The base metric of AI visibility: what share of AI answers actually name your brand. How the number is worked out, how it maps onto SEO, whether yours is any good, and what to do when it’s low.
Search optimisation had one question at its centre: where do you rank? AI answers don’t have a ranking. They hand back a shortlist of two or three names, and you are either on it or you aren’t.
AI mention rate is the measure of that: the share of AI answers about your market that actually name your brand. It is the base metric of AI optimisation — placement, sentiment and share of voice all assume you were named in the first place.
Every run puts your 15 tracked prompts to five models — ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity and Grok — and counts the answers that named you. No weighting, no proprietary score, no credit for prominence: a blunt number is one you can argue with.
You don’t write the prompts. You describe the business once — what you sell, where, who to — and the tracker drafts the fifteen questions your buyers ask, which you edit before anything runs.
Two rules decide what counts as a mention:
If you’ve run an SEO programme, most of the instincts carry over:
The last row is where the analogy breaks, and it is why the card plots five lines: a search engine gave you one result page to work on, AI visibility gives you five that disagree — and predictably so. On Aug 3 above, Gemini named Northwind in 67% of its answers and Grok in 20%: same brand, same fifteen questions, same day. The models don’t read the same internet — some search the live web and cite as they answer, others reply from training data — so a lagging line is usually a sourcing problem with a name, not noise.
The quieter break is the row above — rankings reward your page, AI answers reward the reference. Models name brands they find corroborated in sources they already trust, very rarely your own homepage. Call it AIO, GEO or AEO; the job is the same: earn the citations, then measure whether the models started naming you.
There is no universal benchmark, and anyone quoting you one is guessing. The number depends almost entirely on how broad your prompt set is — fifteen narrow questions about your speciality score high, fifteen about the whole category score low. Same brand, same day, different number. So a mention rate is only meaningful against itself, and two comparisons carry real information:
And read the trend, not the pill. Across 75 answers one answer is worth 1.3 points, so the “▲ 4 pts” above is three answers changing their minds. These models aren’t deterministic — ask twice, get two slightly different shortlists. Three runs moving the same way is a signal; one run is weather.
Mention rate follows citations, and citations are earned off your own site. That is the whole method:
None of that needs our software. What the tracker adds is which prompt to start on, what the winners cited, and whether any of it worked — the part you can’t do by asking ChatGPT about yourself a few times. The longer version of this method, including the tactics that don’t work, is in how to show up when someone asks ChatGPT for a recommendation.
The share of AI answers that name your brand. Mention Tracker puts 15 prompts to five models each run, counts the answers that named you, and divides: 38 of 75 is 51%.
There is no universal benchmark, and anyone quoting you one is guessing — the number depends almost entirely on how broad your prompt set is. Only two comparisons mean anything: you last month, and your competitors on the same prompts.
Because they don’t read the same internet. Some models search the live web and cite as they answer; others reply from training data. In one run of the demo tracker Gemini named the brand in 67% of its answers and Grok in 20% — same brand, same fifteen questions, same day. That is why the chart plots one line per model rather than a single blended score: the blend is the headline, but the gaps between the lines are what you can act on.
No. Mention rate asks whether you were named at all; share of voice compares how often against your competitors on the same prompts. You can hold a healthy mention rate and still be losing share of voice.
Weekly. The tracker re-runs your whole prompt set across every model, and the card gains one point per sweep — which is why movement reads run over run, not day to day.
Two names for one job. AI optimisation (AIO), generative engine optimisation (GEO) and answer engine optimisation (AEO) all describe getting your brand named and cited inside AI answers, rather than ranked on a page of links.
Fifteen prompts, five models, tracked every week — with the losing prompts listed worst first, and the sources the winners cited.