These four fields are set during onboarding but live permanently on your brand’s settings page, under Category. Nothing here is locked in — you can revisit and update it at any point.
Why this matters
Surfais’s audit framework routes its recommendations differently depending on your profile. A Wikipedia article is a sensible default for a mid-sized B2B SaaS company, but low-priority for a micro DTC brand with no press coverage. Reddit engagement is high-priority for most US brands chasing ChatGPT visibility, but gets substituted with a locally relevant forum for an Irish local-service business. Trustpilot is default-keep for consumer-facing brands, but replaced with G2 or Capterra for B2B SaaS. None of this changes what Surfais measures — your AIS Score and visibility metrics are computed the same way regardless of your profile. It changes what Surfais recommends you do about them. Read What audits check for how the audit uses this profile.Category
Four required fields, all needed together:- Industry — free text describing what your brand does, e.g. “monitored alarm systems” or “B2B logistics SaaS”. Specific beats generic.
- Geography — the country your brand primarily serves. Shapes the expected citation mix and drives the currency shown next to scale.
- Business model — one of nine options, covered below. The field with the widest effect on recommendations.
- Scale — an approximate revenue band in your local currency. Gates which authority signals are realistic — Wikipedia notability matters at enterprise scale, Trustpilot and niche directories matter more at SMB scale.
The business model options
Business model is the field that most changes your recommendation playbook, so it’s worth understanding all nine rather than guessing.
Picking the “wrong” option doesn’t break anything technically — it shifts which tactics the audit treats as default-keep versus lower-priority. If recommendations consistently feel off-target, revisit this field first.
Geography and scale
The two work together with business model rather than independently. A local service business’s scale is usually micro or SMB by definition — the model’s geography-bound nature caps how large it typically gets. A B2B SaaS or DTC e-commerce brand can span micro to enterprise, and scale gates what’s realistic: a Wikipedia push only makes sense once there’s enough press coverage and notability, which usually holds from mid-market upward. If your brand operates in more than one country, set geography to your primary market and use Countries to configure which markets your scans actually cover.Brand name ambiguity
If your brand name is a common dictionary word, a short acronym, or shared with unrelated brands, toggle on Brand name is ambiguous in AI search on your brand’s settings page. This tightens citation-extraction confidence so Surfais doesn’t over-attribute unrelated mentions to you. This is separate from brand aliases, which covers other names and domains your brand is genuinely known by — ambiguity is about other, unrelated brands sharing your name.Keeping your profile accurate
Revisit your category profile when your business pivots its primary revenue model (a B2C retailer whose private-label line grows to dominate revenue should switch to DTC), when you expand from single-location local service into multi-region (scale usually moves up alongside business model), or when audit recommendations consistently feel mis-targeted — try adjusting business model before assuming something else is wrong. Changing these fields only affects future audits. Past audits stay pinned to whichever values were active when they ran, so revising your profile won’t retroactively rewrite historical reports. See Reading your audit for how framework versioning works.What audits check
How the audit framework uses your category profile to select recommendations.
Brand aliases
Track other names and domains your brand is legitimately known by.