Brand Mention Rate
Brand mention rate is the percentage of AI answers, across a defined prompt set, in which your brand appears at all. It is the top of the AI visibility funnel: before you can be recommended or accurately described, you must be mentioned. A low rate usually signals weak entity presence and citations rather than negative sentiment.
Mention rate is the bluntest AI visibility metric, and that is its use: it separates 'AI doesn't know we exist for this question' from 'AI knows us but prefers someone else'. Those are different problems with different fixes — the first is entity and citation work, the second is positioning and proof.
Measure it against a denominator that matters: category prompts where you should plausibly appear. Including branded prompts ('what is X?') inflates the number without information, since engines almost always mention a brand the user named.
Mention rate becomes most useful when segmented — by engine, by prompt theme, by funnel stage. A brand mentioned in 80% of definitional answers but 20% of 'best for' answers has a recommendation problem masquerading as healthy visibility.
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