Mention Rate (Visibility Rate)
Mention rate, also called visibility rate, is the percentage of AI answers to a tracked set of buying questions that name your business, calculated per engine over repeated runs, so it measures how reliably an engine recommends you.
Also known as: Visibility rate, AI mention rate, Recommendation rate
Mention rate is the core AI visibility metric. Take a set of questions your customers ask, run each one many times on an engine, and count the share of answers that name you. If ChatGPT names your dental practice in 6 of 15 answers on a given day, your ChatGPT mention rate that day is 40%. Do the same on each engine separately, and you have a picture of where you're visible and where you're invisible.
The rate has to be built from repeated runs because AI answers vary. Ask ChatGPT for a roofer in Tulsa five times and you may get four overlapping lists and one that's completely different. A single run is a coin flip; a rate over dozens of runs is a measurement. It also has to be split per engine. Profound found ChatGPT and Perplexity share only 11% of cited domains, so a blended rate across engines hides the fact that you might be strong in one and absent in another.
Realistic starting numbers are low. SOCi's 2026 Local Visibility Index, which measured 350,000-plus locations of multi-location brands rather than independent businesses, found ChatGPT recommended just 1.2% of local brand locations, versus 11% for Gemini, 7.4% for Perplexity, and 35.9% for the Google local 3-pack. Those are big brands with marketing teams. If your first scan comes back near zero, you're in the majority, not behind.
For a small business, mention rate is the number to watch over weeks, not days. It moves when the sources engines read about you change: a new service page that states pricing plainly, a fixed listing, a batch of recent reviews. It doesn't move because you asked ChatGPT once and it happened to name you. Track the trend, per engine, per question, and treat one-day swings as noise.
Tibly calculates mention rate from daily runs of your generated prompts across seven engines, showing it per engine and per question so you can see which buying questions you own and which you're missing. The free report at /ai-visibility gives you a baseline before you commit to anything.
Keep exploring the glossary
- Brand Mention (AI answer)In an AI answer, a brand mention is any instance where the engine names your business in its response, with or without a link, distinct from a citation, which is a source the engine used and may not be yours.
- Share of Voice (AI)AI share of voice is the percentage of tracked AI answers that name your business instead of a competitor's, measured per engine and across repeated prompts, since a single AI answer isn't a reliable sample.
- Answer ShareAnswer share is the percentage of AI answers to a tracked set of questions in which your business appears at all, counted once per answer, unlike share of voice, which is your percentage of all business mentions across those answers.
- Prompt VolumePrompt volume is the number of times a buying question gets asked across an AI engine in a measurement, and it needs to be high enough, repeated over time and across engines, to produce a share-of-voice reading you can trust.
Common questions about Mention Rate (Visibility Rate)
- What's a good mention rate for a local business?
- Nobody has published a benchmark for independent local businesses. The closest data, SOCi's 2026 index of multi-location brands, found ChatGPT recommended 1.2% of locations and Gemini 11%. Any rate above zero on a buying question in your city is ahead of most competitors; the goal is a rising trend, not a magic number.
- How is mention rate different from share of voice?
- Mention rate asks: of all answers, what share named me? Share of voice asks: of all businesses named across those answers, what share of the mentions were mine? You can have a high mention rate but low share of voice if every answer names you alongside eight competitors.
- Why does my mention rate change day to day?
- AI answers aren't deterministic, and engines re-retrieve sources on every run. Small daily swings are normal. Look at the weekly trend per engine instead. A sustained move, up or down, usually traces to a change in what the engine can find about you.