Alert rules

Alert rules decide what deserves your attention. They live per brand in the Alerts area, run automatically after every tracking run, and each has its own threshold.

The rules

1. Visibility drop: fires when a topic's visibility falls by more than the threshold, measured in points against the previous period. A threshold of ten means a fall from 62 to 48 alerts you; small fluctuations stay quiet.
2. New competitor: fires when a domain enters the top five cited competitors for a topic. This one has no threshold; it is a watchtower for new entrants.
3. Sentiment turned negative: fires when the negative share of mentions crosses the threshold percentage for a topic.
4. Citation loss: fires when a source that cited your domain in the prior week stops doing so, while other platforms still cite you. The comparison is week over week, so one-time gaps do not fire.
5. Name confusion: fires when AI answers cite new same-name companies that are not you.
6. Local visibility change: fires when your business enters or drops out of the Google local pack, or of Gemini's Maps results, for a prompt. It compares the newest run that showed a local pack (or consulted Maps) with the previous such run of the same prompt and source; runs where no local pack appeared are skipped rather than counted as a change. The first run with a local result never fires, and nothing fires while the state stays the same. The alert opens the run that changed the state.
7. Dropped out of the top 3: fires when your brand loses its top-3 place in the answers to a prompt on one AI platform. It only watches list prompts (best of, comparison and unclassified prompts), where the order of the brands means something. It compares your last four answers with the four before: you were in the top 3 in at least three of the four before, in at most one of the last four, and the newest answer has you below third place or does not name you. A single answer at #4 never fires it. A prompt you track weekly compares four weeks with the four weeks before, so it takes longer to fire. The alert opens the newest answer, with the brands it names in order.
8. New recommended brand: fires when answers to your list prompts start naming a brand as an option that they never named before. It needs at least three answers in the last seven days, so one odd answer does not count. Names you marked as yours, chose not to count or merged into another name in Recommended brands stay quiet, and so do names whose website you hid on the Gaps page. A longer form of a name the answers already used ("HubSpot CRM" after "HubSpot") is not new. A topic needs two weeks of answers before its names can be new, so adding a topic does not flood the feed. At most five per run, and each name alerts once.

Tuning thresholds

Start with the defaults and adjust to your noise tolerance:

1. Stable markets: raise the visibility-drop threshold so only real movements alert
2. Volatile markets: lower it, because early warnings pay off more
3. Citation-loss sensitivity depends on how concentrated your citations are: if one source dominates, losing it is a five-alarm event, and the default weekly comparison catches exactly that

Dropped out of the top 3 and New recommended brand have no threshold. If a market is too lively for them, switch them off.

Rules can be toggled off individually; disabled rules stop evaluating until re-enabled.