How to read your mention rate (and when to worry)

Once you've run a few scans, you'll have a mention rate per prompt per platform: how often that AI's answer named your site when asked that question. It's tempting to want this at 100% everywhere. That's not the right bar.

Some prompts are inherently broad — 'what's the best tool for X' will pull in several answers, and no single product owns all of them. What matters more than any single number is the trend and the comparison.

Trend: is your mention rate on a given prompt going up, flat, or down over successive weekly scans? A steady decline usually means a competitor's content or positioning has gotten clearer where yours hasn't.

Comparison: if you've added competitors, look at the side-by-side ranking table. Being mentioned less often than a specific named competitor on a specific prompt is a much more actionable signal than an abstract percentage.

Platform spread also matters. It's common to see a real gap between platforms — mentioned reliably by one, rarely by another. That's a clue about where a model's training data or retrieval behavior differs, not a bug in the tracking.