Competitors & Brands

Every brand named in an AI response becomes an entity in your project automatically. Which of those entities count as yours and which count as competitors is something you decide — that flag drives the competitor views and the entity-scope filter. This guide covers both halves.

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Entities

An entity is a brand, product or company MentionLab has seen in an AI response. Entities are created automatically as your analyses run; you never have to add them by hand. Manage them from Project settings → Entities.

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Flags

Each entity carries four independent flags, set with the Flags toggles in the entity sheet (or in bulk from the entities table):

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Aliases

A brand rarely appears under one exact spelling. Aliases group the variants so their mentions land on one entity. For “MentionLab” you might add:

• Mention Lab
• mentionlab.io
• ML Analytics

Add them under Aliases in the entity sheet; changes save when you update the entity.

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Blacklisting

Short or generic brand names get matched against unrelated text. Rather than blocking individual terms, MentionLab blacklists the whole entity: toggle Blacklisted and it drops out of every metric, chart and table. Its history is preserved, so un-blacklisting brings the data back. You can also blacklist straight from the analysis views: right-click a row in the Entities card on the Overview, or in All Entity Mentions on the Competitors page, and choose Add to blacklist. The settings table has no context menu.

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Domains

The Domains field associates an entity with the sites it owns — “domains associated with this entity, used to categorise cited sources”. It is a list, not a single URL, and it accepts up to 100 domains per entity. This is what lets the Sources analysis attribute a citation to the brand behind it.

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Groups and divisions

Entities can be organised two levels deep with the Group / Division field:

• A group is the top level (e.g. “Direct”, “Enterprise”, “Emerging”).
• A division nests inside a group — useful for sub-brands or regional arms of one parent.

The Group entities filter can then aggregate your analysis at either level. See Filters & Comparisons.

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Merge and unmerge

When AI platforms refer to one brand under names MentionLab detected as separate entities, merge them to combine their mention data. If a merge turns out to be wrong, unmerge splits it back apart.

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Importing and exporting

• Import — Project settings → Entities → Import entities takes a CSV or Excel file, matched by column header. A row carrying an entity_id updates that entity; a row without one creates it. Fill merged_into_id to merge a row into another entity, and domains to replace its domain list. Download the report afterwards to see any skipped rows.
• Export — entity exports live on Project settings → Export data, as the Entities export type (“all entities with aliases and group assignments”). The file carries each entity’s flags, group and division, aliases, domains, its own mention count and merged_into_id. An Include merged entities switch adds the entities that were merged away.

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The Competitors page

Analysis → Competitors puts your brand head-to-head with everything else in the project: Entity Sentiment Analysis opens on the first 10 entities, with a Show 10 more button and an Entities picker. The three ad cards are covered in Sponsored ads.

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Aggregating by group

Set the Group entities filter to Groups (or Divisions) in the Filters popover to collapse individual brands into their group. Useful once you’re tracking more competitors than fit on a chart.

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”View as” mode

Every metric can be recalculated from another entity’s point of view, so you can read the product as if you were monitoring a competitor. Two ways in:

• The navbar picker — the View as entity button in the top navigation bar. Search the list, then pick a brand. A toast confirms “Now viewing as <brand>”.
• Right-click a row in the Entities card on the Overview, or All Entity Mentions on the Competitors page, and choose View as <brand>.

To switch back, hover the picker and click the X (Clear selection), pick your primary entity again, or right-click a row and choose Reset to original. The pin travels in the page URL, so a shared link carries it.