Frequently Asked Questions.

30 standard homeowner queries per company (e.g., "best HVAC in Phoenix", "find me a plumber near Boston") run across 4 AI engines: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini. 1 point per engine for being named, 2 points for being named first. Normalized to a 0-100 score across 4 weighted dimensions: citation presence (40%), accuracy (25%), competitive position (25%), structured data health (10%).

Fuzzy token matching with Levenshtein 0.85 fallback. Handles legal-suffix variance (LLC, Inc, & vs "and") and rejects cross-prefix false positives (Sterling Roofing ≠ Sterling Plumbing). Measured precision: 95.2% on a 30-sample hand-labeled test set. Test suite is public.

Quarterly public refresh. Enterprise data feed subscribers get monthly updates with API access. Time-series data goes back to 2024 (reconstructed baselines for 2024-2025, direct measurement for 2026).

Pinned per audit: OpenAI gpt-4o-mini, Perplexity sonar, Anthropic Claude Haiku 4.5, Google Gemini 3.5 Flash. Methodology version (2026.06.1) is captured per audit. When providers release new model versions, score deltas are flagged as engine drift (not business visibility change). Engine drift is publicly visible at mentionedinai.com/engine-health.

Free for the basic audit at mentionedinai.com. Each audit costs Mentioned ~$0.0007 in API tokens (real measurement, not estimate).

Honest answer. We have early signal, not 12 months of attribution data. What we observed across 12 trade contractors who closed AI Visibility gaps over 90 days: median score improvement +3 to +6 points within 30 days of implementing top 3 fixes. One anonymous $3M HVAC contractor scored 24 in Feb 2026, ranked 67 by May. ChatGPT mentions started appearing in service-area searches that previously returned competitors only.

Attribution math: if ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Gemini continue gaining share of local service search (they will), being absent from those answers is a revenue gap that compounds.

What we do not claim: a fixed dollar lift per point. That requires 12+ months of contractor-level data we are actively collecting.

What we do claim: you cannot win in AI search if you are not cited. Mentioned tells you where you stand against 137 other audited businesses. The fixes are mechanical, public, and free to implement.

15-25 seconds wall-clock for a real audit. Mock audits return instantly (no API calls).

Yes. Every audit is public by default. Each audit creates a permanent /score/<token> URL and a shareable badge. Top 10 per (trade, metro) appears in the public benchmark.

Citation precision is 95.2% measured on hand-labeled responses. Confidence intervals on lift predictions use Student's t-distribution at low N (not magic numbers). Methodology caveats are published in every report - we disclose what's measured vs heuristic.

Yes. CC-BY-4.0 license. Attribution required: "Source: Mentioned - 2026 AI Visibility Index for Trade Contractors. mentionedinai.com/benchmark." Full reprint, modification, commercial use all permitted.

CSV: mentionedinai.com/benchmark.csv. JSON: mentionedinai.com/benchmark.json. Includes 3-year trend, correlation table, methodology metadata.

(1) Trade-specific (HVAC/plumbing/electrical/roofing) vs generic. (2) Free tier, no card. (3) Open methodology + open dataset (CC-BY-4.0) vs blackbox. (4) Ships a fix engine, not just a score. (5) Publisher self-discloses own score (we scored 30.8). (6) Engine reliability is publicly visible.

Founded and operated by Nick Beyer. About page →

30.8/100 on our own methodology. Same bracket as the median operator on the index we publish. We disclose it explicitly on the benchmark page and re-audit ourselves quarterly. The publisher is excluded from the public leaderboard to avoid neutrality bias.

Yes. Mentioned (the publisher) and one private operator-client engagement (Horizon HVAC) are filtered to avoid conflict of interest. Filtered businesses are listed at /api/benchmark-debug for transparency.

For trade publications and major business outlets only. Contact press@mentionedinai.com with publication name + intended publish date. We currently coordinate with 5 trade pubs on a Tuesday June 3 release. Limited additional embargo slots available.

Yes - 3 lengths (25, 50, 80 words), all attributable to Nick Beyer. See press kit.

Yes. Trade-specific, regional, dealer-network analysis, SaaS-vs-customer breakdowns all available with 4-hour turnaround. Contact press@mentionedinai.com.