Mention rate is the share of AI answers, on a set of questions you choose, in which your business is named. Measured over time and across platforms, it is the closest thing AI search has to a ranking.
How you measure something with no results page
There is no list to read, so the measurement has to be made by asking. You choose questions a customer might genuinely ask, they get put to the assistants on a schedule, and the answers are recorded: were you named, were you linked, who else appeared.
One run tells you very little, because these systems are not deterministic and the same question can produce different answers. A rate over many runs and several weeks is the meaningful number, which is why this is a tracking problem rather than a thing you check once.
Choose questions a customer would ask
The most common mistake is tracking your own brand name. Asking an assistant about a business by name almost always produces a mention, and it tells you nothing, because a customer who already knows your name is not the customer you are worried about.
The useful questions are the ones where you are competing to exist: who does this in this place, what is the best option for this situation, what does this cost. Those are the answers that decide whether somebody ever hears of you.
An honest rate counts failures as failures
These are live calls to third-party systems and some of them fail. A tracker that silently counts a failed call as "not mentioned" will show you a decline that never happened, and send you rewriting pages that were never the problem.
We record failed calls as failures and show them as such, which occasionally means a less flattering-looking week. It is the only way the number means anything.
Region changes the answer
Without a location signal, these systems frequently answer about a different country: different prices, different currency, different companies, no local business anywhere in sight. Setting the country per question is what makes the measurement match what your customers actually see.
Where this shows up in the tracker
Every term in this glossary is something the product actually measures or acts on. Plans start at £29 a month, with rank tracking, AI visibility, the daily AI readiness scan, security and domain health, Search Console, backlinks and audits on every one of them.
Related terms
Citation
A citation is when an AI system uses your page as a source for its answer and links to it. It is distinct from a mention, which is when the system names your business without linking to you.
AEO
AEO stands for answer engine optimisation. It is the work of getting your business named and cited when an AI system answers a question, rather than merely ranking on a page of links. The name is new; a good deal of the work is not.
Agent readiness
Agent readiness is a score for how well AI systems can find, fetch and make sense of your website. It covers discoverability, crawler access, machine-readable content and agent capabilities, and it is the first thing to check when you are missing from AI answers.
Share of voice
Share of voice is your visibility across a whole keyword set, weighted by how much each keyword is searched. It shows how much of the available attention in your market you hold, and who holds the rest.