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

1. Go to Tools → Brand Intelligence
2. Click New Brand Profile
3. 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)
4. Set Sensitivity: Low (fewer, higher-confidence matches), Balanced, or High (more matches, more false positives)
5. 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.