Every time Mavel captures an AI answer, it scans the full text for mentions of every brand in your project. That detection drives every metric that involves you or a competitor: visibility, Share of Voice, sentiment, and position all depend on whether a brand’s name appears in the answer and where.
Your brand vs. competitors
Each brand in a project is marked as either your own brand (You) or a competitor. The distinction matters for Share of Voice: the metric compares your mention rate against the total mentions across the full tracked set. Add the brands buyers genuinely compare you against, not aspirational competitors or brands from adjacent markets.
How matching works
Detection is substring-based. When you add a brand, you supply:
- Display name: how the brand appears in the dashboard.
- Tracked name: the substring Mavel searches for in answers (defaults to the display name if left blank).
- Aliases: additional name variants, comma or newline separated. Useful when a brand is commonly referred to by abbreviation or informal name.
- Domains: website domains associated with the brand, used to match source citations as well as answer text.
- Regex (optional): a custom pattern for complex matching cases. Mavel validates the pattern for safety before saving it.
All variants (tracked name, aliases, domains) are checked against every captured answer. “HubSpot”, “Hubspot CRM”, and “hubspot.com” all count as the same brand if they’re configured on one entry.
Regex rules are validated for correctness and screened for patterns that could cause catastrophic backtracking. If a pattern is rejected, simplify it: most brand-matching cases work fine with tracked names and aliases alone.
Brand suggestions
Mavel watches the answers it captures for brand names that appear frequently but aren’t yet tracked in your project. When it spots one, it surfaces it as a pending suggestion in the Brand suggestions panel on the Brands page, sorted by how often the brand appeared. Each suggestion shows the proposed name, associated domain (when detected), and mention count.
From the panel you can:
- Accept: creates the brand as a tracked competitor immediately.
- Reject: dismisses the suggestion without creating a brand.
Brand suggestions can also be accepted or rejected through the MCP server if you’re managing Mavel data programmatically from Claude or another AI tool.
Retroactive recompute after edits
When you add or edit a brand (changing its tracked name, aliases, or regex), Mavel reruns detection across your project’s existing captured answers. You don’t lose historical data or need to wait for the next daily crawl. The recompute runs automatically in the background after every brand mutation.
This means adjusting a brand’s match rules updates its historical metrics, not just future runs. If you realize a competitor has been tracked under the wrong name for a month, fixing it retroactively corrects the entire history.
Duplicate detection
The Brands page automatically flags likely-duplicate entries: when two tracked brands share a domain or name variant that would cause them to match the same mentions, both rows are labeled Possible duplicate. You can merge one into the other from the same row: the merge consolidates the mention history into the surviving brand.
Adding brands manually
Click Add brand from the Brands page. Fill in the display name and, optionally, the tracked name, aliases, domains, and regex. Mark the Is own brand checkbox for your own company: the dashboard uses this to distinguish your metrics from competitors’. Keep a single brand marked as your own; that’s the one Share of Voice and the “You” comparisons anchor on.
Review the Brand suggestions panel after your first week of data. Mavel often surfaces competitors you hadn’t thought to track, especially alternative brand names buyers use in AI queries that differ from official product names.
