AI Mention Rate

AI Mention Rate is the percentage of relevant queries where AI engines mention your brand in any capacity — recommendation, list inclusion, source attribution, or passing reference. It is the floor metric in Machine Relations: before you can optimize for recommendations, you need to confirm that AI engines recognize your brand exists.

Why AI Mention Rate Matters

You cannot be recommended if you are not mentioned. AI Mention Rate answers the most fundamental question in AI-mediated discovery: does the machine know who you are? A surprising number of established brands — companies with strong Google rankings and significant revenue — have AI Mention Rates below 5% in their own category. They are invisible to the fastest-growing discovery channel.

A declining AI Mention Rate signals competitors are displacing your brand in the AI's category association, often months before the impact surfaces in pipeline metrics.

How to Measure AI Mention Rate

1. Define 30-50 queries buyers ask in your category (mix of informational and purchase-intent)
2. Run each query across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and AI Overviews
3. Record whether your brand appears in any form in each response
4. Calculate: Queries With Any Brand Mention / Total Queries = AI Mention Rate

Benchmarks vary by category maturity, but general guidelines hold:

• Below 10% — Critical gap. AI engines do not associate your brand with the category.
• 10-25% — Emerging presence. Foundation exists but coverage is inconsistent.
• 25-50% — Competitive position. Your brand is known but not dominant.
• Above 50% — Category authority. You are a default reference for the category.

How to Increase AI Mention Rate

AI Mention Rate responds to breadth of coverage, not depth. The goal is appearing across as many category queries as possible:

• Diverse earned media — Placements covering different category angles expand your query footprint. AI engines source 82-89% of mentions from third-party publications.
• Entity signal completeness — Ensure entity signals clearly associate your brand with your category across structured data sources
• Topic coverage — Content addressing the full range of category questions, not just your product's sweet spot

AI Mention Rate is the quantity metric. Pair it with Recommendation Rate for quality — together they form the foundation of your AI Visibility Score. Use Citation Gap Analysis to identify the specific queries dragging your mention rate down.