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MentionLab tracks how AI platforms mention your brand compared to your competitors. Competitors are automatically detected from AI responses — any brand mentioned by an AI platform is tracked without manual setup. This guide covers how to fine-tune brand detection with aliases and how to organize your competitors.

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Your project brand

When you create a project, you set up your primary brand — the brand you’re monitoring. MentionLab looks for this brand name (and its aliases) in every AI response.

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Aliases

Your brand might appear in AI responses under different names, abbreviations, or spellings. Aliases ensure MentionLab catches all variations. For example, if your brand is “MentionLab”, you might add aliases like:
  • Mention Lab
  • mentionlab.io
  • ML Analytics

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Blacklist aliases

Sometimes a brand name is also a common word, which can lead to false matches. Blacklist aliases let you exclude specific terms from being counted as brand mentions.
Be careful with short or common brand names. Without blacklist aliases, MentionLab might count unrelated mentions.
You can configure both aliases and blacklists from Project Settings → Aliases.

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Auto-detected competitors

MentionLab automatically identifies every brand mentioned in AI responses and adds them to your competitor list. There’s no need to manually add competitors — they appear as soon as your first analysis runs.

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Managing competitors

Navigate to Project Settings → Aliases (competitors section) to refine your competitor list. For each auto-detected competitor, you can:
ActionDescription
Add aliasesGroup alternative names or spellings under one brand
Set a websiteAssociate the competitor with their URL
Assign a groupOrganize competitors into categories (e.g., “Direct”, “Enterprise”, “Emerging”)
You can also manually add a competitor if you want to track a brand before it appears in AI responses.

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CSV import & export

For large competitor lists, you can import or export competitors via CSV. This is useful for bulk alias/group updates or sharing configurations across projects.

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Competitor analysis

The Competitors page gives you a head-to-head comparison:
  • Visibility score comparison — How your brand’s visibility trends against competitors over time
  • Mention position matrix — Where each brand ranks in AI responses
  • Average mentions per result — How many times each brand gets mentioned per response
  • Tag performance — How each brand performs across different query categories (radar chart)
  • Sentiment comparison — How AI platforms describe each brand

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Competitor groups

If you’ve assigned competitors to groups, you can toggle the “Group by Group” filter to see aggregated performance by group rather than individual brands. This is useful when you have many competitors and want to see category-level trends.

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”View as Brand” mode

Right-click a brand in the Brands Table and select “View as Brand” to switch the perspective of all Analysis pages to that brand’s point of view. This is useful for understanding a competitor’s AI visibility as if you were monitoring their brand.
“View as Brand” only affects the Analysis section (Overview, Queries, Tags, Platforms, Sources, Competitors). Intelligence pages like Sentiments and Shopping are not affected.
When “View as Brand” is active, all analysis metrics (visibility, mentions, share of voice, etc.) are recalculated from the selected brand’s perspective.