An AI brand mention is a named reference to your brand in an AI-generated answer. It's the AI-search equivalent of a press mention — and it's now a leading indicator of category consideration.
Any occurrence of your brand name, product name or tracked alias in the generated answer text. Duplicates within one answer count as one mention on that answer; we track answer-level coverage, not raw hit count.
Mention detection uses a deterministic parser: exact-name match, known aliases (product lines, past company names, common typos) and entity matches for brands that share tokens with common words. Keyword-count-only approaches over-count noisy brand names.
For every prompt in the tracked set, on every engine, on every sampling run: capture the verbatim answer, run the mention parser against your brand + tracked competitors, record one mention per brand per answer. Aggregate to per-prompt, per-engine and pooled mention rates weekly.
Third-party 'best X' and 'X vs Y' pages drive more AI mentions than any other tactic — they're the training and retrieval fuel for category answers.
G2, Capterra, TrustRadius, industry review sites — cite-heavy engines like Perplexity lean on these hard.
'X vs Y' pages you own show up as citations that reinforce named mentions in generated answers.
Named customers, concrete numbers and structured comparisons get extracted verbatim more than brand marketing copy.
Combine mentions with citation share for a full picture, and use share of voice to compare your mention rate against tracked competitors.