Health Service. AWS and Amazon Web Services.
• Don't add product names as separate brands. If your brand is Stripe and you sell Stripe Connect, just add Stripe with Stripe Connect as an alias — not as a new brand.
• Refresh quarterly. Competitor landscapes shift fast in the AI era.

What's next

• Dashboard overview
• Tracking multiple brands
• Gap analysis