Top Brands widget
Most-mentioned brands in your prompt set, with a 'Competitors only' toggle.
Last updated: 2026-05-05
Top Brands widget
Top Brands widget
The Top Brands widget ranks every brand AI models mention in your category, ordered by AI Score. It's the fastest way to answer two questions: who are my real AI-search competitors? and am I in the consideration set?
How the ranking works
Every brand in the widget is scored with exactly the same coverage-inclusive formula as your headline KPI cards:
AI Score = AI Score when mentioned × Coverage
Scans in which a brand was never mentioned are a valid result (zero visibility), so they stay in the denominator. That means a brand mentioned in only 15% of scans but scored highly when it does appear can no longer outrank a brand that shows up consistently — which is the behaviour the leaderboard should have.
Each row shows the same canonical metrics as the AI Scan Results cards:
- AI Score — the coverage-inclusive score above (used for ranking).
- Coverage — share of the prompts where the brand appeared at least once, with the underlying scan counts in the tooltip.
- Mention Rate — a measure of how consistently the brand got mentioned in AI Scans: mentions as a share of every sampled answer position across all scans in scope, including scans with no mention.
- Avg Rank — average position, measured only across the scans where the brand appeared.
Stability and the absolute Mentions / Scan figure now live in the AI Score tooltip rather than the row, so the row carries only the metrics that are defined identically everywhere on the dashboard.
Because AI Score, Coverage and Mention Rate span every scan while Avg Rank only counts the scans with a mention, a brand can show low coverage next to a strong rank: it rarely appears, but when it does it lands well. The widget labels rank as "when mentioned" so the two bases aren't confused.
Two important rules:
- Child brands roll up to their parent. If you registered "Acme" as the parent of "Acme Pro" and "Acme Lite", the widget shows a single Acme bar combining all three. The detailed scan results still preserve the original variant names.
- Generic terms are filtered out. Words like "the platform", "this tool", "the company" are stripped at extraction time so they never appear as fake brands.
Two viewing modes
The widget has a Competitors Only toggle:
- Off (default) — shows every brand the AI surfaced, including ones you haven't registered. This is the discovery view; use it to find competitors you didn't know about.
- On — shows only brands you explicitly registered as competitors. This is the reporting view; use it for stakeholder updates so you don't have to explain why "OpenAI" appears in the chart for a CRM brand.
In Competitors Only mode the ranking is applied to your tracked competitors specifically, so a competitor that sits outside the overall top 10 of your whole category still appears here. Registered competitors that weren't mentioned at all in the current scope are listed at the bottom with an AI Score of 0.0 and 0% coverage — absence is a real result, not missing data, and Avg Rank shows as "—" because there were no mentions to measure.
Historical pollution and the "Competitors Only" toggle
When you change a brand's positioning or category, the AI may have produced very different brand lists in older scans. Looking at 90 days of unfiltered Top Brands can therefore mix two eras. If your category recently shifted, switch to Competitors Only for cleaner trend lines, or shorten the date range.
How to use it
- Identify gaps. Brands above you that you don't compete with explicitly are content/positioning rivals — you share queries.
- Promote underrated competitors. If a known rival isn't in the list, your prompt set may be missing the queries where they win.
- Find new competitors. Unfamiliar names with high counts are often new entrants. Click any brand name to register it as a competitor and trigger 30-day retro-tagging (it back-fills the last month of dashboard data).
Differences from SOV
| Metric | Counts | Best for |
|---|---|---|
| Top Brands | Unique queries where mentioned | "Am I in the consideration set?" |
| SOV | Total mentions (with dedupe) | "Of all the airtime, what's mine?" |
A brand can rank #5 in Top Brands but #2 in SOV (mentioned in fewer queries but more prominently). Read both for a full picture.
Related articles
- Share of Voice (SOV)
- Manage competitors
- Parent and child brand hierarchy
- How Pranas measures AI visibility