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What is the brand profile?

Your brand profile is the set of facts Promptwatch knows about your brand: name, website, aliases, descriptions, industry, and key features. It lives in the Brand Book in your project’s sidebar, and it is first filled in automatically when your website is analyzed during setup. It is worth getting right because it isn’t just metadata. Three of its fields, the name, the website, and the aliases, are the identity Promptwatch matches against every single AI response it collects.

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How it drives mention and citation detection

Every response goes through an analysis step, and your brand name, aliases, and domain are passed into that analysis as the definition of “you”:
  • Mentions: a response counts as mentioning you when the analysis finds your brand name or any of your aliases actually discussed in the answer text. A missing alias means missed mentions, which undercounts your visibility and Share of Voice.
  • Citations: your website domain is the anchor for self-citations, so metrics like self-citation rate depend on the domain being correct. See citations vs. mentions for the difference.
  • Offsite mentions: when Promptwatch scans the pages AI models cite, it looks for your canonical brand name as a whole word inside that third-party content. Aliases and domain are not part of that page scan; the domain is used to leave your own site out of offsite lists. See offsite mentions.
Response analysis is model-based, not a dumb text match, so it can tell “Apple the company” from “apple the fruit”. But it can only credit names it knows about, which is why the alias list matters.

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What makes a good alias

Aliases are the alternative names and spellings your brand actually goes by, for example “Acme Corp”, “ACME”, and “Acme Incorporated” for a brand named Acme. Good candidates:
  • Legal entity names and former names: “Acme Incorporated”, or the old name after a rebrand.
  • Official abbreviations and acronyms: the short form customers and journalists actually use.
  • Domain-style names: “Acme.com” or “Acme.ai” when the brand is commonly written that way.
  • Acquired brands and product names used as a synonym: a product so well known it stands in for the company.
Keep taglines, category keywords, and marketing phrases out. An alias like “project management software” would credit you with every generic mention of the category and corrupt your numbers. The Promptwatch Brand Book form showing the brand name Homestra and its Brand Aliases fields.

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The other fields

  • Brand name: the canonical name. Changing it also updates your project URL.
  • Language and country: defaults for new monitors only. Existing monitors keep their own language and country, which you change in each monitor’s settings.
  • Short description, industry, description, key features: the short description is passed into response analysis; industry, description, and key features are used when generating prompt suggestions and creating content. Keep them accurate rather than aspirational, since they shape what the platform thinks you should be visible for.

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Editing safely

Edits to the name or aliases apply to new response analysis only; already analyzed answers are not recalculated. The website is different: self-citation rate matches citations against your current domain at query time, so changing the website updates that metric for past citations too. The page warns you when you touch these identity fields, because integrations and analytics tied to them can be affected. Make the change deliberately, not experimentally. The Promptwatch Brand Book Heads up warning that appears after editing the brand name, website, or aliases. The Regenerate Brandbook button re-analyzes your website and can overwrite your current profile with freshly extracted data. Useful after a major site or positioning change, but save any manual edits first, and expect to review the result.

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What happens next

Once the profile is accurate, detection takes care of itself: every new response is checked against your name, aliases, and domain automatically. The natural next step is the other half of the comparison, your competitors, whose profiles work the same way and define who you’re measured against.