Definition

Brand mention

A brand mention is an occurrence of a brand name inside the body of an AI-generated answer. It is measured by entity extraction over the answer text rather than by counting links.

Mentions matter because a reader takes the recommendation from the sentence, not from the source list. A brand named as the recommended option with no link attached has still won that answer.

In our own measurement, brands are named roughly 2.7 times more often than they are linked, so link-only tracking systematically undercounts presence.

Related terms

Citation Mention rate Citation share

Nostimates measures brand mention across twelve AI answer surfaces. Request access →

All terms

AEO (Answer Engine Optimisation)GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation)AI Overviews AI Mode Citation share n-sampling Query fan-out Grounding Share of voice (AI)Extraction success rate Surface Answer engine Citation Mention rate Confidence interval Statistical significance Citation volatility Non-determinism Reproducibility Identity-free collection Personalisation Locale Residential proxy Bot detection Collection cost Credit Evidence retention Audit trail Parser version Canary prompt Data freshness Cadence Prompt set Head term Long-tail query Competitive set llms.txt robots.txt AI crawler Training crawler Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG)Hallucination Answer box Featured snippet Zero-click search Entity Entity salience Knowledge graph Structured data JSON-LD schema.org FAQ schema Answer-first content Chunk Embedding Semantic search Prompt injection Market coverage Sentiment analysis Position tracking White-label data