Where an answer about your brand comes from
When an assistant describes your company, it is composing from whatever it retrieved and whatever it absorbed in training. Some of that is your site, some is directories and marketplaces, some is coverage and forums. You own the first outright, influence the second, and do not control the rest.
That distribution is why the useful move is not chasing mentions. It is making sure the one source with your name on the door is complete, current and readable, so that when it is retrieved it settles the question rather than adding to the confusion.
Brand facts have to agree with themselves
The single most common brand-visibility defect we see in scans is disagreement inside one page: the visible text says one thing and the structured data says another. An assistant picks one, and you do not get a say in which.
- Name and legal entity. One canonical spelling, everywhere, including the markup.
- Contact and location. Present in the text a parser sees, not only in a widget that loads after JavaScript.
- What you sell and to whom. Stated plainly near the top rather than implied by a hero image.
- Terms that change. Prices, availability, eligibility, hours. Injected from your source of truth so they cannot go stale independently.
None of this is generated on your behalf. The gateway prints values you already store, and the validator rejects a variant containing a number that did not come from a source field, which is what keeps a fluent summary from quietly inventing your pricing.
What a brand can honestly report
Three of these are measurements of your own infrastructure and hold up in a board deck. The fourth is a sample, and should be labelled as one.
| Metric | Where it comes from | How solid |
|---|---|---|
| Readability score per template | A published, deterministic spec | Exact and reproducible |
| Agent fetches by platform | Your own request log | Exact, it is your server |
| Answer rate and the miss log | Requests you served against ones you did not | Exact |
| Mentions in assistant answers | Sampled prompts | Indicative only, never a guarantee |