Why it matters
Mention rate answers the simplest question in AI visibility: does the AI know you exist? Before you can optimize for citation position, sentiment, or share of voice, you need to appear in the answer at all. A 0% mention rate on a platform means you are invisible to every user who asks that AI about your category.Formula
prompts_with_brand_mention— number of prompts where the AI mentioned your brand by name (with or without a link)total_tracked_prompts— total number of prompts in your prompt library that were run against this platform
Example calculation
A D2C skincare brand tracks 50 prompts across ChatGPT. In the latest run, ChatGPT mentioned the brand in 18 out of 50 answers.What good looks like
| Range | Rating | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| 0–15% | Poor | AI platforms rarely know you exist for these prompts |
| 15–35% | Below average | Sporadic mentions, likely only for branded or navigational prompts |
| 35–55% | Average | Appearing in a meaningful share of category conversations |
| 55–75% | Good | Strong presence — AI platforms consistently associate you with your category |
| 75–100% | Excellent | Category leader in AI visibility for these prompts |
What changes this metric
- Content volume and freshness — more indexed, recent content increases the chance an LLM has seen your brand
- Editorial coverage — third-party mentions in publications that LLMs cite
- Structured data — schema markup helps LLMs understand what your brand does
- llms.txt — explicitly telling AI crawlers about your site’s key pages
- Prompt specificity — branded prompts will always have higher mention rates than generic category prompts
How Cited measures it
Cited runs each prompt in your prompt library against all tracked AI platforms at regular intervals. Each response is parsed for brand mentions using our extraction pipeline. Mention rate is aggregated daily and reported per-platform and overall.Related concepts
- Citation rate — mentions with a link back to your domain
- Share of voice — your mention rate relative to competitors
- Sentiment — how the AI characterizes your brand when it does mention you
- Non-determinism — why mention rates fluctuate between runs