If someone asks ChatGPT for a recommendation in your category and it never says your name, ranking well on Google does not fix that: the two systems retrieve and cite information differently, so a mention rate has to be measured directly against AI answers, not inferred from a search-engine metric.
How it is actually measured
A real mention rate comes from asking a set of realistic buyer questions, branded and unbranded, live against each model, and logging whether the business appears in the verbatim answer. Kelriva's AI Visibility Score runs 8 such questions across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity and shows the actual text, not a synthesised percentage with no evidence behind it.
Why a low number is common even for real, credible businesses
In our own checks, one firm dominated AI mentions in each sector we tested, while most others were never named.