How to track your brand's mentions across AI assistants

Build the question set first

The most common mistake is tracking flattering questions ("what is <your brand>?") instead of buying questions ("best <category> for <use case>"). The first kind you almost always win; the second kind is where customers actually are. Build a list of 10–30 questions your buyers genuinely ask, in their words:

• "Best X for Y" comparisons in your category — the money queries.
• Problem-phrased questions ("how do I stop AI traffic showing as direct") where your product is one honest answer.
• Alternative-seeking questions ("alternatives to <big competitor>") where challengers get discovered.
• Localized variants if you sell in multiple markets — engines answer differently per language and country.

Record more than yes/no

"Mentioned" alone hides most of the signal. For each question and engine, worth recording:

• Mentioned vs cited: named in the text is good; your URL linked as a source is better — they move independently.
• Position: named first among three brands is a different outcome than named last with a caveat.
• Who won instead: the competitors and sources in the answers you lose are your roadmap.
• Sentiment and accuracy: engines sometimes describe products wrongly; catching a wrong claim early matters as much as a missing mention.
• Which domains the engine cited: that source list tells you where answers come from — and where you need presence.

Manual vs automated

Manual works at small scale: a spreadsheet, 10 questions, two engines, once a month — an hour of honest work that beats total blindness. It stops scaling fast: 20 questions × 7 engines × weekly is 140 checks, and single-run sampling wobbles enough that you'll want repeated samples per question — that's automation territory.

Whatever you use, hold it to the honesty bars from this guide: multi-run sampling (not one-shot answers), mentioned-vs-cited kept distinct, per-engine breakdowns (a Bing proxy is not ChatGPT), and no guaranteed-placement promises. Promvia runs this loop across seven engines with those exact rules — that's the product — but the rules matter more than the vendor.

Close the loop with money

Mentions are a means. The loop closes when you connect them to visits and revenue: track which AI assistants send traffic (including the share hiding in "Direct" — see our guide), attribute conversions to the assistant that drove them, and compare against your mention trend. When mentions rise and attributed revenue follows, you have the paired trend that makes the case for the channel — to yourself, your team, or an acquirer.

Frequently asked questions