Core Concepts

Before diving into MentionLab, it helps to understand how the platform is structured. This page covers the core concepts you’ll encounter throughout the product.

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Organization

An organization is the top-level entity in MentionLab. It represents your company or team and contains all your projects, users, and billing information.

• Every user belongs to at least one organization.
• After signing up, you either create a new organization or join an existing one via invitation.
• Organization-level settings include user management, billing, and API keys.

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Project

A project represents a brand, product or anything you want to monitor across AI platforms. Each project contains its own set of queries, competitors, tags, and analysis results. When you create a project, you configure:

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Queries

A query is a question or prompt sent to AI platforms to observe how they respond and whether they mention your brand. For example:

• “What is the best project management tool?”
• “Which CRM software do you recommend for small businesses?”

Queries are the foundation of your monitoring. The more relevant queries you configure, the broader your coverage of how AI platforms perceive your brand.

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Tags

Tags are labels you assign to queries to organize them into groups. They help you segment and analyze your results by topic, intent, product feature, or any custom category. For example, you might create tags like:

• Pricing — for queries about cost comparisons
• Features — for queries about product capabilities
• Industry — for queries about sector-specific tools

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Brands & Competitors

Your project brand is the primary brand you’re tracking. Competitors are other brands that appear alongside yours in AI responses. MentionLab automatically detects competitors from AI responses — you don’t need to manually add them. Any brand mentioned in an AI response is tracked automatically. In project settings, you can optionally refine auto-detected competitors by:

• Adding aliases — Alternative names or spellings so mentions are grouped correctly
• Setting a group — Organize competitors into categories (e.g., “Direct”, “Enterprise”, “Emerging”)
• Setting a website — Associate a competitor with their URL

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AI Models (Platforms)

MentionLab queries multiple AI platforms to give you a comprehensive view of your brand’s presence. Supported platforms include:

• OpenAI (ChatGPT, API models)
• Anthropic (Claude)
• Google (Gemini, AI Overview, AI Mode)
• Perplexity
• DeepSeek
• And more as they become available

You choose which platforms to include when setting up your project or when performing a manual analysis. Each platform may surface different sources and mention different brands, so querying multiple platforms gives you broader coverage.

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Results & Analysis

After your queries run, MentionLab analyzes each AI response to extract:

• Mentions — Which brands were named, how many times, and in what position
• Sources/Citations — Which websites the AI cited when building its response
• Sentiment — Whether the AI’s mention of your brand was positive, neutral, or negative
• Fan-outs — Follow-up questions the AI suggested as related topics
• Shopping products — Product recommendations found in shopping-related responses
• Ads (soon) - Ads displayed during the run of your queries (if any)

Results are displayed across multiple analysis pages, each focusing on a different dimension of your data.

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Credits

MentionLab uses a credit-based system. Each query execution consumes credits from your organization’s balance. The number of credits used depends on:

• The number of queries
• The number of AI models selected
• The number of iterations (repetitions) per query
• The recurrence frequency

You can view your credit usage and transaction history in the Billing section of your organization settings.

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Key relationships