Mention Rate
The binary L1 presence metric — the share of answers that mention the brand.
What is mention rate?
Mention rate is the binary presence metric at L1 of the SOV pyramid: the proportion of AI answers that contain at least one mention of the brand. It asks simply whether the brand appears at all.
Mention rate is the floor of the pyramid — the yes/no question every other SOV metric builds on.
For each sampled answer, mention rate records a single bit: did the brand appear at least once, or not? Averaged across a run it becomes the share of answers in which the brand showed up. It is L1 Presence of the SOV pyramid — the most basic signal, and the one that gates everything above it.
Its binary nature is the point. Mention rate does not care how prominently or how often the brand appears within an answer — that is the job of Word Count Share and PWC. By staying binary it gives a clean, robust measure of raw presence that is hard to game and easy to compare across engines and queries.
A low mention rate is the first problem to solve: if the brand is absent from the answer entirely, no amount of prominence tuning helps. Only once presence is established does the loop move up the pyramid to volume (L2) and quality (L3).