Skip to main content

​
What brand merging is

AI engines refer to the same brand under different names, spellings, and abbreviations: “Coca-Cola”, “Coca Cola”, “Coke”. Each variant can land in your analytics as a separate brand, which splits your mentions and visibility scores across duplicates. Brand Merging is where you review those duplicates and merge them into your brand, or ignore the suggestions that are false matches. You’ll find it under the Brand tile in the left rail: clicking the tile opens the Brand Book, and Brand Merging is in the inner navigation and in the tile’s hover flyout. It has no plan gate, but it is not available on white-label workspaces.

​
The candidates table

The page leads with your own brand card (Name, Domain, Aliases, with Edit brand jumping to the Brand profile to fix those), then lists Similar brands by domain with the count in the heading. Candidates are matched by domain, not by name: a brand qualifies when its domain (or one of its related domains) is the same as your brand’s domain, it is mentioned in this project’s responses, and it has at least 10 mentions in the last 90 days, so a duplicate with fewer mentions does not appear here. If the page says No merge candidates, no brand sharing your domain has 10 or more mentions in the last 90 days, or you have ignored them all; that is the normal state for a clean project.
  • Brand and Domain: the detected duplicate, with a link to its domain.
  • Match: a name-similarity percentage against your brand name, green from 80% up and amber from 50%.
  • Mentions: how often the duplicate appeared in your responses in the last 90 days. A high-mention duplicate is the one splitting your numbers.
  • Aliases: the other names already attached to that entry.
The table is ordered by Mentions, highest first, so the duplicate that hurts most is at the top. Click the Match or Mentions header to sort by that column instead.

​
Merging duplicates

  1. Select the duplicates with the checkboxes.
  2. Click Merge selected (the button shows how many you picked) and confirm in the “Are you sure you want to merge?” dialog, which lists exactly which brands and domains will merge.
Merged brands are combined into your brand and no longer appear separately, so your visibility score reflects the full set of names AI uses for you. The merged names are also added to your brand’s aliases, so new responses that use them count as you from then on. Merge only true duplicates: the dialog reminds you that if you want two names tracked separately, like “Apple” and “Apple TV”, you should not merge them. There is no undo control on the page, so read that list before confirming. Viewers can see the candidates but cannot merge or ignore. False matches go the other way: select them and click Ignore selected, then confirm in the “Ignore selected brands?” dialog. Ignored brands are hidden from the candidates list and are also left out of your competitor lists, so the page stays a clean review queue instead of a recurring list of rejections.

​
When merging is disabled

The merge button stays off until the basics exist, and an alert titled Merge is currently disabled tells you which one is missing, one reason at a time and in this order: your own brand relation is not set, your brand domain is not set in the Brand Book, website analytics is not verified, or website analytics has received no page hits yet. “Website analytics” is the visitor analytics tracking script, set up under the Analytics tile, then Visitor Analytics. For the two website analytics reasons, candidates still list and ignoring still works; for the other two, the list stays empty until you fix them. Fix the cause it names and the Merge selected button becomes active.

​
After you merge

The merge is retroactive and scoped to this project: existing mentions, citations, visibility scores, and sentiment move to your brand, so historical charts change immediately, and new responses stop splitting across the merged names. Where a response mentioned both the duplicate and your brand, the higher visibility score and the earlier position are kept. If duplicates keep appearing under new spellings, adding them as aliases on your Brand profile catches them at detection time instead of in this queue; a merge does that for you for the names it combined.