Competitors

You do not have to tell Surfaced who your competitors are. It finds the brands that appear alongside you in the answers and lists them on Competitors. What you do have to decide is which of them count.

Detected, added, pinned

Detected. The analysis of each answer is asked which other companies it named, and the ones it finds arrive as unverified detections. No action from you. This is the raw list, and it will contain things that are not competitors at all: trade publications, research firms, marketplaces, tools your buyers also use. Added. You create or confirm a brand by hand, in a preview-then-confirm step, because you want it watched even in periods where it was not detected. Uncapped; adding only puts a name in the table. Pinned. You have said this one counts. Pinned competitors get a rival share figure measured against the pinned set alone, and they appear on the dashboard. Your plan caps how many you can pin at once.

What pinning does and does not change

It does not change share of voice on Analytics. That is measured against every brand detected in the window, pinned or not, so your headline share is not something you can move by curating the list. It changes rival share: the comparison against your pinned set alone. That is the number to watch when you want “how am I doing against these five”, and it is only as meaningful as the five you chose. Adding and pinning need the editor role or above. Everyone can read the table.

Choosing who to pin

The ones you lose deals to, rather than the ones you would like to be compared with. Few enough to mean something. Pinning fifteen brands makes share of voice a small number that moves slowly and tells you little. Five or six real rivals give a figure that reacts. Not publishers. A trade magazine mentioned in every answer will dominate the comparison without ever competing for a customer. Leave it detected and unpinned. Its presence in the raw list is itself a finding, and usually points at a publication worth being covered by.

Using the detail view

Clicking a competitor opens every prompt that mentions them: a list of the exact questions where a rival is recommended and you are not. For a go-to-market team it is the most directly useful screen in the product. Start there rather than with the ranking chart. The chart tells you that you are behind; the list tells you where.

Unverified by design

Nothing in the detected list has been checked for competing with you. Surfaced reports which names appear. Deciding which are rivals is an editorial judgement that only you can make, and pinning is where you record it.