Count a competitor mention only when the answer's context identifies the intended business. A name shared with a person, place or unrelated company should enter an ambiguity review rather than automatically increasing competitive share of voice.
Define the entity before writing aliases
Record the competitor's public name, domain, product category, geography when relevant and known product relationships. An alias is a proposed matching rule, not proof of identity.
Illustrative example: a fictional analytics company called “Cedar” shares a name with a tree and a local restaurant. “Cedar offers event analytics” fits the intended category; “cedar is durable timber” does not. “Try Cedar” without context may remain unresolved.
The FActScore paper uses fine-grained factual units rather than judging an entire generation as one fact. Our recommendation is similarly narrow: review the identity evidence surrounding each candidate match. This is not a claim that MonitorMyGEO runs FActScore.
Use an adjudication sheet
For each uncertain match, keep the exact answer sentence, candidate entity, supporting context, decision and reviewer. Useful decisions are confirmed competitor, unrelated entity, unresolved and excluded by scope.
A linked domain can help establish identity, but a link elsewhere in the answer may refer to a different business. Review the relationship between the name and the citation rather than treating any nearby URL as confirmation.
Keep unresolved matches visible. Automatically excluding them makes the score look more certain than the evidence allows; automatically including them inflates presence.
Recalculate transparently
- Freeze the alias rules for the reporting period.
- Review a sample of accepted matches and all material ambiguous matches.
- Record rule changes with a version and rationale.
- Reprocess historical observations only if you can apply the same revised rules consistently.
- Show the impact of the change separately from market movement.
If a new alias changes last month's score, explain that the calculation changed. Do not describe it as a newly discovered improvement in the brand's actual visibility.
Decide what the report should say
Report confirmed mentions with their valid-answer denominator, then disclose unresolved entity cases. For a high-stakes competitor comparison, include an example of the ambiguity and the decision rule.
The share-of-voice guide explains the broader calculation. Next, inspect a competitor observation in the AI visibility workflow and verify the intended entity from the answer context before using it in a competitive narrative.
Fact-checked: 17 October 2026. Examples are illustrative; no customer results are reported.