Inclusion Rate

Inclusion Rate is the percentage of prompts in a defined prompt set where a company is mentioned by name in the AI-generated response.

It is the baseline AEO metric. Before measuring how prominently a company appears, how often it is cited as a source, or how favorably it is positioned, you need to know whether it is part of the conversation at all. Inclusion Rate answers that question.

To measure Inclusion Rate, a company defines a set of commercially relevant prompts (typically 30 to 50 questions a buyer might ask an AI tool during research or evaluation), runs them against one or more AI platforms, and records whether the company name appears anywhere in the response. The percentage of prompts that include a mention is the Inclusion Rate.

Inclusion Rate should be tracked separately for each AI platform, since ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity surface different companies at different rates. It should also be tracked over time to measure the impact of AEO initiatives.

A low Inclusion Rate indicates a fundamental visibility gap: the AI model does not associate the company with the topics its buyers are asking about. Addressing this typically requires work on messaging clarity, content breadth, and third-party authority signals rather than technical optimization alone.