The answer explorer is the record of what each engine said — see every verbatim reply, the rivals it named instead of you, and the sources it pulled from.
Answers and competitors is the evidence layer under every MentionBeat number: the verbatim reply each engine gave to each prompt, kept and searchable, alongside the rivals it named instead of you and the sources it pulled from while answering. A rate tells you that you lost a prompt. This tells you what was said, who won it, and why — which is the difference between a metric and a decision. Every sampled response is stored, not summarised. Filter down to the exact slice you are arguing about and read what the model said.
By engine, prompt, ICP, journey stage, market, or outcome — named, not named, recommended, ranked. "Show me every prompt where Gemini recommends someone else" is two clicks, not an export.
The full text as returned, with your brand and every rival highlighted, the position each appeared in, and the citations the answer carried where the engine supplied them.
The same prompt sampled five times, side by side. Consistent absence is a content problem; inconsistent presence is a retrieval problem. They need different fixes.
Competitive position in AI answers is not a ranking table you can look up — it only exists relative to the questions being asked. MentionBeat scores every brand that appears in your answers the same way it scores you.
Head-to-head is usually where a quarter's content plan comes from: a short list of specific questions where a specific rival is being preferred, each with the answer text that explains the preference.
For web-grounded engines, MentionBeat records the domains retrieved while answering your prompts and ranks them by frequency. The list is frequently uncomfortable: a review roundup you have never heard of, a four-year-old forum thread, a competitor's comparison page.
Those pages are effectively writing your category's answer. Knowing which ones they are turns "improve our AI visibility" into a short list of specific, addressable sources.
Every other tool reports one number: you were not mentioned. That number is useless, because the fix for each cause is completely different — and one of them has no fix at the page level at all. For every answer, MentionBeat classifies which of these actually happened.
| What happened | What it means | What to do about it |
|---|---|---|
| Named | The engine retrieved you and put you in the answer. | Hold the position and watch it. |
| Retrieved, not named | You were in the candidate set the engine pulled, and it chose someone else. | A selection problem. The page was found and rejected — change what it says, not whether it exists. |
| Not retrieved | Retrieval happened for this question and you were not among the candidates. | A retrieval problem. Classic SEO and source work applies. |
| Cited, not named | Your page was consulted, but your brand was not credited in the answer. | An attribution problem — usually a page that answers the question without naming who is answering. |
| Answered from memory | No retrieval happened at all. The model answered from training. | No amount of page work changes this one. Entity and third-party corroboration is the only lever. |
| Unknown | No ranked results were captured for that question. | Nothing — and we say so rather than reporting it as an absence. |
That last row is the one that matters most for trusting the rest. “We could not tell” is never rounded down to “you were not there”, and where an engine does not publish what it retrieved — Perplexity, for instance — the classification is labelled as measured by proxy rather than presented as direct evidence.
Each pattern in the explorer maps to a different remedy. Guessing between them is how GEO work gets wasted.
| What you see | What it usually means | Where it goes next |
|---|---|---|
| Never named, on any engine, for a whole intent | No page of yours answers that question in a liftable form | Content Studio — a page family for the intent |
| Named by parametric engines, missing from grounded ones | The model knows you; the live crawl cannot reach or parse you | Fix queue & site health |
| Named, but never as the recommendation | Comparison and proof material is missing or unciteable | Content Studio — comparison pages |
| Named with a wrong fact attached | A retrievable source states something false about you | Accuracy & corrections |
| One rival appearing everywhere you are not | They own the sources the category is answered from | Head-to-head view, then a targeted plan |
Run a suite and read the answers — including the ones that name someone else.