Surveys under test are often confidential: they name the client's brands, the competitors and the products that are about to launch. When an AI feature sends a page or a questionnaire to a public AI vendor such as OpenAI or Mistral, those names travel with it. With "Pseudonymize brands" switched on for an AI engine, SurveyTester replaces every brand from your Company Dictionary with a stable fake name before the prompt leaves, and puts the real name back into the answer. The vendor sees "Velorin" instead of "Nivea"; you see "Nivea" in the result.
Why brands are the sensitive part
Most survey content is generic: "How often do you buy shampoo?" is no secret. What makes a survey confidential is who it is about. A list of brands tells anyone who reads it which client ordered the study, which competitors they watch and, in a concept test, which product has not been announced yet. Removing the brands removes most of what an outsider could learn from a prompt, while the AI still understands the task: a fake brand name is still a brand name, so testcase generation, survey answering and questionnaire analysis work as before.
Why this is hard without SurveyTester
- Prompts are built automatically. Nobody types them, so nobody can leave the brand names out by hand.
- One survey, many calls. A single test run can send dozens of pages to the AI. Each one would need the same replacements, consistently.
- The answer has to fit the survey again. When the AI picks "Velorin" as the answer, the bot must click "Nivea" on the page. A one-way filter would break the features it is meant to protect.
How it works
- The brands come from your Company Dictionary. Every entry of the type Brand gets a fake name the first time it is needed. Entries of the type Corrected word are not replaced.
- The fake name is stored and never changes. A brand keeps its pseudonym across all projects and over time, so the AI sees a consistent picture, and repeated prompts stay comparable. The same word always gets the same fake name, and two brands never share one.
- The fake names look like brands. They are pronounceable and follow the brand's spelling pattern: "Coca-Cola" becomes a capitalised word, an acronym like "BMW" stays three capital letters.
- The answer gets the real name back, in the spelling the survey used. If the page writes "Coca-cola", the answer says "Coca-cola", so answers still match the categories on the page.
The replacement follows a few rules so it does not change ordinary words:
- Only whole words are replaced: "Axe" is replaced, "taxes" is not.
- Longer entries win: "Coca-Cola Zero" is replaced as one brand, not as "Coca-Cola" plus " Zero".
- A brand that is also an everyday word is only replaced when it is capitalised: "Dove" is replaced, "a dove" is not.
Switch it on for an AI engine
The setting belongs to the AI engine, because whether a vendor may see your brands depends on the vendor. A self-hosted engine in your own data centre does not need it; a public cloud vendor usually should have it.
- Navigate to Administration → AI Engines.
- Click Edit next to the engine, or Add Engine for a new one.
- Tick Pseudonymize brands.
- Save.
Engines from our catalog come with a recommended setting: public cloud vendors on, self-hosted engines off. As long as you do not change the checkbox, the engine follows that recommendation. Custom engines start with the setting off. Engines that pseudonymize show the badge Brands pseudonymized in the engine list.
See the fake names
The Company Dictionary shows the fake name of every brand in the column AI Pseudonym. It is assigned the first time an AI prompt or the dictionary list needs it. You do not set it yourself.
Tip
Add the brands of a new study to the Company Dictionary before the first AI feature runs on it: the client's brands, the competitors and the product names of a concept test. Brands that are not in the dictionary are sent unchanged.
Which AI features are covered
All features that send text to an AI engine: testcase generation (including screenout testcases), answering surveys with AI, questionnaire document analysis, AI text analysis and the AI support of the page parser.
What it does not cover
Pseudonymization is a strong layer of protection, not a guarantee:
- Brands missing from the dictionary are sent as they are. Client names and project code names count too: add them as brands if they should be hidden.
- Misspelled forms that differ from the dictionary entry ("Coca Cola" without the hyphen) are not recognised.
- Images are sent unchanged. A prompt that includes an image, for example a stimulus with a logo, is not pseudonymized at all, because the logo would contradict the fake name in the text.
- Questions about real brand knowledge become impossible: an AI that only sees "Velorin" cannot know what the brand stands for.
Notes
- SurveyTester's own AI request log keeps the real text, so support can still read what was asked.
- Changing the checkbox affects the next AI request. Results that were generated before stay as they are.