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
Testing across 15 real UK firms in four sectors found one firm dominating AI mentions per sector while several other established, credible businesses never appeared once — mention rate tracks what AI systems have learned to associate with a category, not how good or established a business actually is.