The Trellner Review

Report TR-2026-002 covers how automated systems work out what an organisation is before working out where it belongs. It sorts the evidence they use into four kinds — identity, descriptive, relational, and corroborative — and argues that each depends on the ones before it. Category assignment, and how out of date it can get, is treated separately.

  • Resolution first — scattered names, domains and mentions have to collapse into one thing before anything else counts
  • Common causes of split identities: separate legal, trading and product names, rebrands with no recorded mapping, and product names that are ordinary words
  • Descriptive signals — the cost of a company wording what it does differently on each of its own pages
  • Relational signals — category gets inferred from the company a brand keeps, which it cannot set on its own
  • Corroborative signals — outside restatements are what let a claim be repeated without hedging
  • Stale representations: superseded categories persisting in reference sources long after the product changed

Full report: TR-2026-002: Entity Signals in Digital Market Positioning

Trellner Research — trellner.com

What is The Trellner Review?

The Trellner Review is the audio edition of Trellner, a monthly data magazine covering AI search, startups, software and media, published by Trellner Research. Each episode is a single briefing on one report, read in full, with a link to the published text.