What a good AI mention rate actually looks like across 270 B2B software brands
We ran buyer-intent AI queries across 270 B2B software brands and mapped where their mention rates landed. The median is 20%. A score of 25% puts you at the 60th percentile. A score above 40% puts you in the top 9%. Without knowing where the field sits, any individual score is hard to interpret.
The problem with a raw number
Say your AI mention rate is 22%. Is that good? It depends entirely on what other brands in your category score. A 22% rate in a market where most brands score under 10% is a strong result. The same 22% in a category where the average is 35% is below the pack. The number alone does not tell you where you stand.
We measured mention rates for 270 B2B software brands across three categories: project management software, customer support software, and HR software. Each brand was run against 10 buyer-intent prompts across four web-grounded AI engines. Here is where those 270 brands landed.
The full distribution
| Mention rate band | Brands | Share of field | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 0% (never mentioned) | 23 | 8.5% | |
| 1 to 10% | 36 | 13.3% | |
| 11 to 20% | 77 | 28.5% | |
| 21 to 30% | 73 | 27.0% | |
| 31 to 40% | 48 | 17.8% | |
| Above 40% | 13 | 4.8% |
What your score actually means
The distribution lets you place any individual result on a map. Here is how common benchmarks translate to field position:
| Mention rate | Percentile | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| 0% | Bottom 9% | No AI foothold at all. Not an edge case: 23 brands in this study are here. |
| 10% | Bottom 22% | Showing up rarely. Most buyer queries return no mention. |
| 20% | Median (50th) | The most common single result. Exactly average for the field. |
| 25% | 60th percentile | Slightly above average. Beating 60% of comparable brands. |
| 30% | 67th percentile | In the top third. Solidly above the median cluster. |
| 40% | 91st percentile | Top 9% of brands. Showing up in most buyer-intent queries. |
Where most brands actually lose ground
The large cluster in the 11-30% band (55% of brands) is not necessarily underperforming. These brands appear in some AI answers and are invisible in others. What they share is that they are reaching a generic buyer-intent audience unevenly: they show up when a query is framed a certain way, or when a particular engine is queried, but they do not show up reliably.
The distinction that separates the 11-30% cluster from the brands above 40% is not usually content volume. It is coverage on the sources that AI engines weight most heavily for the specific query type. A brand at 20% mention rate typically has some presence on comparison sites and directories but is not the primary recommendation in any of them. A brand at 40% is consistently recommended first or second on the pages the engines actually retrieve.
The brands at 0-10% fall into two patterns. Some have no editorial presence at all. Others have a presence on the wrong pages: content that exists but does not appear in the sources these AI engines are retrieving for buyer-intent questions in their category.
The tail at the top is thin
Only 13 of the 270 brands in this study exceed 40% mention rate. These are not necessarily the largest or most funded companies. They are the brands that have built consistent, high-authority coverage in the exact editorial sources the AI engines retrieve for buyer-intent queries in their category. For project management software, that is a set of comparison roundups and editorial directories. For customer support, a similar but different set. Getting onto those sources in a primary position is what moves a brand from the median cluster into the thin top tier.
The gap between 30% and 40% is also meaningful. Moving from the 67th to the 91st percentile requires consistently appearing in one additional high-weight source, not a broad content marketing campaign. The improvement is targeted, not volumetric.
Why average is not the goal
The median brand at 20% mention rate is showing up in 2 of every 10 buyer-intent queries. A buyer asking an AI assistant which tool to use gets 8 responses that name a competitor. If that buyer is in a competitive category like project management software, they are likely hearing about Asana, ClickUp, or Jira in those 8 responses. The median brand is present but not prominent.
For a category where AI search is starting to drive meaningful traffic and lead volume, median is losing ground relative to the handful of brands above 40%. The field is moving. A 20% mention rate today is defensible; in a year it will be the low end as the brands investing in GEO now gain compounding advantage.
We measure your brand's mention rate across four AI engines, benchmark it against your competitor set, and break down exactly which sources are driving the gap. The audit shows where you are in the distribution and what it would take to move up.
Get the AI Visibility Audit, $490Methodology note
270 B2B software brands were measured in June 2026 using live, search-grounded AI endpoints: ChatGPT (OpenAI Responses API with web search), Gemini (with grounding), Perplexity (Sonar), and Claude (with web search). Each brand received 10 buyer-intent prompts generated for its specific category. Mention scoring used automated word-boundary matching against the brand name. Branded queries and research-intent queries were excluded. All results reflect organic buyer-intent behavior only.