Brand Voice — samples, fingerprint, rules.
Feed ScoutRival your own writing and it stops sounding like an AI. Three or four real samples is the difference between generic content and yours.
The Voice tab is how ScoutRival stops sounding like an AI and starts sounding like you. You give it things you've written; it extracts a fingerprint; every post, brief and article from then on is written against that fingerprint. Three or four real samples is the difference between "content" and your content.
Auto-pull from your website
The orange card at the top of the tab. One click, and we read your site for you.
It tries about ten likely pages — your homepage plus the usual suspects (/about, /about-us, /services, /work, /blog, /articles, /case-studies, /manifesto, /story) — and keeps the ones that have real prose on them. Three rules govern what lands:
- It adds at most 6 samples per pull. Not ten. Six.
- It skips any page with under 400 characters of readable text — that threshold exists to throw away nav bars, cookie banners and "Coming soon" pages rather than train your voice on them.
- It never exceeds your sample cap. See below.
It tells you what happened — "Added 4 samples · skipped 5" — and you can re-run it any time. If it comes back with nothing, your site is probably JavaScript-rendered or behind a wall; use Paste instead.
Auto-pull is a floor, not a ceiling. Your website was probably written by a designer, an agency, or you at 2am three years ago. If you want ScoutRival to sound like you, paste in three things you actually wrote — a LinkedIn post, a client email, a blog draft. It's the highest-return five minutes in the product.
The three manual sources
Under the auto-pull card, three tabs:
| Source | How it works | Limits |
|---|---|---|
| Paste text | Drop in a past post, an email, a blog excerpt. Instant — no fetching. | At least 40 characters, up to 50,000 |
| From URL | We fetch the page, strip the chrome, and keep the readable body. Works best on blog posts and articles. | Needs a decent amount of readable text on the page, or it's rejected with a message telling you to paste it instead |
| Upload file | The body is extracted, everything else is dropped. | .txt, .md or .docx · 5 MB max |
Every sample lands in the list below with its source badge, its date and its character count. Delete any of them with the bin icon.
The 50-sample cap
Fifty samples per brand. That's the hard limit — the card header reads "N samples · 50 max", and when you hit it the auto-pull button greys out and reads Cap reached. Adding another sample by hand returns a plain error telling you to remove an older one first.
Fifty is far more than you need. The fingerprint sharpens fast and then plateaus; a handful of samples that genuinely sound like you beats forty pages of website boilerplate. If you're near the cap, prune rather than push.
The fingerprint
Hit Regenerate fingerprint and ScoutRival reads every sample and describes your voice precisely enough that a writer could copy it. You get:
- Six dimensions — Tone · Formality · Sentence length · Vocabulary · Pacing · Point of view
- Signature moves — the specific habits it spotted ("opens with a one-line provocation", "uses concrete numbers over vague claims")
- Do and Don't lists — the concrete instructions handed to the writer
- A plain-English summary, and a stats footer: how many samples, how many words, your average sentence length
You need at least one sample before the button will do anything. The fingerprint is not recomputed automatically when you add a sample — computing it is expensive, so it's an explicit button. That's what the stale chip is for.
“AI-analyzed” vs “stats-only”
The last line of the stats footer tells you which kind of fingerprint you're looking at, and it's the single most useful thing on the card.
- AI-analyzed (green) — the real thing. Your voice was read and described. This is what you want.
- stats-only (grey) — the AI call didn't come back, so we fell back to a fingerprint built from arithmetic: average sentence length, how often you use exclamation marks, how often you ask questions. It's honest, it's better than nothing, and it is not a voice profile. Your posts will read generic.
You'll also see it in the success message: "Fingerprint updated (stats only — AI was unavailable)." If you get that, wait a minute and hit Regenerate again. It's almost always transient.
The stale chip
An amber Stale — regenerate chip appears next to the fingerprint when you've added a sample since the fingerprint was last computed. That's all it means. The new samples are stored, but the writer isn't using them yet — it's still working from the old fingerprint.
Regenerate, and the chip clears.
What regenerating costs
Regenerating your fingerprint costs 2 credits — and it charges on every run, not just the first. There's no free re-roll. It's a small amount, but if you're clicking it repeatedly hoping for a different answer, that's the wrong tool: the fingerprint changes when your samples change, not when you press the button again. More on credits →
Adding samples is free. Deleting them is free. Only the analysis is metered.
Banned and preferred words
The last card. Two boxes, one word or phrase per line, up to 50 in each.
- Banned — never use these. This is where "synergize", "leverage", "game-changing" and "unlock" go to die.
- Preferred — favour these. Your house words: the verb you always use for shipping, the name you use for your customers.
Phrase rules outrank the fingerprint. The fingerprint describes how you tend to write; the banned list is a wall. If a word makes you wince every time you see it in a draft, put it in the box once and stop seeing it.
Save the rules with the button on that card — it's a separate save from the rest of the tab. When you're done with Voice entirely, Save & Continue at the bottom takes you on to Competitors, which is also what unlocks AI competitor discovery.