The registered vertical must match the business on the website
The requirementstatement
The declared industry vertical must match the business the registered website actually describes.
- Severityseverity
- HighHIGHRejected by at least one carrier or provider, and a common cause of failure at the rest.
- When it bitesphase
- Gates approvalapprovalGet this wrong and the brand or campaign is refused at registration.
- What is checkedobject
- brand.vertical vs website content
- Where it liveslayer
- BrandBRAND
- How Ekas settles itdetectability
- AI · crawlCRAWL
- Needs your live site or policy page fetched and read. Ekas crawls it the way a reviewer would.
- What the fix involvesfailureClass
- Fix the fieldRETRY_FIELD
- A better value in the form fixes it. Ekas can rewrite it and re-check.
- Who requires itauthorities
- AWS
- When it appliesapplicabilityText
- Applies to every 10DLC registration.
Why this rule existsrationale
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 itremediation
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.
A compliant exampleexample
vertical: RETAIL for acmecoffee.com, which sells coffee — not HOSPITALITY because there is a café
Notesnotes
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.
Rules you will hit next
Other brand rules at the same severity. A registration is judged as a whole, not rule by rule.
BRD-006Submit every name line above the address on a multi-line IRS recordHighHIGHBRD-007TCR takes only the first line of the IRS-registered nameHighHIGHBRD-010Take the legal name from the CP-575 or 147C, never a W-2 or W-9HighHIGHBRD-014An acquired business registers the details it filed taxes underHighHIGHBRD-027EIN must be old enough to have propagated to IRS recordsHighHIGHBRD-034Validate a non-US identifier against its home register before submittingHighHIGH
BRD-144 is one of 196 brand rules in the 915-rule 10DLC registry. Free to cite under CC BY 4.0.