A ChatGPT mention is a single answer in which ChatGPT names a specific brand, business or product. It is the unit behind every AI visibility metric: visibility counts the questions with at least one mention, share of voice divides a brand's mentions by all brand mentions, and sentiment describes how the mention reads. A mention can come with a citation (a link to the brand's own page) or without one.

Since November 2026, OpenAI's Business Hub reports mentions to claimed businesses. For a local business, a mention is the business's location being shown in an answer; for an online business, its website being referenced. The counts cover 7 or 28 days, appear only above a threshold OpenAI does not publish, and never include the prompts, so they show a trend but not which questions were won or lost.

An AI visibility scan measures mentions the other way round: it asks a fixed list of buyer questions and records, for each one, whether the brand was named, who else was, and which pages were cited. In SEOmatic's scans of 693 local questions, ChatGPT mentioned the business asked about in 19% of answers, and the median answer named 5 businesses. See the data.