GLOSSARY
Mention rate
- Mention rate
- Mention rate is the percentage of answers across your tracked prompt set in which an engine names your business — whether or not it links or cites you. It's the closest thing AI search has to a rank position, measured per engine because engines rarely agree on who to name.
The metric is deliberately simple: run a fixed prompt set of buyer-intent questions on a schedule, and for each answer record whether your business is named. Forty prompts, fourteen answers naming you: 35% mention rate on that engine, that month. Simplicity is the point — the number has to be repeatable, comparable month over month, and understandable by whoever owns the budget.
Named is not the same as linked, and the distinction matters commercially. An engine can recommend a business by name without citing its site — the recommendation still steers the buyer, invisibly to your analytics. That's why mention rate can't be inferred from referral traffic, and why it pairs with citation share: one measures whether you're in the recommendation, the other whether your pages are the evidence behind it. Divergence between the two is diagnostic — see the citation share entry for the patterns.
Two honesty rules keep the metric useful. Report per engine, never blended — only 11% of domains cited by ChatGPT are also cited by Perplexity (AuthorityTech), so an average across engines hides more than it shows. And hold the prompt set fixed: swapping prompts mid-engagement to flatter the trend is the metric's version of moving the goalposts. There's no universal good number; the benchmark is your baseline and your competitors on the same prompts.