SEOmonitor automatically moves keywords related to the monitored website's brand into a separate group, isolated from the “All keywords” group. It is not taken into account in any metric or feature regarding the SEO campaign.
We do this to avoid distorting campaign- or group-level metrics, since branded/navigational keywords:
usually have high search volumes,
the tracked website usually ranks #1,
while the competitors most likely won’t rank on them.
This distorts the Competition Visibility against the tracked website, erroneously showing the tracked website as having higher Visibility than anybody else.
Mixing them would mean that the overall portfolio visibility would be artificially increased, with a high baseline, allowing for only a few "degrees" of movement when the non-branded keywords' rankings improve or drop. This may “hide” important SEO performance changes.
How does this work?
When adding new keywords, they are being enriched with many automatic labels mostly based on their SERPs. The branded/navigational keywords are detected when:
the website ranking #1 shows expanded full site-links, OR
the same website is ranking on the first 4 positions, OR
the same website ranks with small site-links, but also ranks in the Knowledge Graph feature.
If that website is the tracked website, the keyword is automatically moved to the “Brand” keyword group, and cannot be moved anywhere else.
If it is not the tracked website, the keyword will be labeled and highlighted as “Brand of others”.
The “Brand” group is completely isolated, being used only when explored alone. The keywords within it are not included in any other group (not even in “All keywords”). They are also not included in the Forecast, nor in the SEO Opportunity metric.
Use case
You might still want to track some of your branded keywords, not for SEO purposes, but rather for tracking search demand and ranking (owned) media.