Brand Intelligence: What It Monitors and How
Brand Intelligence monitors your brand name across domains, social media, and the web - detecting impersonation, tracking mentions, and flagging reputation risks.
Brand Intelligence: What It Monitors and How
Brand Intelligence is a monitoring hub that watches for uses of your brand name across domains, social platforms, and web content. It surfaces impersonation attempts, tracks sentiment, and identifies reputation risks before they escalate.
What Gets Monitored
Domain Impersonation (CT Log Scanning)
Brand Intelligence scans Certificate Transparency (CT) logs for newly issued SSL certificates that contain your brand name or domain. CT logs are public, append-only records of every certificate issued by public CAs.
When a certificate is issued for login-mycompany.com or mycompany-support.net, it appears in CT logs within hours. Brand Intelligence detects these and flags them as potential phishing or brand impersonation infrastructure.
The scan looks for:
- Your brand name as a substring in certificate CNs and SANs
- Your primary domain name as a substring
- Configurable keyword tokens (for brands with multiple names, abbreviations, or product names)
Web Mentions
Brand Intelligence uses web search to find recent pages mentioning your brand name. Results are collected and analyzed for:
- Sentiment: Positive, neutral, or negative tone (calculated using NLP)
- Source credibility: News site, forum, social platform, blog
- Context: Whether the mention is about your brand or a false positive
Social Media Signals
Monitors search results across platforms for brand name mentions. Note: deep social media API integration (direct Twitter/X API, LinkedIn API) requires OAuth connection via the Brand Central social accounts feature.
Competitor Signals
Add competitor domains and brand names to track their mentions alongside yours. Useful for:
- Monitoring competitor product launches or announcements
- Tracking share of voice over time
- Spotting when competitors change positioning or messaging
Setting Up a Brand Profile
- Go to Tools → Brand Intelligence
- Click New Brand Profile
- Enter:
- Brand name - the primary name to monitor
- Domain - your main domain
- Industry - for context-relevant filtering
- Description - optional context
- Keywords/tokens - additional terms to monitor (product names, abbreviations, campaign hashtags)
- Set Sensitivity: Low (fewer, higher-confidence matches), Balanced, or High (more matches, more false positives)
- Save and activate
Brand Intelligence runs scans on a schedule. First results appear within minutes.
Reading the Dashboard
The Brand Intelligence dashboard shows:
Threat Level
An overall assessment of brand risk based on:
- Number of impersonation domains detected in CT logs
- Presence of suspicious domain registrations
- Negative sentiment trend in web mentions
Mention Feed
All detected web mentions in reverse chronological order. Each shows:
- Source URL and site name
- Snippet of relevant text
- Sentiment label and score
- Date detected
Filter by: date range, sentiment, source type.
Impersonation Alerts
Domains flagged from CT log scanning. Each shows:
- Suspicious domain name
- When the certificate was issued
- Certificate issuer
- Risk assessment (similarity to your brand, registration patterns)
Trend Charts
- Mention volume over time (are people talking about you more or less?)
- Sentiment distribution over time (is coverage trending positive or negative?)
Sensitivity Settings
| Setting | Description |
|---|---|
| Low | Only high-confidence matches; fewer false positives; may miss borderline impersonations |
| Balanced | Recommended default; good signal-to-noise ratio |
| High | Catches more variations; expect more false positives to review |
High sensitivity is useful during product launches, PR crises, or when you know impersonation is actively occurring.
Workspace Isolation
Each workspace has its own Brand Intelligence profiles. If you manage multiple brands (agency use case, holding company), create a separate workspace per brand to keep monitoring data and alerts separate.