Brand Profile — name, industry, About.
Every field on the Profile tab, what it changes downstream, and the industry picker that quietly decides which keywords ScoutRival chases for you.
The Profile tab is where ScoutRival learns what your business is. Two fields on it do real work — your services and your industry — and both change what the AI produces for you from the moment you save.
The fields
| Field | What it's for | Limit |
|---|---|---|
| Business name | Used everywhere your brand is named. Required. | 200 characters |
| Website URL | The site we read for voice, colours and re-extraction. Required. We add the https:// if you leave it off. | — |
| Industry | Resolves to the engine archetype that tunes your keywords, article shapes and safety rules. See below. | Pick one, or Auto-detect |
| About the business | The single richest piece of context the writer gets. Free text. | 4,000 characters |
| Products & services | The spine. Every content idea must map back to one of these. Read this one properly → | 30 rows |
| Who buys it | Target audience — who the writer is writing for. | 2,000 characters |
| Pricing posture | Budget · Mid-market · Premium · Luxury · Custom-quote. Where you sit on the price ladder. | Pick one |
| Business goal | Ten presets. Biases what we recommend. Details → | Pick one |
| Social accounts | Your own profiles — so we can watch your channels and line them up against your rivals'. | — |
The primary button is Save & Continue. It saves and moves you on to Identity.
Writing a good About
We pre-fill this from your homepage. That copy was written to convert visitors, not to brief an AI, so it's usually the wrong shape — long on adjectives, short on facts.
Aim for 150–250 words and make sure four things are in there:
- What you actually do, in plain language
- Who you serve — the customer, not the market segment
- Where — your city or service area, if you're a local business. This is what decides whether we chase "near me" keywords for you at all
- What makes you different from the next firm on the list
The About also feeds competitor discovery. If discovery keeps returning rivals that aren't yours, a vague About is the usual reason.
The Industry picker
One searchable dropdown, 88 industries across 11 groups. Type to filter — it searches the label, the group and a set of synonyms, so "botox" finds Med-Spas and "webflow" finds Website Design & Development.
Every group ends with an Other… option, so nothing is unclassifiable. Some entries carry an extra shield icon: those industries have additional safety rules attached to them (medical, financial, alcohol, child-facing), which get merged into the instructions behind everything we write for you.
Creative & Personal Brands // authors, photographers, creators Coaches & Educators // life, business, finance, tutoring Consultants & Agencies // marketing, web design, UI/UX, HR Professional Services // law, accounting, insurance, real estate Home & Local Services // trades, roofing, cleaning, landscaping Health, Fitness & Wellness // therapy, gyms, nutrition, med-spas Beauty, Fashion & Retail // product brands that sell online Beauty & Personal-Care Services // salons, barbers, spas Food, Hospitality & Events // restaurants, catering, venues Technology & Software // SaaS, apps, AI, managed IT Local, Community & Other // pets, automotive, travel, nonprofits
Underneath the picker there's a small optional field — Anything we missed? — for the bit of your business the taxonomy doesn't cover ("we also do commercial drone roof inspections"). It's a note for context; it doesn't change the engine profile.
The eight engine archetypes
Each of the 88 industries resolves to exactly one of eight archetypes. The archetype is the thing the engine actually runs on. The picker tells you which one your choice maps to, on the line below it.
| Archetype | Who it's for |
|---|---|
| Local / home service | Trades, home services, local creative — booked by nearby customers |
| Professional service | Lawyers, accountants, insurance, advisors, agents — high-trust local pros |
| Health, fitness & wellness | Therapists, trainers, nutritionists, chiropractors, yoga |
| SaaS / technology | Software, platforms, digital products |
| Consultant / advisory | Business, financial, ops, marketing and strategy consulting |
| Coach / creator / educator | Coaches, course creators, authors — audience-built, mostly online |
| E-commerce / retail | Product-led brands, searched by product rather than by provider |
| Other | Anything else — the engine infers from your About and services |
What the archetype changes, concretely:
- The nouns we build keywords from — a roofer gets "contractor" and "installer"; a SaaS gets "platform" and "tool"
- Whether we go local at all — "near me" and "free estimate" are the right keywords for a plumber and completely wrong for a SaaS
- The mix of intent we chase — how much informational vs. commercial vs. ready-to-buy
- The article shapes we suggest — "How much does X cost in your area" vs. "Best X software for Y in 2026"
- The safety rules — the high-trust archetypes (legal, financial, health) carry stricter constraints: no guaranteed outcomes, general information only, no treatment claims
One rule is on every archetype: we never name a competitor in your published copy. Comparison content is always written at the category level.
Auto-detect vs a manual pick
The top option in the picker is Auto-detect — let ScoutRival decide. It's the default, and it means the engine re-reads your About and re-infers your industry whenever it re-enriches your brand.
A manual pick is pinned. Once you choose an industry yourself, no later AI pass will overwrite it — not a re-extract, not a rebuild, not a background enrichment. Auto-detect stays open to being changed. If you're in an industry that straddles two archetypes (a photographer, a med-spa, a fractional CFO), pin it and stop the guessing.
Switching back to Auto-detect clears the pin and hands the decision back to the engine.
Changing your industry changes the keywords the engine hunts — so after you change it, run Rebuild engine from the Brand Engine panel on your Daily Brief so your market intelligence is rebuilt on the new profile. It's free. More →
Your own social accounts
The last card is your own profiles — LinkedIn, X, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, Threads, Pinterest, GitHub, Reddit. These are yours, not your rivals'. They're how we know which of your channels to watch, and they're the baseline your competitors' activity is measured against.