MentionShare is the AEO metric that measures how often AI engines cite your brand. Here is how it works, what a good score looks like, and how to improve yours.
Traditional marketing metrics — traffic, rankings, impressions — tell you what happened on your website. MentionShare tells you what AI engines say about you when your buyers are not on your website.
That distinction matters because 43% of B2B buyers now use AI to research software before visiting a vendor's website. If AI engines are not mentioning your brand in those research sessions, you are invisible at the moment of highest purchase intent.
MentionShare is the metric that quantifies that visibility.
MentionShare measures how often your brand appears in AI-generated answers across a defined set of buyer-intent prompts. TrueCite calculates it by:
The result is your MentionShare score — a single number that represents your share of AI-generated brand mentions in your category.
| Score | Interpretation |
|---|---|
| 0-10% | Minimal AI visibility. Virtually absent from buyer research. |
| 10-25% | Emerging visibility. Cited occasionally but inconsistently. |
| 25-50% | Solid AI presence. Appearing in meaningful buyer research sessions. |
| 50-70% | Strong AI visibility. A top-of-mind brand in AI answers. |
| 70%+ | Dominant AI visibility. Category leader in AI recommendations. |
Most B2B brands start below 10%. The goal of AEO is to systematically move up this scale.
Your overall MentionShare is an average across all engines, but engine-specific breakdowns reveal important patterns:
Your absolute MentionShare matters less than your relative MentionShare. If your MentionShare is 30% but your top competitor's is 60%, you are losing half the buyer research conversations to them.
TrueCite tracks competitor MentionShare alongside yours so you can see exactly how you stack up and identify the specific prompts and engines where competitors outperform you.
The fastest MentionShare improvements come from:
MentionShare is a trend metric — its value is in tracking how it changes month over month. Run TrueCite scans monthly to:
[Measure your MentionShare with TrueCite →](/sign-up)