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.
Full article: Grounding Source ≠ Citation ≠ Mention.
