Hawkscan

Mention rate

Mention rate is an AI visibility metric that measures the share of AI answers that name a brand. It divides the answers from ChatGPT, Gemini, Microsoft Copilot or Google AI Mode that mention the brand by all the answers checked, for the same prompts and period.

Why mention rate matters

Mention rate is the AI metric that best survives the randomness of each answer. SparkToro and Gumshoe had volunteers run the same prompts 60 to 100 times each and found that the lists of brands almost never came back identical. Presence, however, was stable enough to measure: when Google's AI was asked to recommend digital marketing consultants with e-commerce expertise, the agency Smartsites appeared in 85 of 95 responses. Rand Fishkin, who started the study as a skeptic, concluded that "visibility % across dozens to hundreds of prompts run multiple times is a reasonable metric".

How mention rate works

Mention rate counts answers, not mentions: a brand named three times in one answer still counts once.

  1. Pick the prompts your buyers ask, such as "best payroll software for a restaurant".
  2. Run each prompt on each engine, several times over the period.
  3. Check each answer for the brand name and its common variants.
  4. Divide the answers that name the brand by all the answers checked.

A mention is not a citation. An engine can name your brand without linking to your site, or link to one of your pages without naming you. The citation rate tracks the links.

Formula

Mention rate = answers that mention the brand ÷ answers checked × 100

Worked example (fictional values). A project management brand tracks 10 prompts on 4 engines, once a day for 7 days: 280 answers. It is named in 98 of them, so its mention rate is 98 ÷ 280 = 35%. On one engine alone, it is named in 35 of 70 answers, a 50% mention rate, which shows where it is strongest. AI share of voice starts from the same answers but divides the brand's mentions by the mentions of all tracked brands.

How Hawkscan calculates it

Hawkscan divides the completed runs in which your brand is mentioned by all the completed runs of the period. A run is one tracked prompt answered once by ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, Gemini or Google AI Mode. A run that fails is excluded, so an engine outage never lowers your rate. The same ratio is shown for each engine and for each prompt.

How to improve your mention rate

Engines name the brands the web already talks about. In an Ahrefs study of 75,000 brands, branded web mentions correlated with AI visibility at 0.66 to 0.71 across ChatGPT, AI Mode and AI Overviews, while link metrics such as the number of backlinks showed very weak correlations.

  • Find the prompts where you are missing and note who is named instead.
  • Get covered in the comparison articles, reviews and forum threads those answers draw on.
  • State plainly on your own pages what you do and who it is for.

Hawkscan tracks your mention rate every day on ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, Gemini and Google AI Mode, with your AI visibility score and average position next to it.

Sources

  1. SparkToro, NEW Research: AIs are highly inconsistent when recommending brands or products; marketers should take care when tracking AI visibility ()
  2. Ahrefs, Top Brand Visibility Factors in ChatGPT, AI Mode, and AI Overviews (75k Brands Studied) ()

Your AI visibility starts here.

Your customers are already turning to AI for recommendations. Hawkscan gives you the full picture, so you always know where you stand and where to grow.