Key Messages

Every communications program is, at its core, an effort to make a brand mean something specific in the minds of a defined audience. Key messages are the distilled expression of that meaning — the short phrases you want people (and, increasingly, AI systems) to associate with the brand when they think about it. The Key Messages dashboard is where you capture and maintain those phrases for each property.

Why Key Messages Matter

A PR program without agreed-upon key messages drifts. Different team members describe the brand differently in different placements, spokespeople answer the same question three different ways, and the story that reaches the market is blurry instead of sharp. Explicit key messages give everyone — agency, client, spokespeople, ghostwriters — a shared reference for what the brand is supposed to stand for.

In an AI visibility context, key messages matter for an additional reason: AI platforms build their answers by synthesizing the associations they've seen repeated across the web. When a journalist, an analyst, and a podcast host all describe your client as "the most secure CRM for finance teams," that association becomes a fact the models surface when someone asks about secure CRMs. When everyone describes the client differently, no single association is strong enough to stick. Key messages give your outreach, content, and spokesperson coaching a common target.

What Goes in a Key Message

A good key message is short, specific, and ownable:

• Short: It should fit in a single sentence, ideally under ten words. If it takes a paragraph to state, it's a positioning statement, not a key message.
• Specific: "We care about our customers" is not a key message — every company says that. "The only analytics platform with SOC 2 Type II and HIPAA out of the box" is specific and defensible.
• Ownable: A key message should be something your brand can credibly claim better than its competitors. If two competitors could equally use the same phrase, it isn't a differentiator.

Key messages come in a few flavors, and it's fine to capture several per brand:

• Category definition: "The original headless CMS" — tells the audience what kind of thing you are.
• Audience fit: "Built for finance teams" — tells the audience who you're for.
• Capability claim: "Deploy in under ten minutes" — tells the audience what you uniquely enable.
• Value framing: "The fastest path from data to decision" — tells the audience what outcome you deliver.
• Contrast: "No agents, no sidecars, no headaches" — defines the brand against an alternative approach.

A typical property has three to seven key messages at any given time. More than that and the list stops functioning as a reference — nobody remembers a list of twelve.

Creating and Managing Key Messages

Navigate to Key Messages in the property sidebar. For PR-focused users, this appears under Projects because key messages most often drive campaign work. For SEO and general users, it appears under Manage. Click Add Key Message and provide:

You can edit any key message to refine the wording as the program evolves, and you can delete messages that no longer reflect the positioning. Deletions are permanent.

How Key Messages Drive Share of Influence

Key messages aren't just internal reference material — Spyglasses uses them to compute the Share of Influence (SoI) metric on the Historical Metrics dashboard's AI Visibility Funnel. SoI sits at the awareness stage of the funnel and answers a different question from Share of Voice:

• Share of Voice (consideration / decision): "When AI surfaces brand recommendations, how often is my brand named?"
• Share of Influence (awareness): "When buyers ask AI about the category — before any brand is named — how often does my framing show up in the answer?"

After every report and every nightly prompt run, Spyglasses takes each AI response and compares every sentence against every positive-sentiment key message using semantic similarity (cosine on embeddings). A sentence is a "match" when its similarity to a key message is at or above the calibrated threshold (currently 0.50) — i.e., the sentence clearly expresses the same narrative, not just the same topic.

For each report we compute, per positive key message: the percentage of awareness-stage AI responses that contained at least one matching sentence. Share of Influence is the average of those per-message rates. Three positive key messages matching in 30%, 50%, and 70% of awareness answers respectively gives an SoI of 50%.

Two practical implications:

• Negative and Neutral messages don't contribute to SoI. They're still tracked and you can see their mention rates in the per-message detail, but the funnel hero rolls up positive messages only — SoI is about the narrative you're trying to build, not the noise around it.
• Wording matters because the matcher is semantic, not exact. A sentence doesn't have to repeat your key message verbatim to count; it just has to express the same idea. That's why specific, ownable phrasings (see What Goes in a Key Message) work better than generic ones — they have a clear semantic center.

Inline Highlights in AI Reports

When you view an AI Visibility Report for a BRAND or PRODUCT property, each platform's response is rendered with inline sentence highlights drawn from key-message matches:

• Purple background — the sentence matched one of your positive key messages.
• Orange background — the sentence matched one of your negative key messages.

Hover over a highlight to see which key message it matched and the similarity score. The inline highlights are a teaser — they show up to the five highest-scoring sentences per key message per platform, so don't expect every brand-aligned sentence to be marked. The authoritative comprehensive view is the funnel hero on the Historical Metrics dashboard, where every match is counted.

Person reports (subject type PERSON) don't use inline highlights — they retain the dedicated Tracked Attributes section instead.

Best Practices

Make the Message Exact

The whole point of a key message is that multiple people will use the same words in different contexts. If the message is approximate — if different team members rephrase it differently each time — the repetition effect is lost. Agree on exact wording and use it verbatim in briefs, pitches, and content.

Use the Description Field for the Why

The message is what you want people to remember; the description is where you capture the reasoning behind it. Note the audience, the proof points, and the evidence that supports the claim. When a new team member comes onto the account, the description is what gets them up to speed without a two-hour onboarding call.

Revisit Messages Quarterly

Key messages aren't permanent. Competitors evolve, product positioning shifts, and what was a differentiator last year might be table stakes this year. Review the list at least once a quarter and update or retire messages that no longer hold up.

Coordinate With Projects

When you scope a campaign in Projects, reference the relevant key messages in the project brief. This keeps the campaign narrative tied to the brand's overall positioning rather than drifting into one-off angles.

Don't Confuse Key Messages With Taglines

A tagline is customer-facing — it shows up on the homepage. A key message is internal-facing — it shows up in briefs, pitch notes, and spokesperson training. The same phrase can sometimes be both, but most key messages are written for working teams, not for billboards.

Related

• Projects — Scope campaigns around the key messages you want to reinforce
• Annotations — Mark campaign milestones on your visibility charts
• Historical Metrics — See how key messages drive Share of Influence in the funnel hero
• Prompts — Author the awareness-stage prompts that feed Share of Influence