Getting started
Understand mention rate, share of voice, prominence and citation share — and when a number is solid enough to act on.
Your brand's Overview shows four numbers, each with a range. This page explains what they mean and when they are solid enough to act on.
The four 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 |
| Citation share | How often your domain is the source being cited |
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.
Every number has a range
A result 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.
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 confidence intervals before and after do not overlap.
- 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