Mention rate
The share of AI answers for your tracked prompts that mention your brand at least once.
Mention rate is the simplest AEO metric and often the most sobering. It ignores where you appear and whether you're linked. It asks one thing: when buyers ask these questions, how often does your name come up?
How Elite Answers calculates it
In Elite Answers, mention rate is the number of answers that mention the brand divided by all answers in the window. A brand counts as mentioned when any of its names, aliases or domains appears in the answer text, matched on word boundaries and ignoring case. Text inside URLs doesn't count.
Say you track 20 prompts on six engines: 120 answers. If 42 of them mention you, your mention rate is 35%.
Using mention rate
- Slice it by engine. A brand can be a regular in Perplexity and a stranger in Gemini.
- Slice it by topic to find the questions you're absent from.
- Compare it with competitors, or switch to share of voice for the relative view.
- Pair it with average position. Being mentioned last beats not being mentioned, but not by much.
Somewhere, right now, an AI is recommending your client's competitor.
Elite Answers is invite-only. Request access through Elite Digital and the team will set you up.