Count parent companies, product brands and marketplaces at declared entity levels. Combining them without a rule can make an answer appear more competitive—or more favorable—than it actually is.
Name the unit of analysis
A company-level comparison asks which businesses are represented. A product-level comparison asks which products satisfy the question. A marketplace may be a seller or discovery channel rather than the manufacturer.
The FActScore paper motivates checking small factual units against evidence. Our entity worksheet applies that review discipline to brand relationships; it is an editorial recommendation, not a claim about a built-in product taxonomy.
Build the relationship map
For each tracked name, record the entity type, official domain, parent relationship when verified, product category and counting level. Keep unknown relationships unresolved.
Illustrative example: fictional Northstar Group owns LedgerLeaf, while MarketSquare sells it. An answer recommending LedgerLeaf through MarketSquare contains a product brand and a seller. Counting both as competing accounting products would misstate the answer.
The same answer may support a separate retailer visibility analysis. The right treatment depends on the declared question, not on a universal rule to exclude marketplaces.
Define roll-ups before reporting
- Decide whether a product mention contributes to its parent's company-level presence.
- Prevent multiple products from inflating a binary company-per-answer measure.
- Keep product-level results available beneath the roll-up.
- Treat seller mentions as a separate role unless the benchmark explicitly compares sellers.
- Version the relationship map and record effective dates.
A merger or rebrand can change the mapping. Do not rewrite historical relationships based only on the current ownership page. When evidence is incomplete, preserve the historical labels and disclose the limitation.
Review borderline answers
Check whether the named marketplace is recommended as a destination or merely appears in a citation URL. A cited reseller domain does not automatically mean the answer recommended the reseller.
Keep the original sentence and the adjudication. This allows a second reviewer to understand why a name was counted, rolled up or excluded.
Use the share-of-voice guide for denominators. Next, inspect a multi-brand answer in the AI visibility workflow, identify the role of each entity and confirm the counting level before sharing a competitive percentage.
Fact-checked: 17 October 2026. Examples are illustrative; no customer results are reported.