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

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 Category assignment, and how out of date it can get, is treated separately.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Corroborative signals — outside restatements are what let a claim be repeated without hedging Stale representations: superseded categories persisting in reference sources long after the product changed Full report: TR-2026-002: Entity Signals in Digital Market Positioning Trellner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