How Onym works

The handful of objects behind every number, and how they connect.

Onym measures one thing: when people ask AI assistants the questions your buyers ask, who gets named. Everything else is a way of slicing that count.

#The primitives

Workspace

Your account. It holds domains, members, API keys, webhooks and the plan.

Domain

A site and brand you track, like acme.example and "Acme". Every metric belongs to one domain.

Prompt

A question Onym asks, like "Which auth provider is best for a B2B SaaS app?". Each prompt has a topic and a status.

Surface

Where a question is asked: an engine plus a lane, written engine:lane. For example chatgpt_app:chat or openai:coding.

Run

One pass that asks every active prompt on every surface. Runs happen on your plan's schedule.

Answer

One surface's reply to one prompt in one run. It's the unit everything is counted in.

Mention

A brand named in an answer's text, with its position and tone.

Citation

A URL the answer links to or names as a source.

#From question to metric

1. You choose prompts. Start from your category's library, add your own, or accept suggestions. Only active prompts are asked.
2. A run asks them everywhere. Each active prompt goes to every surface that serves its lane. One prompt on seven surfaces makes seven answers.
3. Onym reads each answer. It finds every brand it knows in the text, records the order they appear in, judges the tone around your brand, and keeps every cited URL.
4. Metrics count answers. Visibility is answers that name you over all answers. Share of voice, position and citation rate are counted the same way.
5. Changes need evidence. Each count gets a 95% range. A change is reported only when this period's range and the last one stop overlapping. See Confidence and significance.

#Brands: you, competitors and everyone else

Onym keeps a registry of brands per category, with their names, aliases and domains.

• You are the domain's own brand.
• Tracked competitors are the brands you choose to compare against. They drive share of voice, gaps and opportunities.
• Untracked brands are everyone else Onym recognizes. They still take up positions in an answer, so being named third behind two untracked brands is still third.
• Products belong to a brand: Stripe Connect and Stripe Radar are Stripe. A mention of a product counts as a mention of its brand, once per answer.

Names that are also ordinary words, like Square or Minimalist, only count when they're written as a name: capitalized, and not just because they start a sentence. If something is counted as a brand when it isn't, click Not a brand next to it on the answer page.

Tracking a competitor later fills in its history too, because mentions are counted against your current choices.

#What happens after a run

• The Changes feed compares the run with the previous one.
• Opportunities are refreshed from answers where competitors were named and you weren't.
• Notifications go out: the email digest, Slack and webhooks.

#See also