What you track

Competitors

Competitors set the field your share of voice is measured against. Matching is exact, so the spellings you add are what counts.

Competitors are the brands you expect to be compared against. They set the field your share of voice is measured against.

How matching works

Shruwd counts a mention only when an alias matches exactly, on word boundaries. There is no fuzzy matching and no patterns.

This is deliberate. A near-match that silently counts the wrong brand corrupts every number downstream and is close to impossible to spot later. The cost is that you have to add the spellings answers actually use.

You addMatchesDoes not match
LaunchList"LaunchList", "launchlist""Launch List", "LaunchLists"

Add each spelling you expect as a separate alias.

Adding a competitor

Permissions: editor or above.

  1. Go to the brand's Competitors page.
  2. Select Add a competitor.
  3. Enter the name, then any other aliases the answers use.
  4. Add the competitor's domain so their citations are attributed to them.
  5. Select Add.

On a new brand, add competitors before prompts. The first measurement starts with the first prompt and counts only the competitors that exist by then; a competitor added later counts from the next cycle.

Short and common-word names

A name that is six characters or shorter, or that is an ordinary English word, is refused until you add context terms — words that must appear nearby for a mention to count. They are what make "Arc" mean the company rather than the word.

Shruwd asks rather than guessing, because the alternative is a metric that quietly counts every unrelated use of a common word.

Exclusions

Add an exclusion to stop a specific phrase counting as a mention — useful when your competitor's name appears inside a longer, unrelated product name.

Accepting a suggested competitor

Once answers start arriving, Add as competitor? lists names that came up but are not tracked, with how often each appeared and a domain hint where the answers linked one.

  1. Review the name and the domain hint. Check the spelling before it starts counting.
  2. Select Add to track it, or Dismiss to quiet it for 90 days.

Accepting goes through the same checks as adding by hand, including context terms.

Your brand

Your own brand appears at the top of the page as Your brand. It is matched the same way as any competitor, so if answers spell your name differently — an old name, a common misspelling, a product name used in place of the company — add those as aliases here. Editing your brand's name in settings does not change what is matched.

Your brand cannot be removed.

Removing a competitor

Select the remove icon. It stops counting from the next cycle on. Past measurements keep it, and share of voice is recomputed against the remaining set.

Next steps