# BRD-144 — The registered vertical must match the business on the website

> The declared industry vertical must match the business the registered website actually describes.

- **Rule ID:** BRD-144
- **Layer:** Brand (`BRAND`)
- **Checks:** `brand.vertical vs website content`
- **Severity:** HIGH — Rejected by at least one carrier or provider, and a common cause of failure at the rest.
- **When it bites:** Gates approval — get this wrong and registration is refused
- **How it is detected:** AI judgement over the crawled website or policy page
- **Fix type:** Fix the field — a better value in the form clears it
- **Required by:** AWS
- **Applies:** Applies to every 10DLC registration.
- **Canonical URL:** https://ekas.io/rules/10dlc/brand/brd-144/

## Why this rule exists

The vertical is one of the inputs to use-case eligibility and to the trust score, and a reviewer checks it in the cheapest possible way: they open the site and see whether it looks like that kind of business. A mismatch reads as a brand describing itself as something safer than it is, which is a much less charitable reading than the truth — usually that the closest of twenty-three options was chosen quickly.

## How to fix it

Pick the vertical a stranger would choose after thirty seconds on your home page. Where nothing fits well, choose the one covering most of the revenue rather than the most flattering one. Done when the vertical and the site's own description of the business agree.

## Example of a compliant value

```text
vertical: RETAIL for acmecoffee.com, which sells coffee — not HOSPITALITY because there is a café
```

## Notes

BRD-150 checks the value is one of the 23; BRD-151 asks whether it came from the right vocabulary. This rule is the third question: whether it is TRUE of the business, judged against the site.