Brand Mentions vs. Citations
The difference between mentions and citations and how to filter between them.
Most AI visibility tools combine brand mentions and citations into a single number. Traqer separates them because they are fundamentally different.
A brand mention means an LLM recommended your brand by name in its answer. That's what drives leads. A citation means your URL showed up as a source link at the bottom of the response. That's useful, but it's not a recommendation.
When you combine them, your visibility numbers get inflated. You might see 40% visibility on a topic and think you're doing well, but if most of that is citations and not brand mentions, you're not actually being recommended. You're just being cited. There's a big difference.
Traqer has a toggle at the top of every brand page and the All Brands overview page that lets you switch between:
Brand — visibility based only on brand mentions (the metric that matters most for generating business)
Citations — where LLMs are citing your content as a source
Both — the combined view
When you switch, every metric on the page updates accordingly: visibility percentages, counts, graphs, and topic-level numbers all reflect the filter you've selected.
If you're an agency managing multiple brands, the All Brands page also has this toggle, so you can see mention-only or citation-only visibility across your entire client portfolio at a glance.
Final note: If you see that a brand is named in an answer but Traqer doesn't seem to actually be counting the mention, the LLM is probably using a different form of the name (e.g. "Grow and Convert" vs. "Grow & Convert") You need to add additional variants of your brand name that you also want to track by clicking the edit icon next to the brand name. See Brand Name and Variants.