Brand Themes

Brand Themes are the positioning themes AI platforms lean on when they describe your brand. A theme is a perspective such as "Affordable" or "Specialized": a one-word or hyphenated two-word label with a one-line definition of what it means in your niche. Where Brand Coverage measures whether you show up, Brand Themes measure how you show up.

Brand Themes are part of the Professional and Agency plans.

How themes are derived

Each domain gets its own theme list of four to eight themes. SurfacedBy builds it from what it knows about your brand: your detected niche, your brand name and description, your site's content, your competitors, and your tracked prompts. Generic praise words ("good", "best", "popular") are not accepted as themes.

The list is reviewed as your Full Checks run and at least every 90 days, keeping themes that still fit, retiring ones that no longer do, and adding new ones when your positioning shifts.

How answers are tagged

During each Full Check, every analyzed AI answer is tagged with up to three themes from your list, along with a short verbatim quote as evidence. Tags come only from your list; an AI platform cannot introduce a new theme through one stray phrase. Daily Checks do not tag answers, so theme figures move once per Full Check.

After tagging, each theme gets:

• Coverage - the share of analyzed AI answers in that Full Check that carry the theme.
• Sentiment - how positive, neutral, or negative those answers were, on a 0 to 100 scale.
• Per-platform coverage - the theme's coverage on each AI platform, measured against that platform's own answers.

Reading a theme tile

On AI Visibility, each tile shows the theme name, whether it is an aspirational, neutral, or risk theme, its definition, its coverage and the number of answers behind it, the change in coverage since the previous Full Check, a positive, neutral, and negative split, and a small coverage trend.

Selecting a tile ("View prompts") opens its evidence drawer:

• Coverage per AI platform.
• Up to five verbatim quotes from AI answers.
• The prompts where the theme dominates, and a link to every answer tagged with the theme on AI Responses.
• How often your tracked competitors are named in answers that carry the theme.
• What changed since the previous Full Check.
• An "Add to Plan" action when a theme's coverage has dropped or its sentiment is low.

New, fading, and retired themes

A theme appears as "Forming" while it has only a small number of tagged answers, and becomes a full tile once it has enough evidence.

A theme that goes two Full Checks without any tagged answers becomes dormant and is hidden. If it stays absent for two more, it is retired and moves to the Archive list. History is kept, and a theme that is tagged again returns to active. On large prompt sets, where a Full Check does not recheck every prompt each week, a theme takes longer to become dormant.

You are notified when a new theme emerges, when a theme's coverage drops sharply, and when a review adds or retires a theme.

Where themes appear

• Overview - up to four themes with their coverage, and a link to the full section.
• AI Visibility - the full Brand Themes section: tiles, a sentiment-by-theme trend chart, the evidence drawer, and the Archive.
• AI Responses - the answer detail shows the themes an answer carries and its quote. Opening a theme's answers from its evidence drawer filters the list to that theme.
• Tracked Prompts - a Theme column shows the dominant theme for each prompt, with a theme filter.
• Trends - a Sentiment by Theme chart with one line per theme.

The dashboard's country and platform filters apply to theme figures where the data allows it.

On Starter and during the trial, the Brand Themes section shows a locked preview that explains what the feature measures; see Plan limits.