Matching rules

Matching rules decide which words in an AI answer count for you and which count for your competitors. Engines call brands by nicknames, product names, and misspellings. A rule tells MentionFlow that all of those mean you, so your visibility counts every mention you earned, not just the ones using your exact legal name. A re-scan applies a new rule to answers you already collected. The page lives at Matching rules.

What it does

The page has four tools:

• Competitor aliases: extra names for each competitor, so a mention under any of them is counted correctly.
• Custom patterns: an advanced rule for names that aliases can't express, like spelling variants or glued-together product names.
• Chart colors: the fixed color each brand keeps across every chart and table.
• Apply rules to history: re-run your current rules over answers you already collected.

Who it's for

• Anyone whose brand or competitors get called several things by AI assistants: abbreviations, product lines, common misspellings.
• Analysts who want each brand in one fixed, easy-to-spot color on every chart.

Competitor aliases

An alias is another name that counts as the same competitor: a product name, a short form, a misspelling. Your own brand's aliases live on the Brand hub, not here.

Try it:

1. Open Matching rules and find the Competitor aliases card. If you have no competitors yet, add them on the Competitors page first.
2. Edit a competitor row and type the other names, separated by commas. The field's hint says: product names, shorthand, misspellings, comma-separated.
3. Save. From now on, a mention under any of those names is credited to that competitor.

Aliases ignore case. You can have 20 per competitor, each 2 to 60 characters. An alias that collides with another tracked brand is refused ("one alias can't attribute to two competitors"), so a name can never credit two companies at once.

Custom patterns (advanced)

Aliases can't capture every name. Take a brand written with or without a space or hyphen: "Click Up", "click-up", "clickup". A custom pattern handles that. Because it is an advanced tool, it comes with a Test button and strong safety limits.

Two things to know:

• A dot means a literal dot. Unlike normal pattern syntax, a . matches an actual full stop. This helps with domains. clickup.com matches the text "clickup.com" and not "clickupXcom". When you really want "any character", use a character class like [a-z0-9].
• Patterns run in guaranteed linear time. Only a safe subset is allowed, with no lookarounds, backreferences, or quantified groups. So a rule can never slow collection down. Patterns ignore case, are 2 to 120 characters, and are capped at 12 per brand.

Try it:

1. In the Custom patterns (advanced) card, choose the brand or competitor the pattern should credit.
2. Type the pattern. The field shows an example like click[\s-]?up.
3. Click Test. It checks the pattern against your 40 most recent answers and reports "Matched X of Y recent answers", with a few example snippets. It says plainly that this is a sample preview, not your full history.
4. Click Add rule to save it.

A pattern that would also match a different tracked brand is refused, so one entity's rule can never take another's mentions. If a pattern is too broad or too complex, the page tells you exactly what to fix.

Apply rules to history

New rules apply to future answers on their own. A re-scan applies them to answers you already collected too, using the same matcher run backward over your history.

Try it:

1. In the Apply rules to history card, click Re-scan history and confirm the dialog: "Re-scan collected answers with the current rules?"
2. It runs name, alias, and pattern matching over your stored answers again and updates mentions to match. New rules add mentions. Removed aliases take theirs away.
3. When it finishes you see a summary: how many answers were scanned, and how many mentions were added, removed, or confirmed.

A few honest details:

• AI-scored sentiment is kept. Newly found mentions start unscored, shown as an em dash rather than as neutral. See Sentiment. The re-scan never re-runs the language model.
• Metrics recompute from the updated mentions, and the re-scan can't be undone.
• It works newest answers first. If it doesn't finish in one pass it remembers where it stopped: "Run again to continue from where this run stopped." Only one re-scan runs per brand at a time.

Chart colors

Give each brand a fixed color that follows it across every chart and table. Each row offers eight preset swatches plus a free color picker. A Default button clears an override. Custom colors are used as-is in both light and dark mode, so mid-brightness colors read best.

How matching decides what counts

• Your tracked name and its aliases are matched on word boundaries, ignoring case, so a name inside a longer word doesn't falsely count.
• Custom patterns are applied exactly as written, ignoring case, through the safe matcher.
• When several brands appear in one answer, each is credited at its earliest appearance. Mentions are numbered in the order they appear in the text.
• Cross-attribution is blocked at the source. An alias or pattern that also matches another tracked brand is refused when you add it.
• These matches feed the mention rows that drive your metrics. That is why adding an alias or pattern adds mentions, and why a re-scan carries a rule change back over your history.

Limits

• You need editor rights and a live workspace. View-only members and the demo can't edit rules.
• These are your workspace's rules only. They never touch the shared global brand registry.
• Aliases: 20 per competitor. Custom patterns: 12 per brand. Re-scan: one at a time per brand.

Related

• Competitors: where competitors are added before you alias them.
• Brand and knowledge: where your own brand's aliases live.
• Answers and receipts: where mentions and their evidence are shown.
• Sentiment: why re-scanned mentions start unscored.