Tracked competitors and brand merges
Which competitors you can track and what tracking changes, how Fond decides two names are one brand, and how to merge, rename or ungroup brands on the Competitors page.
The Competitors leaderboard counts every brand that AI assistants name. You shape it in two ways: you track rivals, and you merge names that are one company.
Track competitors
Fond sorts each brand on the leaderboard into Competitor, Retailer, Media, Platform, or Noise for a word that is not a brand.
You track up to five brands for each website on every plan, starting with the ones that you named at setup.
Tracking changes no number on the leaderboard. It changes three things:
- From your next run, Fond looks for the brand on the pages that AI assistants cite for your questions.
- At the next classification of cited sites, Fond files the website of the brand under Competitor / Brand Site on the Citations page.
- The row carries a Tracked badge, which the Tracking filter reads.
Manage tracked competitors, in the leaderboard toolbar, shows how many of your five you use. Its list says whether each brand is in an answer yet. You can add a brand there, but Track competitor in the menu of a row is better. A brand that you pick from the leaderboard stays linked through renames and merges. Fond matches a typed name to answers by its spelling.
To remove a brand, click Stop tracking in the row menu or the list. Fond deletes your note on why it is your closest competitor. Tracking it again does not restore the note.
How Fond decides two names are one brand
Fond groups names in three ways:
- By spelling. Names that differ only in capital letters or in end spaces are one brand. Any other difference, including punctuation, makes a separate name.
- By parent brand. Fond counts a product or sub-brand in the row of its parent brand.
- By your merges.
The You row counts your website name, the variants that Fond matched to you, and the names under Brand Aliases on the Brand Profile page. To make a name count as you, add it as an alias. You cannot merge a brand into your own.
Merge, rename or ungroup
Any member of your organization can regroup brands from the row menu:
- Use Merge into… to count this brand in the row of another brand on the board. When two rows share a website, a Merge button suggests it.
- Use Rename and Edit URL to change the name and website of the row.
- Use Ungroup, in the list behind the merge mark of a row, to take a merged name back out. Right after a merge, Undo on the confirmation does the same.
The page of a merged name takes you to the brand that it went into.
What a merge changes
Fond groups mentions when you look, not when the run happened. So a merge changes every past run.
A question that names any name in a merged brand counts for the whole brand. So a merge can move mentions from organic to non-organic.
What you cannot change
- Grouping is per website. A merge on one website does not change another.
- Fond sets the category of a brand and which variants count as you. To change either, ask your Fond contact.
Competitors
What the Competitors page shows, how the leaderboard counts and ranks brands, how Fond decides two names are one brand, what tracking a competitor changes, and what the page cannot tell you.
Agent Readiness
What Fond's Agent Readiness checks measure, how the passing count is worked out, what each check status means, how often checks run, and how to fix a failing one.