Data
Competitor identity
How Ranqo groups the different spellings of one competitor under a single name, how separating one works, and how competitor websites and logos are found.
AI engines name the same company in many ways: a short name, a legal name, a product name, different capitalisation. If each spelling counted as its own competitor, one rival's mentions would split across several rows and every Share of Voice figure would be wrong. This page explains how Ranqo decides which spellings are one competitor, how you correct it, and how it finds each competitor's website and logo.
One name per competitor
Each brand has its own register of competitor names. It maps every spelling Ranqo has seen to the one name the dashboard shows for that competitor. It holds two kinds of entry:
- A merge, such as Acme Payments shown as Acme.
- A capitalisation choice, such as acme shown as ACME, so a name does not appear in two casings.
The competitor rankings, trends and breakdowns on Visibility, Competitors, Prompts, a prompt's insights page and a run's snapshot all read the same register, so a competitor has the same name and the same mentions on each of them.
How a new spelling is grouped
After each run, Ranqo looks at every competitor name the run found:
- A name already in the register is resolved from it. No new decision is made.
- Spellings that differ only by accents are one name, shown with the accents: Cafe Acme is shown as Café Acme.
- A longer name that begins with a shorter one found in the same run is grouped under the shorter one: Acme Payments Gateway under Acme.
- Names seen for the first time are checked by a model, which reads the full list of names from the run alongside your brand's category and says which belong to the same company.
Whatever is decided is written to the register once, and every later run reuses it. A settled name is never moved to a different competitor by a later run, which is what stops the same pair from merging one week and splitting the next.
Names the register does not hold yet can also be grouped when a page loads, when they share their first word (Acme CRM and Acme Sales Hub shown together as Acme). Those groupings are not stored, and you can separate them the same way.
How a merged competitor is counted
- Its row shows one name, the one the register chose.
- One answer counts once. If a single answer names two spellings of the same company, that answer counts once for the competitor, not twice. Mentions and Share of Voice are counted over answers, so a merge never inflates them.
- Its detail lists the spellings. Open the competitor on the Competitors page, or choose it in Head-to-head, and Also named as lists each spelling counted in the row with its own count.
Separating and grouping back
If a spelling in Also named as is a different company, press the × on its chip. A message confirms it will no longer be counted as part of that competitor, with Undo. While the separated spelling is still listed, it shows struck through with an arrow to group it back. The steps are in the Competitors guide.
- Your decision wins. A separation or a grouping you make overrides anything Ranqo decided, and you can change it again at any time.
- A separation is remembered as a pair. Later runs will not merge the two names again, in either direction, even if a model would group them.
- When it shows. Depending on how the two names were first grouped, the change applies when the page reloads, or from the next run.
Websites and logos
A competitor's website is not part of an AI answer, so Ranqo infers it from evidence, in this order:
- The website saved for a competitor on your watchlist.
- The evidence in your answers: the websites AI reported for the competitor, and the sites AI cited whose address belongs to the competitor's name. A citation counts for more than a report.
- On some pages, a search of a logo directory by the competitor's name.
Every candidate has to match the competitor's name. A running shoe brand called Brooks gets brooksrunning.com, but not a running magazine AI cited while writing about Brooks. Being cited proves a site is a source AI read, not that it is the competitor's own site, and publishers are cited far more often than competitors' own sites are.
Why some logos are a letter
When no website is confirmed, the logo shows the first letter of the name. Ranqo never guesses a website by adding .com to a name: that guess belongs to a different company for any brand whose site is not literally its name, and a wrong logo is worse than a letter.
- The same competitor can show a logo on one page and a letter on another. The logo directory search is skipped on some pages, including those that refresh while a run is in progress.
- A logo can appear later. As more runs report and cite a competitor's site, the evidence can become enough to confirm it.