Brand troubleshooting.
Why your colours are orange, why discovery found nothing, why a rival looks dormant, and why everything reads generic. Cause and fix, in order of how often we see them.
Every brand-side failure we see, with its actual cause and its actual fix. Two things explain most of them: an empty services list, and competitors with no links attached.
Everything reads generic
The posts are fine. They're just… anyone's. This is the most common quality complaint in the product and it almost always has the same cause.
Every content idea ScoutRival generates has to map back to something you actually sell — and if it can't, the idea is thrown away rather than shipped as filler. With an empty services list there's nothing to map to, so the writer falls back on your industry alone. Industry-level content is, by definition, content any of your competitors could have published. Products & Services →
After that, in order of impact:
- No voice samples. Three things you actually wrote, pasted into Brand → Voice. The difference is not subtle.
- No target audience and no pricing posture. A brand with neither is a brand the writer knows nothing about, so it writes for everyone. Positioning →
- A stale fingerprint. You added samples but never regenerated, so the writer is still using the old one. Look for the amber chip.
My colours are ScoutRival orange
Your palette reads #FB7B3D · #1E293B · #BEF264 — a warm orange, a dark navy, a lime. Those are ours. It means colour extraction found nothing usable and the form fell back to its defaults.
Usual causes: no logo we could find, a logo that's really just a monochrome favicon, or a site whose colour lives entirely in a background photo.
Fix: upload a proper logo on Brand → Identity, then hit Re-extract. If that still misses, type the three hex codes in yourself — a value you typed is never overwritten by a later AI pass. Full explanation →
My logo is blurry
We look for the real logo in your header — an image with "logo" in its alt text, class or filename, or the image inside your home link. When none of those match, we fall back to your favicon at 128 pixels wide. It's the right image at the wrong resolution.
Fix: Replace logo on the Identity tab. PNG, JPG, WEBP or SVG, up to 5 MB. Ten seconds, and every generated image gets better.
Discovery found nothing (or is locked)
The Discover button has a padlock on it
AI discovery is locked until you reach the Voice step of brand setup. It runs off your industry, your About and your voice — run it without them and it hands you rivals from an adjacent market. Finish the first three tabs and it unlocks. You can add competitors by hand at any time; that's never gated.
It ran and found zero
You'll get a message telling you your About might be too generic, and it's usually right. Discovery has three fuel sources — your hostname, your industry and your About — and if the About says "we deliver quality solutions" there is nothing for the model to reason from.
- Sharpen your About on Brand → Profile: what you do, who you serve, where you are, what makes you different. Then run discovery again.
- Pin your industry instead of leaving it on Auto-detect.
- Just add them yourself. You know who you lose deals to better than any model does. Paste a URL and the form fills in the rest.
It found three, not six
That's the design. Discovery aims for four to six real rivals and caps at six — it would rather hand you three you recognise than pad the list.
A competitor shows no activity
They're in your list, but they never appear in your brief and their timeline is empty.
They have no links on them. A competitor with no social profiles, no blog URL and no founder LinkedIn gives us nothing to check — so there is nothing to report. Open Brand → Competitors, hit Edit, and paste their LinkedIn and Instagram at minimum. The next scan fills in.
The other possibilities, in order:
- A link has gone dead and they've been quarantined. After two consecutive failures an amber warning appears on their card — "Couldn't reach this competitor's LinkedIn page on recent runs — check the link." We back off rather than hammer a dead URL: one failure waits a day, two waits three days, three or more waits a week. A single success clears it. Fix the URL and it resumes.
- They genuinely didn't post. A real quiet week is useful information.
- You're reading a 24-hour window into a 7-day product. We check each source once a day, so a rival's latest post can be a day old when it reaches you. That's why activity is measured over seven days. Cadence and quarantine →
The Sources toggles do nothing
Because they don't. Plainly: the Monitoring scope chips in the competitor form and the Sources toggles on the competitor detail page are stored and then ignored by the scraper. Toggling them changes nothing.
What we actually watch is decided by which links are on the competitor's record. To stop watching a channel, remove the link. To start, add it. That's the only control that works today. The full story →
Voice problems
The fingerprint says “stats-only”
It means the AI analysis didn't come back and we fell back to arithmetic — average sentence length, exclamation marks, question marks. It's honest, and it is not a voice profile. Your posts will read flat.
Fix: wait a minute and hit Regenerate fingerprint again. It's almost always transient. A good fingerprint is labelled AI-analyzed in green.
There's an amber “Stale — regenerate” chip
You've added samples since the fingerprint was last computed. The samples are saved; the writer just isn't using them yet, because the fingerprint isn't recomputed automatically. Hit Regenerate fingerprint — it costs 2 credits, every time.
Auto-pull added nothing
Auto-pull tries about ten likely pages and skips any with under 400 characters of readable text. If your site is JavaScript-rendered, behind a login, or genuinely thin, it'll come back empty and tell you to paste instead. Do that — pasting is better training data anyway.
“Cap reached”
Fifty samples per brand, hard limit. Delete an old one to add a new one. Fifty is far more than you need — prune rather than push.
The Brand Engine isn't there
No Brand Engine panel on my brief
The engine has never been built, which means brand setup was never finished. Go to Brand → Competitors and hit Save & Complete at the bottom. That's the button that starts the build. Until it runs, you'll have no keyword gaps and no market intelligence, because there's nothing to compute them against.
The refresh nudge won't go away
Dismissing it snoozes it for seven days, per brand and per reason. Clicking Refresh also snoozes it. If it comes back sooner, the reason changed — that's new information, not a bug.
It tells me to update my profile instead of offering a refresh
You have no services listed. A refresh on a brand with no services would only produce noise, so it refuses to run at all and points you at the Profile tab instead. This is the same root cause as generic output — fix it once and both problems go.
I changed my services and nothing improved
New services apply immediately to anything generated from that moment on. But your existing market intelligence — keywords, gaps, angles — was built on the old ones. Open your Daily Brief and hit Rebuild engine on the Brand Engine panel. It takes a couple of minutes, runs in the background, and costs nothing. More →
Brand problems
I can't delete my brand
You cannot delete your only brand — the bin is disabled, and the server refuses anyway. ScoutRival has no "no brand" state, so there'd be nowhere for you to land. Create the replacement first, then delete the old one.
Add brand is greyed out
You're at your plan's brand limit — the counter in the brand strip tells you where you stand ("3 of 3 · Pro"). An Upgrade → link sits next to the button. Brands per plan →
Adding a brand says I need credits
Your first brand is free; every one after that costs 20 credits, charged once. The form checks before it creates anything, so you never end up with a half-made brand.
My work is showing up under the wrong brand
Everything applies to the active brand — the pill with the check mark on it. If output is landing in the wrong place, you switched later than you thought. Switching forces a full page reload precisely so this can't happen silently.
My industry keeps changing back
You're on Auto-detect, which means the engine re-infers your industry from your About whenever it re-enriches your brand. Pick an industry manually and it's pinned — no later AI pass will overwrite it. The industry picker →
Re-extract wiped my setup
There are two buttons called Re-extract, and they behave completely differently:
- On the onboarding Confirm screen — it wipes your colours, fonts, favicon, confidence scores and setup progress, then re-runs the read from scratch. Anything you'd edited is gone.
- On the Brand → Identity tab — it re-runs and merges. A field is only overwritten if the new run actually found something for it. Safe to press as often as you like.
If it's already happened: nothing is unrecoverable. Walk the four Brand tabs, fix the fields, and hit Save & Continue on each. Your competitors, your voice samples and your briefs were never touched — it's the identity fields and your place in the setup chain that reset.