Brand Mention
Your brand name appearing in the prose of an AI-generated answer, as distinct from a link to your site.
A brand mention is your brand name, or a spelling of it you track, appearing in the prose of an AI answer. It is the part of the answer a person actually reads: the model wrote your name where the reader will see it.
It is not the same event as a citation. A citation is a URL the answer linked to as a source. The two come apart in both directions. A model can name you without linking to anything of yours, and it can link to your own page as a source without naming you in the text. A tool that labels a count of links as mentions is reporting the wrong event, so when two dashboards disagree, ask which of the two each one counts.
Whaily counts a mention only from the prose. URLs are removed from the answer before any name matching runs, so a link to your site never counts as your name being said, and a name the model puts only in a structured list of recommendations, outside the prose, does not count either. Matching is whole word and case insensitive, built from your company name, the aliases you add, your product names and a name derived from each of your domains, so "Sana" does not match inside "Asana".
A third thing is easy to confuse with both: whether a cited page itself names your brand. That is a fact about the page rather than about the answer, and Whaily records it separately.
Frequently asked questions
- Does a link to my website count as a brand mention?
- No. A link the answer gives as a source is a citation. Whaily strips URLs from the answer before matching names, so a link alone never counts as a mention, and the two are reported as separate numbers.
- What is it called when an AI answer cites my page but does not name my brand?
- Whaily calls it cited without being named: an answer that linked to a page on your own domain as a source and did not say your name in its prose. It is shown as a list of those answers and, from five cited answers up, as a rate.
Related terms
Whaily turns this from theory into measurement: which brands AI names in your category, and which sources shape those answers, tracked across ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity.