Brand Snapshot

The Brand Snapshot is the normalized profile of a property — the essential information about the brand, distilled into a structured set of fields. It's the foundation the rest of Spyglasses builds on: the prompts we generate, the mentions we match, and the FAQ answers we write all draw on what's captured here. Getting the snapshot right is the single highest-leverage thing you can do to make everything downstream more accurate.

What the Brand Snapshot Contains

The snapshot captures the things you'd want a well-briefed analyst to know before they wrote about your brand — what the company does, who it's for, what makes it distinct, the language it uses about itself, and the competitors and categories it sits among. It's deliberately concise. The goal isn't a full marketing dossier; it's the essential, structured facts that let an AI system (and Spyglasses) reason about the brand correctly.

Where the Snapshot Comes From

You don't build the snapshot from a blank form. When you run an AI Visibility Report for a property, Spyglasses crawls the site and analyzes how AI assistants already describe the brand, then assembles the snapshot automatically from what it learned. If a report has been run, the snapshot arrives pre-populated with sensible, evidence-derived values.

From there, every field is editable. Where the crawl-derived value is off — a stale tagline, a missing differentiator, the wrong primary audience — just edit the field. Your edits are treated as the source of truth.

Your Edits Are Preserved

This is the important part: edits persist when the snapshot is rebuilt. When you re-run a report or otherwise regenerate the snapshot, Spyglasses doesn't blow away your manual corrections — it keeps the fields you've edited and only refreshes the ones you haven't touched. You can confidently correct the snapshot once and trust that a future re-crawl won't silently undo your work.

Why the Snapshot Matters: Prompt Generation

The most important consumer of the snapshot is Prompt Generation. When Spyglasses generates the discovery prompts used to test your AI visibility, it uses the brand snapshot as its basis — the category, the audience, the differentiators, and the competitive set all shape which questions get asked and how. A vague or inaccurate snapshot produces vague or off-target prompts; a sharp one produces prompts that actually probe the conversations your buyers are having with AI.

That's the practical reason to invest a few minutes here. The snapshot isn't a static profile page you fill in for completeness — it's the input that determines the quality of nearly everything Spyglasses measures for you.

Editing the Snapshot

Open Brand Snapshot from the property sidebar. Each field can be edited in place. Make the values specific and true:

• Correct anything the crawl got wrong or stale.
• Fill in differentiators the site copy undersells.
• Make sure the audience and category reflect who you actually serve, not who you aspire to.

Save, and your changes immediately become the basis for future prompt generation and mention matching. Because edits are preserved across rebuilds, you only have to do this carefully once and then maintain it as the brand evolves.

Locations inherit the snapshot. A LOCATION sub-property doesn't have its own snapshot — it inherits the parent brand's, shown read-only. Edit the snapshot on the parent to change it everywhere. See Locations for how inheritance works.

From Differentiators to Key Messages

Here's a workflow worth adopting. When you go to set up Key Messages, use the differentiators in your brand snapshot as the starting point for the positive key messages you track.

The reason is strategic. Key messages drive Share of Influence — how often your framing shows up when buyers ask AI about the category, before any brand is named. If AI responses mention your differentiators, it means your brand is influencing the AI's answer before brands even enter the conversation. That's the earliest and most valuable point in the funnel to win. Your differentiators are, by definition, the things you can credibly own — which makes them the strongest candidates for positive key messages to track and build.

So the loop is: get the differentiators right in the snapshot → carry them into Key Messages as positive messages → measure whether AI is repeating your framing at the awareness stage. The snapshot is where that loop begins.

Best Practices

Run a report first, then refine

The fastest path to a good snapshot is to run an AI Visibility Report so the fields arrive pre-populated, then correct and sharpen rather than writing from scratch.

Be specific in differentiators

Generic differentiators ("great support," "easy to use") produce generic prompts and weak key messages. Name the specific, defensible things only your brand can claim.

Maintain it as the brand evolves

When positioning shifts or you launch something new, update the snapshot. Because it feeds prompt generation, a stale snapshot quietly degrades the relevance of everything downstream.

Carry differentiators into Key Messages

Don't let the differentiators sit only in the snapshot. Promote the strongest ones into positive Key Messages so you're actually measuring whether AI repeats them at the awareness stage.

Related

• Discovery Queries — The prompts generated from your snapshot
• Key Messages — Promote your differentiators into measurable positive messages
• AI Visibility Reports — Run a report to build the snapshot automatically
• Locations — How locations inherit the parent brand's snapshot