Definition

Mention rate

Mention rate is the number of sampled answers naming a brand divided by the total number of samples for that prompt, engine and market, reported with a confidence interval.

It is the mention-side equivalent of citation share, and it is usually the more stable of the two because a brand name survives paraphrasing while a specific URL does not.

Reported without a sample size it is meaningless. Nine out of ten and ninety out of a hundred are both 90%, but only one of them supports a decision.

Nostimates measures mention rate 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 Brand mention 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