Your brand appearing by name in the readable text of an AI answer: a generation outcome that leans on the model's prior more than on which pages were grounded, and the one that carries commercial weight.
A mention is your brand appearing by name in the body of an AI answer, the part the user reads. It is a generation outcome, decided as the model writes the text, and it is distinct from a citation, which attributes a source rather than naming a brand.
A mention leans on the model's prior, what it already holds about who matters for a topic, more than on which pages landed in the grounding set. A brand can be mentioned without being cited, when the name comes from the model's memory rather than from retrieval. A brand can be cited without being mentioned, when its page supplied the evidence and a competitor is the name in the text.
The mention carries the commercial weight, because the reader forms an impression from the sentence that names a brand, not from the source list beneath it. A recommendation is a stronger mention: every recommendation is a mention, though not every mention is a recommendation. The mention is harder to move than a citation, because the prior shifts little in response to a single page.
A mention in the answer can itself be linked or unlinked. An unlinked mention is the brand named in plain text, the name and nothing more. A linked mention is that same name rendered as a clickable link, usually to the brand's own page. Both name the brand in the readable text, so both are mentions rather than citations, but the linked form also hands the reader a way through to you, while the unlinked form works on impression alone.
Full article: Grounding Source ≠ Citation ≠ Mention.
