If you manage a brand’s published coverage, you need to identify relevant mentions and the descriptions that require attention. What this report finds depends on the names you enter, the sources it reads, and how old each result is. Check all three before you report coverage or write to a publisher.
Enter the names buyers use
Organizations holds the brand names and hosts used to label results. Put in product names, former names, common abbreviations, and the spellings people get wrong.
Most reports apply their labels when the report is drawn, so a name added today changes how your existing history reads. No new collection needed.
Google AI Mode is the exception. Its mention extraction runs off the tracked names, so an organization you never entered cannot show up there as a detected brand. Enter your names before the collection runs, not after you notice the gap.
An ambiguous name will match other companies
If your brand is a common word, or shares a name with businesses in other sectors, the report will return them. Read the page before recording anything as coverage. Then narrow the tracked phrase, instead of reading past the same noise every week.
Capabilities that are not here
No social listening. Social platforms and review sites are not read. If what you need to know about is a complaint posted at nine in the morning, buy a listening platform.
No sentiment scoring. Mentions come back with their context so a person can read them. Nothing labels one positive or negative.
No demographics and no anomaly detection. Nothing profiles who is talking, and nothing raises a flag when the volume moves.
Coverage timing, and the mistake it causes
The News Index reaches this month and last month. It tells you what is being published now and it is not an archive. Keep your own copy of anything you will need to cite later.
The bigger problem is the two dates. When a page was found and when it was published can sit eighteen months apart, and today's report shows you both without insisting you look.
Check the published date before writing to a publisher about coverage you are calling recent. Describing an old article as new tells them a tool found it, and no single mistake damages these relationships faster.
What to do with a mention
Your best row is a factual error or an out-of-date description. Those pages sit there for years, get cited by other pages and by AI answers, and the old fact outlives the thing it described. Correction requests are short and they land.
Second best is a mention with no link. Easiest link request there is, because the publisher already decided to name you.
How you appear in AI answers
Tracked prompts show whether ChatGPT, Gemini and Google AI Mode name your brand, and which sources those answers cite.
Read the wording, not the count. A business named as too expensive for the job still counts as an appearance, and putting that in a report as a recommendation falls apart the moment somebody opens the answer.
The cited sources are pages being used to answer your buyers. Go through them for placement opportunities and for descriptions that need correcting.
When deciding on a response, retain the passage and verified business facts so the request addresses a specific issue.
See brand monitoring, what source coverage changes, or AI Brand Mentions.