Every entry below follows the same shape: the term, a one-sentence definition, a one-sentence example. The format is deliberate. Definitions structured this way get lifted cleanly into AI answers, and they give your team one stable place to point when a report or a vendor demo uses a word loosely. Each term carries its own anchor link, so you can reference a single definition directly. These definitions match the ones used across our guides; when another page on this site says mention, it means what this page says it means.
The objects: what you are counting
Five terms describe the things a tracking program collects. The distinctions sound fussy until money hangs on them: a team that files unlinked mentions under "unbranded" builds the wrong term list, and a team that cannot tell a citation from an ordinary mention will underinvest in exactly the coverage AI engines quote.
1. Brand mention
A brand mention is any reference to your company, product, or people anywhere online, with or without a link. Example: a Reddit comment saying a team switched to your product last quarter is a brand mention, and so is a line naming you inside a ChatGPT answer.
2. Unlinked mention
An unlinked mention names your brand without hyperlinking to your site, which makes it invisible to your analytics while remaining fully visible to buyers. Example: "we dropped [vendor] over the pricing change" in a forum post is an unlinked mention; no referral report will ever record it.
3. Unbranded mention
An unbranded mention is a conversation your brand belongs in that never says your name, such as a category question or a competitor comparison. Example: a thread asking for the best brand monitoring tool for B2B teams is an unbranded mention of every vendor it omits, covered in depth in our branded vs. unbranded guide.
4. Citation
A citation is a mention doing authority work: linked as a source by a publication or quoted by an AI engine composing an answer. Example: when Perplexity cites a review roundup that names your product, that roundup just became a citation, and its opinion of you became quotable.
5. Mention source
A mention source is the platform, site, or engine where a mention appears, and source quality matters more than source quantity. Example: a 4,000-subscriber subreddit where your buyers ask for recommendations is a more valuable mention source than a national site those buyers skim.
The measurements: how you score the feed
The measurement layer boils the collected feed down to five numbers. Every monitoring dashboard displays some version of them, and each one misleads in a specific way when read alone, which is why the section after the definitions covers how they combine.
6. Mention volume
Mention volume is the count of brand mentions collected across your tracked sources in a given period. Example: a jump from 300 to 340 monthly mentions is volume growth, and whether that is good news depends entirely on what sentiment says.
7. Mention velocity
Mention velocity is the speed at which mentions accumulate, measured as the rate of change rather than the total. Example: forty mentions in a month is a calm baseline; forty in an afternoon is a velocity spike that should page somebody before the evening.
8. Mention sentiment
Mention sentiment is the positive, negative, or neutral scoring of what a mention's author meant, rather than merely which words they used. Example: "another flawless release, guys" posted under a bug thread scores negative when the reader is a language model, and positive when it is a keyword matcher.
9. Mention reach
Mention reach estimates how many people are likely to see a given mention, based on the source's audience and the post's traction. Example: a complaint with 12 upvotes has modest reach today, while the same thread ranking on Google for your brand name compounds its reach for years.
10. Share of voice
Share of voice is your brand's portion of all mentions across a tracked set of brands, usually you plus your main competitors. Example: if the market produced 1,000 mentions of the four vendors you track and 320 named you, your share of voice is 32%, a number that means little until you watch its trend.
The operations: what you do about it
The last five terms describe what happens after collection, which is where tracking programs either earn their subscription or quietly die. In our experience the operational vocabulary is the least standardized of the three groups; two vendors saying "alert" can mean a real-time page and a daily email, and the difference matters at 2 a.m. on launch day.
11. Mention alert
A mention alert is a notification fired when a new mention matches rules you set, ideally rules keyed to urgency rather than volume. Example: a negative spike in r/saas triggers an immediate Slack ping, while a neutral blog mention waits quietly for Friday's digest.
12. Verified mention
A verified mention has been confirmed to refer to your brand rather than a same-named entity, a filtering step called disambiguation. Example: a tracker for a company called Swan drowns in noise without verification; the verified feed keeps the fintech mentions and drops the waterfowl.
13. Negative mention
A negative mention is one scored as critical of your brand, and it carries more operational weight than any other type because the response window is short. Example: a pricing complaint gaining traction is worth answering within hours, while the thread still has a dozen upvotes rather than ten thousand.
14. Mention routing
Mention routing is the assignment of each mention to the team that can act on it, which is the step that separates tracking from decoration. Example: the support complaint goes to support, the feature request goes to product, and the journalist's mention goes to comms, each with its own response window.
15. AI mention
An AI mention is your brand named inside an AI-generated answer from an engine like ChatGPT or Perplexity, earned through the consensus of your other mentions. Example: when Perplexity lists your product among three options for a category question, that AI mention shapes the buyer's shortlist before your website gets a visit; our AI search visibility guide covers how to measure and move it.
Reading the numbers together
No metric on this page means much alone, and the misreads are predictable. Volume rises during a crisis and during a great launch, so volume without sentiment is a rumor. Velocity is the alarm system: the same forty mentions read completely differently at different speeds, which is why spike detection matters more than monthly totals. Share of voice adds the market context that volume lacks; your mentions can grow 20% in a quarter where the category grew 60%, which is a decline wearing a growth costume.
The combination we watch first across customer accounts is velocity plus sentiment. A fast-moving negative cluster is the one pattern that costs real money by Friday. Everything else on this page can wait for the weekly review; that one cannot, and it is the reason brand monitoring tools exist as products rather than spreadsheets.
For reporting, four of the fifteen carry the monthly narrative: volume, sentiment ratio, share of voice, and the count of negative mentions answered inside their response window. That last one is the honest metric, because it measures behavior rather than weather. Velocity belongs in the alerting layer rather than the report, and reach is best treated as a tiebreaker when two mentions compete for the same response hour. Resist the urge to report all fifteen; a dashboard with four numbers gets read.
A note for content and SEO teams
Each term above has a stable anchor (this page's URL plus, for instance, #mention-velocity), and the definitions here are the canonical versions used across every Mentient guide. If you are building content that touches this vocabulary, link into the anchor rather than re-defining the term; engines reward one consistent definition far more than fifteen slightly different ones scattered across a blog. That consistency is also, not coincidentally, how a brand becomes the entity AI engines associate with a category's vocabulary. When a definition needs to change, change it here first and let every linking page inherit the update.
