Branded and near-brand questions: why the headline leaves them out

What the badges mean

Every tracked question is classified into one of three kinds:

• Branded — the question contains your brand name outright ("is AEOTrack any good"). It measures reputation, not discovery: any engine will surface you when asked about you by name.
• Near-brand — the question does not name you, but contains your name as a run-together substring or a one-letter spelling neighbour. "Best AEO tracking software" contains "aeotrack" once the space is removed. Search engines retrieve lexically, so you are surfaced for spelling reasons rather than reputation.
• Non-branded — a genuine discovery question a buyer types before knowing any brand names.

The classification is deterministic, with no model involved, so you can check any verdict by eye.

Why the headline leaves branded and near-brand questions out

Any engine names you when it is asked about you by name, and a brand whose name is its category is named on every category question. Counting those flatters the score without measuring anything a buyer sees. On one real account the headline read 25, all of it from two questions with the brand's name in them; its score on the questions buyers ask before knowing the name was 0.

So since scoring version 9 (October 2026):

• The AI visibility headline is built only from non-branded questions: the ones a buyer asks before knowing your name. It is the number that measures discovery, and the one alerts and the trend follow.
• Branded and near-brand questions are scored on their own. That score says how the engines describe you when asked about you, which is reputation, not discovery. It is the figure labelled Branded: on the Dashboard under More detail, in The other scores, and on the Questions page beside the visibility score. In your first 14 days the Dashboard's first screen also shows it under Questions with your name in them (for example "Their own score is 60/100 from 10 answers. It is not part of the visibility score"), with how many engines named you for each of those questions.
• If every question you track is branded or near-brand, they all count, so you still have a number. The line under the headline says so ("Every question you track contains your name, so this score counts them."), and so does the first screen under Questions with your name in them. Add a question a buyer would ask before they knew you existed.

The change was applied once to every stored answer, so the trend chart marks one step where it happened. That step is the re-reading, not a change in how often you are named. How both figures are computed is on the public methodology page.

What to do about a near-brand question

Nothing, if it is a question your buyers ask. Keep it, read its answers, and let the badge remind you it is not evidence of discovery. If you added it only because it contains your category word, replace it with the phrasing a buyer would use before knowing your name.

Aliases

If engines write your name differently from your domain ("AEO Track" against "aeotrack"), add the alias under Settings → Websites, in the website's Other names AI should count as you. The names your homepage gives the business are added there for you when you add the website (Confirm your business). Stored answers are re-read against the new terms immediately, so the change shows up without waiting for the next scheduled run.

An alias is your name, so a question that contains it becomes a branded question and moves out of the headline. If you change your aliases, the questions AEOTrack suggested may be out of date; the app says so and can propose new ones.

AEOTrack also suggests names the answers use for you that do not count yet, and adds one in a click: see Brand names and "Is this you?".