Interpret the landscape.
Analysts read the narrative graph in context. They produce fingerprints (client-level), landscapes (category-level), and drift alerts when positions start shifting.
The interpretation layer of narrative intelligence.
Analysts are the agents that make the narrative graph legible. Researchers deliver structured signal. Analysts read it. They produce artifacts humans can actually use: client fingerprints, category landscapes, competitive overlays, white-space maps, and drift alerts when a rival starts moving on a claim.
Explore narrative intelligenceFingerprinting
Score the client's current narrative position across the claims that matter in the category.
Landscape mapping
Lay out who owns what in a category across media, search, and AI answers.
White-space identification
Surface claims that are live in search and AI demand but uncontested in coverage.
Competitive overlays
Stack the client against rivals on share of voice, journalist relationships, and claim momentum.
Drift detection
Alert when a claim the client owns starts shifting toward a competitor.
Senior account managers
Competitive decks and pitch-prep briefs used to take a week of senior time per client, per quarter. Analysts produce them on demand from live graph data. Senior managers review and direct instead of building.
Research analysts
Quarterly positioning briefs, category one-pagers, and share-of-voice audits are standing outputs now. Research analysts move from assembling evidence to challenging it.
Strategy leads
White-space identification used to rely on gut plus dated reports. Analysts ground the call in current search demand (DataForSEO), current coverage (Perigon), and current AI answers (ZipTie-style audits).
The strategic work stuck in decks.
Senior account managers and research analysts have historically owned competitive decks, quarterly positioning briefs, and category reviews. Those artifacts were expensive, slow, and stale the day they shipped. Analysts produce them continuously and ground every claim in the narrative graph.
Read the graph, score the position, mark the shift.
Analysts query the narrative graph directly. They score each client's narrative strength across the claims that matter, identify which territory is contested versus open, and watch for drift between reporting cycles. Every conclusion traces back to signal.
Talk to usQuery the graph
Analysts pull structured views of the narrative graph scoped to a client, a category, or a specific claim. The graph is populated by Researchers against Perigon, DataForSEO, and AI answer logs.
Score narrative strength
For each claim a client wants to own, Analysts score current strength: coverage volume, coverage quality, AI answer presence, search ownership, journalist alignment. Scoring methodology draws on the Princeton and Georgia Tech GEO study and Semrush 2025 entity-based ranking benchmarks.
Contested versus open
Analysts flag territory where a rival is pulling ahead (contested) and claims with demand but no clear owner (open). Open territory becomes the first input to the Positioning Engine.
Drift detection
When a claim a client owns starts shifting toward a competitor in coverage, search, or AI answers, Analysts raise a drift alert into the workspace. Teams move before the position is lost.
Landscape becomes the input to the Positioning Engine.
The Analyst output is the input the Positioning Engine needs. A scored fingerprint, a mapped landscape, and a set of open claims go to the Strategist agent. Strategists run positioning options against that landscape and return a ranked set of claims the client could credibly own.
Meet the StrategistsWithout Analysts, Strategists are scoring against raw signal. With Analysts, Strategists are scoring against a curated, contextualized reading of the market. The difference shows up in the quality of the recommendation and the speed of the approval.
Planners, Writers, and Reporters then execute against the selected position. Every program traces back to an Analyst read of the graph.
Questions about Analysts
What is AI for competitive analysis?
AI for competitive analysis uses structured signal from media, search, and AI answers to score how a brand compares to its rivals on claims, share of voice, and narrative momentum. Shadow's Analyst agents produce competitive overlays from a live narrative graph populated by Researchers against Perigon, DataForSEO, and AI answer audits.
What is brand landscape analysis?
Brand landscape analysis maps who owns what in a category across earned media, search results, and AI-generated answers. Analysts lay out the claims, the current owners, the contested territory, and the open territory. The output is a category view grounded in structured signal, not a static competitive matrix.
What is white-space analysis?
White-space analysis identifies claims with real demand (in search, in coverage requests, in AI queries) that no competitor currently owns. Analysts surface these gaps by intersecting DataForSEO demand signal with Perigon coverage data and AI answer logs. White space becomes the first input to the Positioning Engine.
How do Analysts differ from Researchers?
Researchers gather and structure signal into the narrative graph. Analysts interpret it. Researchers answer what is being said. Analysts answer what it means for the client. Together they form the reading layer of Shadow's narrative intelligence platform. Strategists, Planners, Writers, and Reporters pick up from there.
See your category through an Analyst read.
Book a demo and we will produce a live fingerprint and landscape on your client's space before the call.