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 that only share their first word are never grouped: Burger King and Burger Singh stay two competitors, and so do two products of one company such as Acme CRM and Acme Sales Hub, unless the register says they are one.
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.
- Watching never merges names. A competitor you watch joins the row whose spelling, or a saved decision, already matches it. Watching a short name such as "Swiggy" does not fold longer names such as "Swiggy Instamart" into it, so watching never changes the counts.
- Its detail lists the spellings. Open the competitor on the Competitors page, or choose it in Head-to-head, and Counted with lists each spelling counted in the row with its own count.
Separating and grouping back
If a listed spelling is a different company, press Separate on it. A confirmation says what will change, and Count separately applies it. A message then 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 Group back. The steps are in the Competitors guide.
- Your decision wins. A separation or a grouping you make overrides anything Ranqo decides from then on.
- 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. Answers saved under the competitor's name before the separation stay counted under it until they leave your date range. The rest move when the page reloads, and later runs count the spelling on its own.
Websites and logos
A competitor's website is not part of an AI answer, so Ranqo works it out during each tracking run, 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.
- An AI model asked directly, told your brand's category and market, which also says how sure it is. A site it is unsure of, or whose address does not spell the competitor's name, is used only once the site itself gives the competitor's name.
- A Google search, for the competitors the model does not know, written from what your answers say about each one. Each search is the competitor's name and where it is, such as Greenr Café, Bandra, and the website Google's own business listing gives is used first. A brand, company or app that is not a place people visit is also searched as its name and official website. A search result whose address spells the name is used only once the site gives the competitor's name, and is dropped when the site describes a different business. A site that now uses a new name, such as Imagine Foods for Imagine Meats, is used only when it describes the same business your answers do. A site the model was sure of is used when Google's results show it too.
Every candidate has to match the competitor. 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.
Each run decides the logos before it finishes, so they are there when its results open, and every page shows the same one. On a brand's first run the lookups start while the AI engines are still answering.
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, never searches for a place by its name alone, and drops any site that describes a different business: many businesses share a name, a café in Mumbai and a restaurant in San Francisco for one, and a wrong logo is worse than a letter.
- A business with no website of its own keeps the letter. Many local businesses have only a delivery-app or social media page, and those are never used as a logo.
- A logo can appear after a later run. As more runs report and cite a competitor's site, the evidence can become enough to confirm it, and a site that could not be checked in time during one run is checked again in the next.