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Some AI answers carry paid placements: a product card with a price, or an image card with a headline and a link. MentionLab records every one it sees, so you can tell an earned mention apart from a bought one, and see which advertisers are paying to appear next to your category.
Ad data exists only for responses whose model returned an ad block, so coverage varies a lot by model. Use the AI Models filter to see which of yours produce it.

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Where ads appear

Ads are not a single page. They surface next to the metric they belong with:

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The Competitors ads section

At the bottom of Analysis → Competitors.

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Ad Format Mix

A single bar splitting every placement in scope by card format, with the count of placements and ad units beneath it. This card is deliberately never scoped by the format toggle: it is the reference the other two cards are read against.

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Ad Share by Advertiser

A ranked table of who is advertising: A donut of the same shares, top 10 plus an Other slice.
Both cards report advertisers, not brands. Brand attribution on ad cards is not reliable enough to publish yet, so the brand view is switched off rather than shown half-working.

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The format toggle

The table and the donut each carry their own All formats / Product ads / Image ads toggle, and they move independently. The toggle narrows the placement counts only. Ad rate and the response totals stay format-agnostic, so an advertiser’s ad rate does not change when you switch formats.
Ad formats are defined by the platform and new ones appear without notice. The two known formats get friendly names; anything new shows its raw format name rather than being dropped.

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Empty states

  • No sponsored ads found means no ads ran in the scope you selected.
  • Ads detected, none brand-attributed means ads did run, but no card named a brand MentionLab could resolve.

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Ads on a single response

Open Queries, click a query, and each run in Response History lists its ads under Sponsored ads (n), below the sources. A pink Ads dot in the timeline legend marks the runs that carried one, and each run is labelled Has ads or No ads. What a card shows depends on its format:
  • Product ads name the advertiser, then the product image, title, price, any strikethrough price, and the star rating.
  • Image ads show the creative with the advertiser or brand, an Ad pill, a headline and body text.
The query’s Ad Rate card above counts the share of that query’s responses that carried at least one ad.

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Filtering by ads

The Ads filter in the Filters popover is three-way: All, Ads, No ads.
Like the Sources and Shopping filters, this one narrows the population of responses, so it changes the denominator of every rate on the page. Setting it to Ads pins Ads rate at 100% by definition.
Set it to No ads to read your organic visibility with paid placements taken out of the picture.

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Exporting

Project settings → Export data → Sponsored Ads produces one file, ads.csv, with a row per ad placement. A five-card carousel is five rows. Each row carries when the run started, the query text, the model, country and language, the card format, the advertiser and resolved brand_name, the creative’s title, body, image URL and target URL, price and price_currency, any strikethrough price, star_rating, the card’s position_rank and the max_position of its carousel, plus the ai_response_id it came from.
The export respects the filter bar, so filter to one model or one date range before you run it.

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Reading the results

  • A competitor with a high ad rate and a low mention rate is buying its way into answers where it does not rank. That is a different problem from a content gap, and a different fix.
  • Watch Ad Format Mix over time. A shift toward product cards usually means the platform is treating your category as transactional, which changes what your content has to do.
  • Compare your numbers with Ads and with No ads selected. The gap tells you how much of the answer real estate in your category is now paid.
The Analytics – Ads group in the REST API exposes the same advertiser, format and brand breakdowns.