Competitors and topics

Two lists shape what a project measures. Competitors decide who counts as someone else being named instead of you. Topics decide what the questions are about.

Competitors

A competitor is a name Citerva watches for in every answer, alongside yours. When an answer names them and not you, that is what share of voice and the competitor gaps are built from.

Give each one:

• A name — the one a model would actually write.
• Alternate names, one per line, for the same reason your own brand has them: a model writing "Acme Corp" when you listed "Acme" is still naming them.
• A primary domain, so that a source pointing at their site is attributed to them rather than counted as a neutral third party.

Add the competitors you actually lose deals to. A list of twenty makes share of voice look bad in a way that tells you nothing, because the denominator fills up with companies nobody was choosing between anyway.

Deactivating, not deleting

A competitor can be deactivated. Deactivated means: not asked about, not watched for, in any future scan. Everything already measured stays.

There is no delete, and the reason is worth stating. Past scans computed share of voice over a set of competitors that included this one. Removing the row would leave those historical figures referring to something that no longer exists, and every earlier scan's denominator would quietly change meaning — the same number on the screen, describing a different calculation. A trend line that moves because you edited a list, rather than because anything happened, is worse than no trend line.

Deactivating is reversible. Reactivate and future scans include them again.

Topics

A topic is a theme the generated questions are drawn from — "expense management for small teams", "applicant tracking for agencies". They are what makes a prompt set about your market rather than about your product page.

Topics can be added, renamed and removed. Unlike competitors, removing a topic is a delete, and that is safe for a specific reason: topics shape which questions get generated, and the questions themselves are snapshotted into every scan that asked them. Removing a topic changes what future prompt sets are about; it does not change what any past scan asked.

Renaming a topic is purely a label change.

What changes when you edit either list

Nothing already measured. Both lists affect the next scan.

If you add a competitor you should have been tracking all along, the answers you have already collected still mention them — Citerva stores every answer exactly as it was received, so those scans can be re-read against the new list without asking any provider a second time. That is a deliberate capability, not a side effect. Ask us if you need it applied to your history.