Getting started
Understand mention rate, share of voice and prominence — and when a number is solid enough to act on.
Your brand's Overview leads with three numbers. This page explains what they mean and when they are solid enough to act on.
The numbers
| Metric | Answers |
|---|---|
| Mention rate | How often you are named at all |
| Share of voice | How much of the naming goes to you rather than your competitors |
| Prominence | How early in the answer you appear, when you do |
| Named first | How often you are the first of the companies you track that an answer names. It is a column in the competitors table |
A brand named six times in one answer counts once. Counting every occurrence would reward long answers and swing on formatting, so mentions are counted per answer.
By question type
Below the competitors, By question type splits your mention rate by the intent of your prompts: buying, comparing, problem, learning and brand lookup. A good overall rate can hide a weak one on buying questions, the ones that decide a purchase.
Each row shows how many prompts it pools, the mention rate across their answers, and how many of those answers named nobody you track or had no AI answer. A type needs ten answers of its own, so one with few prompts can read insufficient data while the overall rate does not. The table appears once your prompts span two types or more, and not on the free plan, whose single snapshot cannot give each type ten answers.
Sources
The Sources tab lists the sites the answers cite, most-cited first, and whose each one is: yours, a competitor you track, or someone else's — a review site, a forum, a video, Wikipedia or another website.
- Each site's rate is the share of all answers in the window that cite it, with its range. Like every rate, it needs ten answers. An answer citing three pages of one site counts once for that site.
- Answers that cite nothing are in every rate's total and counted on their own. A page can only win the answers that read pages, and ChatGPT often answers from memory.
- Open a site to see its most-cited pages. On a video site they are videos, credited to a company when you or a competitor has named its YouTube channel.
- A site a finding is about links to that finding.
Filter by window, engine or a single question. On the Prompts page, What the answers cite opens this view for that question.
Every rate has a range
A rate reads like 32% (24–41%). The range is a 95% confidence interval: the answers
Shruwd sampled put your true mention rate somewhere in that band.
Read the band, not just the middle. 32% (24–41%) and 32% (10–60%) are the same point
estimate and completely different facts.
Prominence has no range. It is an average position, not a rate.
Insufficient data is not zero
Shruwd never shows a number computed from fewer than ten responses. You will see insufficient data instead.
This shows up most on individual prompts. Each prompt is asked three times per cycle, so a single prompt takes several weeks to clear the threshold — while your prompt set as a whole clears it immediately. A three-run result is noise, and showing it as a number would be worse than showing nothing.
Share of voice moves for two reasons
Share of voice is your mentions as a fraction of all mentions across you and your tracked competitors. It rises when you do better and when a competitor does worse.
Always read it next to mention rate. If share of voice is up and mention rate is flat, nothing about you changed — a competitor lost ground.
When an answer names nobody in your tracked set, it counts toward neither side. Shruwd reports those separately:
- Naming nobody — answers that mention no tracked brand. High across a group of prompts means nobody owns the category yet, which is an opportunity rather than a loss.
- No AI answer — the engine did not produce an AI answer for that prompt. If this is high, the prompt set is the problem, not your visibility.
When a number has actually moved
Week-to-week variation is large. Shruwd only calls a change movement when both of these hold:
- The change is statistically significant: its 95% range does not include zero.
- The change is at least 5 percentage points.
It also corrects for the fact that you are watching many prompts at once — testing dozens of prompts every week would otherwise turn up a few false alarms forever.
If the provider changed its underlying models between two windows, the comparison is marked model changed. The difference may be the model rather than you.
Next steps
- How findings work — turn a number into a fix
- Prompts — what you are measuring
- Competitors — who you are measured against