AI search
How to Track Brand Mentions in AI Answers
A repeatable workflow for recording brand mentions, citations and competitor names across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and other AI engines.
By Starry Research Labs · Published and reviewed
What counts as a brand mention in an AI answer?
A brand mention appears when the answer names your company, product or one of the spelling variants you track. A citation appears when the answer links to a URL on your domain. Record them in separate fields.
The two often appear together, but they do not have to. An answer can name you without linking to your site. It can also link to your site while recommending another product. Treating every link as a mention, or every mention as a citation, hides the difference you need to act on.
Keep the engine, prompt, market, date and the sentence where the name appears. Without those fields, two answers that look similar cannot be compared later.
Which prompts should you track?
Start with five to twenty questions a buyer would actually ask. Keep the set fixed so each run measures the same thing. A new prompt adds a new question; it does not extend the history of the old one.
- A discovery question that asks for options without naming your brand.
- A problem question about the job your product completes.
- A comparison question with a real constraint, such as price, market or team size.
- A brand question that asks how the engine describes your product.
How do you build a baseline you can repeat?
Run the same prompt set in each engine and store the raw answer with its links. One answer is a sample, not a rate. Repeat the set weekly for four weeks before you describe a trend.
Mark an engine error as missing data. Do not count it as zero mentions. The same rule applies when an answer is cut off or contains no source links: record what happened instead of filling the gap.
Our free checker counts name and domain matches in answers you paste. It does not run the engines. Starry Monitor runs the prompts on a schedule and keeps each answer with its evidence.
What should you change after the baseline?
Fix observable access problems first. Check for a blocked crawler, a wrong canonical, a missing description or a page that never answers the prompt. Then improve the page that should carry the answer.
Re-run the same prompts and compare the new answers with the baseline. Keep mentions, citations, visits and signups in separate columns. A mention is not a citation, a citation is not a click, and a click is not revenue.
Sources and method
External references were reviewed for this guide. Examples and tool workflows are our own. The launch audit records our public website observations, with no ranking or citation claim.