Is getting mentioned by AI the same as getting recommended?
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A brand might appear frequently in ChatGPT or Perplexity answers, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's being recommended as the best choice.
There's a difference between being listed among several options and being positioned as the solution a buyer should consider.
It's one of the distinctions we're exploring with ReSO AI as we help teams understand their visibility across AI-generated answers.
If you were measuring your brand's AI visibility, would you care more about how often you're mentioned or how often you're actually recommended?
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Sometimes the brand is there in the answer, but it's buried between five other options. That probably makes a difference too.
@junchen_wu Definitely, that is why we track the average position of the brand when mentioned
I'd rather know if ChatGPT actually tells people to use my product than just see it mentioned somewhere in the answer.
@raaed_muggo12Â Of course. But if the prompt says "Best product for..." ChatGPT gives only the brands that it recommends. So even mention in that prompt can be taken as recommendation
Recommended, and measured per question rather than as one overall share. In our test (960 answers from four models to 48 "which X is best" questions) we counted whether the model actually recommended a brand. That tracked closely with how many third-party pages in Google's top 10 mentioned it: about 19% of answers with none of those pages, 71% with six or more.
So next to each recommendation I'd log which pages the model cited. My guess is that a mention without a recommendation often means you're in the sources but not near the top of them, and that's a different fix than not being in the sources at all.
@ksanyokm Agreed. Hence the average position tracking is important. Top 3 is where you would want to be.
@mohit_gupta138Â Agreed on top 3. One caveat from the Google side: in PromoPilot's rank tracker we check positions daily per country and device, because a single average hides where a page actually ranks for a given market.
I'd expect AI answers to need the same split, per model and per market, before an average position tells you much. Do you break it down that way?
Good distinction Swati. mention is simply raw brand awareness, the digital version of being listed in a directory. But it in being recommended that the intent and converrsion happen. If i am measuring AI visibility, recommendation rate is the real KPI that drives pipeline. Mention frequency is just reach. This distinction is critical for Reso AI to address as geo/aio evolves