Brand Perception

Brand Perception is the first thing you see when a report finishes. It’s built to answer one question in ten seconds: how am I doing? Everything else in the report explains the numbers you see here.

The one-sentence read

At the top sits a single sentence — the TL;DR — followed by your Top 3 Takeaways. This is the report talking to you like a colleague who spent the week in the data. It names the actual problem: who’s shaping the story about you, what’s missing, or where you lose the deciding comparison. It won’t lead with a stat, because the stats are right below it. Read this first. If you read nothing else, read this.

The takeaways are tagged by funnel stage — discovery, evaluation, decision — so you can see whether your trouble is early, when buyers are first learning the category, or late, when they’re about to choose.

The three rings

Below the summary are three donuts. Each one is a separate question, and keeping them separate is the whole point — see Concepts for why one number won’t do.

Mentioned — across all the buyer questions in your audit, how often did the answer engine name your brand at all. This is your floor. The center shows the share of questions where you came up.

Cited as Source — when the engine answered, how often did one of your own pages get pulled in as evidence. This ring splits three ways: cited (your page was used in the answer), considered (your page was read but left out), and not considered (your page wasn’t pulled at all). The gap between considered and cited is where your fastest wins live — those pages already have the engine’s attention.

AI Perception — when the engine does talk about you, is the take positive, neutral, or negative. The center shows the share that’s positive. A high Mentioned number with a low Perception number means you’re getting talked about and it isn’t helping you.

How to use it

Read the three rings together, not one at a time. Mentioned but not cited means other people are telling your story — head to Sources to see who. Cited but flat perception means your pages get read and still don’t make the case — that’s a content problem you’ll work in Actions. Strong everywhere except one topic means you have a specific hole, and Topics & Prompts will show you which one.

Brand Perception tells you what’s wrong. The other four views tell you where and what to do.