Open SEO Audit, choose the correct brand, and open Brand Rules. Rules belong only to that brand. A rule for one client never changes another client’s scans.
Choose the rule type
- Approved term keeps an exact brand, product, person, or technical name from being treated as a spelling mistake.
- Forbidden term creates a finding whenever wording the brand does not allow appears.
- Preferred wording finds one term or phrase and supplies the approved replacement.
- Regular expression applies a bounded pattern when a plain term is not specific enough.
- Page exclusion skips visible-content review for a matching URL or path, such as /legal/*.
- Page locale sets the language used for matching pages, such as en-US or es.
- Vale YAML pack stores one or more offline Vale rule documents separated by
---. Script, action, package, import, and external configuration features are blocked.
Limit where a rule applies
Locale limits a rule to matching language content. CSS Selector limits it to elements such as main h2. Page URL or Path accepts an exact page or a glob such as /services/*. Leave these fields empty when the rule should apply to all visible content for the brand.
Preview, activate, and rerun
- Save the rule as a draft.
- Click Preview. The preview uses retained HTML from a real page in the latest completed crawl and shows matching text and its recorded selector.
- Correct the draft by choosing New version when needed.
- Click Activate after the preview is correct.
- Start a new Website Crawl. A crawl keeps an immutable snapshot and hash of the active rule versions it used.
- Open Spelling & Grammar and filter Issue Type to Brand rule to review the resulting findings.
Version history and evidence
Changing a rule creates a new draft version instead of overwriting the old record. Activating a version retires the previously active version of the same logical rule. Retiring a rule does not delete earlier scan history. Every custom finding records its rule ID, rule key, version, rule hash, crawl rule-set hash, source page, selector, locale, observed text, correction, severity, and local Vale engine version.
LanguageTool and Vale run locally on the Analytics & Beyond server. Brand copy and rule packs are not sent to Gemini or a public proofreading service.