What is Mention Rate?
Mention Rate is the percentage of prompt runs in which your brand is mentioned at least once. If Mentova ran your brand's prompts 100 times across selected models and your brand appeared in 35 of those responses, your Mention Rate is 35 %.
It answers the simplest possible question: "Does AI even know I exist on this topic?"
How Mentova computes it
For every completed prompt run, Mentova records which brands were mentioned. The Mention Rate for your brand is then:
Mention Rate = (runs where your brand appeared) ÷ (total completed runs) × 100
Each individual model run counts as one unit. If you selected 3 models for a campaign with 10 prompts, that is 30 total runs. Your Mention Rate reflects how many of those 30 runs included your brand name.
Mention Rate vs Share of Voice
These two metrics are complementary but measure different things:
| Metric | Question answered |
|---|---|
| Mention Rate | How often do I appear at all? |
| Share of Voice | When brands are mentioned, how often is it me vs competitors? |
Example: your Mention Rate may be 20 % (you appear in one in five responses) while your Share of Voice is 60 % (when brands are mentioned, you take most of the space). This can happen on niche topics where AI models only occasionally bring up brands, but when they do, yours leads.
How to use it
- Benchmark over time - a rising Mention Rate after publishing new content or acquiring backlinks signals improved AI visibility.
- Per-model breakdown - low Mention Rate on a specific model (e.g. Gemini) while strong on others often points to a content or citation gap on the sources that model trusts.
- Threshold alert - configure a Mention Rate alert in Settings → Alerts to be notified when your rate changes by more than 5 percentage points between campaigns.
Common pitfall
A Mention Rate of 0 % does not always mean the brand is truly unknown - it can also mean the prompts chosen for that topic do not naturally invite brand recommendations. Review your topic and prompt wording if the baseline is unexpectedly zero.