still can't track brand mentions in ai search - what am i missing?

Run each question a few times too, not just once. The answers change between runs, so one mention can be luck. If you're in 3 out of 5 runs that's something; 1 out of 5 is noise. A private window helps keep your own history from skewing it.

honestly you're not missing much, the tooling is still young. a free tier won't get you far. the manual version works though: write down 20-30 questions a customer would actually ask, run them through chatgpt, perplexity, gemini and google's ai overviews once a month, and log whether you're mentioned and who is mentioned instead. boring spreadsheet, but it's the only number you can trust right now.