AI models do not always refer to a brand by the name you expect. The same brand can show up under a shortened name, a parent company, an old name, a misspelling, or a name a model invented, and sometimes a competitor or an unrelated company appears where your brand should be. A brand can also end up split across two entries when models cite more than one URL for the same business.
Both problems are fixed by you, from the Competitive Leaderboard in your Visibility Audit (formerly known as a report), and neither one means your data is wrong.
Which problem do I have?
- One entry, wrong name. The brand is tracked correctly but displays under a name you do not recognize. Fix it on the Customize tab.
- One business, more than one entry. The same company appears twice in the leaderboard, usually because models cited a root domain and a subpage, or slightly different domain variations. Fix it on the Brand aliases tab.
Both tabs sit in the same place, so if you are not sure which you are looking at, open the brand and check.
How do I know my brand has a naming issue?
You may have a brand-name issue if you used your correct brand domain, but you see any of the following:
- Your audits show a brand name you do not recognize
- Your audits are labeled with someone else's brand or product name
- The brand name is a misspelling or variation of your actual brand
- A competitor or an unrelated company appears where your brand should be
Does a wrong name affect my scores?
No. Gumshoe matches mentions by domain, not by the name shown on screen, so your audit has been tracking your website from its first run. A wrong or awkward label never caused a mention to be missed or miscounted.
That also means there is nothing to redo. Correcting a name does not change your scores and does not require a new run. It applies to everything already recorded as well as everything going forward.
Merging duplicate entries works differently, because it does change how mentions are grouped.
How do I see what Gumshoe counted for a brand?
Use the Mention breakdown tab, which shows you what was matched rather than asking you to take our word for it.
1. Open the Competitive Leaderboard from the left sidebar of any Visibility Audit.
2. Click "View comparison" on a competitor's row, or click anywhere on your own brand's row.
3. Select Mention breakdown.
You will see every term the models used for that brand, grouped by model, with the URL each term resolved to and how many times it came up. Models often use several forms of a name, including shortened versions, and you will see them all mapped to the same domain. Those are the mentions behind the score.
This is also the fastest way to decide what to rename a brand to. Pick the name that is most accurate or most widely used, then enter it on the Customize tab.
How do I rename a brand?
1. Open a Visibility Audit and click Competitive Leaderboard in the left sidebar.
2. Find the brand you want to rename. Click "View comparison" on a competitor's row, or click anywhere on your own brand's row.
3. Select the Customize tab.
4. The Canonical name shows the name the brand is currently stored under. Type the name you want to display in the Custom name field.
5. Click "Save custom name."
The brand now displays under the name you set everywhere it appears across your company account, including the Competitive Leaderboard and every Visibility Audit. This change applies only to your company account and does not affect what other Gumshoe customers see.
Only an Admin on your company account can set or change a brand's custom name. If you do not see the Customize tab or cannot save a change, ask an Admin on your account to make the update.
How do I merge duplicate entries?
1. Open the full Competitive Leaderboard and click the "correct" version of the brand, for example target.com rather than info.target.com.
2. Select the Brand aliases tab, which sits next to Mention breakdown.
3. Use the "Alias Brand" dropdown to pick another URL that should be treated as the same brand, for example info.target.com.
4. Click "Create alias." Repeat for any other variants you want to merge.
5. Click "Apply changes."
Once applied, the versions are grouped under the canonical brand across the project, so you do not need to repeat the merge on each audit.
Do the two fixes apply in the same places?
Both reach beyond the audit you are looking at, but not equally far.
- A custom name applies across your whole company account, so the brand displays that way in every Visibility Audit you have.
- A merge applies across the project you set it in. That includes the other audits in that project and its Pulse Audit, so you only need to do it once.
Where does a merge show up, and where does it not?
A merge changes how mentions are grouped, and most of what you look at day to day reflects that. A few places do not, and those are worth knowing about.
Reflects the merge:
- Your Competitive Leaderboard, mentions, trends, conversations, and PDF export
- Your Sentiment Audit questions, which move across with the merge
- Which brand a cited page is credited to, going forward
Does not reflect the merge:
- Pages that were already analyzed before you merged. Their existing attribution stays as it was, so your Citations and Sources views can still show the earlier grouping for work that was already done.
- Your tracked competitor list. If you merged one tracked competitor into another, the merged-away brand stays on your list and will show zero mentions. Remove it yourself to keep your tracking clean.
- Your Technical Audit, which scores pages rather than brands and is not affected either way.
What else should I check while I am in the Competitive Leaderboard?
Fixing one brand is a good moment to sweep the whole leaderboard, because the same underlying issue tends to show up in more than one place.
- Look for the same business appearing more than once. This usually happens when models cite two different domains for one company, such as a main site and a regional or product-specific one. Left alone, that business competes with itself and its real standing looks lower than it is.
- Check the domains associated with your own brand. If your company owns more than one domain, confirm which ones the models are actually citing and whether they are all rolling up to you.
- Look at which models cite which domains. One model favoring a legacy domain while the others use your current one tells you something useful about where that model's information is coming from.
What if the name I want to change is the project title?
Renaming a brand will not change a project's title in your projects list, and renaming a project will not change a brand name. These are set in two different places.
Project titles are set on the project's Settings page, and any team member with access can change one. Keep in mind that renaming a project gives it a custom title, while the product category and brand continue to display at the top of the audit the way they always have.