OtterlyAI has released one of the biggest updates to Brand Reports, and it is live now. The main chart now tracks Brand Sentiment and Average Brand Position next to Brand Coverage, annotations show which actions moved your numbers, and Brand Mention Count leaves the Brand Report. The raw count remains available via the OtterlyAI API and MCP.
What changed in Brand Reports at a glance
| Update | What changes | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| Sentiment and position in the main chart | The chart shows Brand Coverage, Brand Sentiment and Average Brand Position over time, for your brand and every competitor you track | Read the three metrics together before you draw a conclusion |
| Brand Mention Count removed from Brand Reports | The raw count of brand mentions no longer appears in Brand Reports; it remains available via the API and MCP | Switch any dashboard or report built on it to Brand Coverage |
| Annotations | Completed Recommendations appear on the Brand Report timeline, and you can add your own; annotations will also become available via the API and MCP | Log the work you do outside OtterlyAI: a new page, a PR push, a listing update |
| Brand Ranking | The table shows additional KPIs per brand | Benchmark competitors on more than coverage alone |
| Prompt Performance | A new switch shows prompts that are Trending Up or Trending Down | Check Trending Down first each week |
What is a Brand Report in OtterlyAI?
A Brand Report is the OtterlyAI dashboard that shows where a brand stands in AI search. It measures how often AI answers mention your brand across the prompts you monitor, where you appear in those answers, how you are described, and how you compare with competitors.
OtterlyAI collects those answers from seven AI search platforms: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, Gemini, Claude and Microsoft Copilot. The update described here changes which metrics the report puts in front of you, and makes it easier to connect a change in the numbers to the work that caused it.
Brand Sentiment and Average Brand Position join the main chart
The main Brand Report chart now shows three metrics over time instead of one: Brand Coverage, Brand Sentiment and Average Brand Position. Until now it showed Brand Coverage only. All three are available for your brand and for every competitor you track.
| Metric | What it measures | How it is calculated | How to read it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Brand Coverage | How often AI answers mention your brand | Prompts that mention your brand / all prompts in the selected time window | Higher is better |
| Average Brand Position | Where your brand appears when an AI answer lists several brands | Sum of your positions across prompts / number of prompts where your brand appeared | Lower is better: 1 means you are named first |
| Brand Sentiment | The tone AI answers use when they mention your brand | Net Sentiment Score: (positive mentions − negative mentions) / total mentions × 100 | Runs from −100 to +100; higher is better |
Definitions follow the OtterlyAI Brand Report KPI definitions.
Seeing the three lines on one timeline answers questions a single coverage line could not. Did a coverage gain come with a better position, or did you get mentioned more often but further down the list? Did sentiment move while coverage stayed flat? A brand can be mentioned in more answers and still be losing ground if those mentions arrive later or read less favorably.
Why OtterlyAI removed Brand Mention Count from Brand Reports
Brand Mention Count leaves the Brand Report because it is an absolute number that moves with the size of your setup, not with your visibility. It goes up when you add prompts or extend the date range, and it goes down when you shorten them, whether or not AI search engines mention you more often.
A worked example shows the problem. The numbers are illustrative.
| Setup | Prompts tracked | Prompts that mention the brand | Brand Mention Count | Brand Coverage |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Before | 50 | 20 | 20 | 40% |
| After adding 50 prompts | 100 | 30 | 30 | 30% |
The mention count rose by 50%, which looks like progress. Brand Coverage fell from 40% to 30%, which is what really happened: the brand appears in a smaller share of the answers that matter to it. The same distortion appears when one report covers 7 days and the next covers 30.
Three metrics already answer the visibility question without that distortion, so they replace the raw count:
- Brand Coverage: the share of prompts that mention you. It stays comparable when the prompt set or date range changes.
- Average Brand Position: how early you are named in the answers that include you.
- Share of Voice: your brand mentions as a share of all brand mentions, which shows how you compare with competitors.
If a dashboard or client report is built on Brand Mention Count, switch it to Brand Coverage. The change applies to the Brand Report only: Brand Mention Count remains available via the OtterlyAI API and MCP for teams that use the raw count in their own pipelines.
Annotations show what moved the needle
Annotations mark on the Brand Report timeline what you did and when you did it.
They appear in two ways:
- Automatically: every time you mark a Recommendation as completed in OtterlyAI, it shows up as an annotation on the timeline.
- Manually: you can add an annotation for anything you did outside OtterlyAI, such as publishing a new page, running a PR push or updating a listing.
Here’s how to manually add Annotations.
AI search optimization has a long feedback loop. You publish or fix something today, and the effect on AI answers shows up days or weeks later, when nobody remembers the date of the change. With annotations on the same chart as coverage, position and sentiment, you can look back after a few weeks and see which actions came before a lift, and which did not move anything.
Annotations will also become available as a data point via the OtterlyAI API and MCP, so you can pull them into your own reports next to coverage, position and sentiment.
Brand Ranking and Prompt Performance get more depth
The Brand Ranking table now shows additional KPIs per brand, including Brand Position and Brand Sentiment next to Brand Coverage. You can compare yourself with competitors on more than coverage alone. A competitor with lower coverage and a stronger position or sentiment is a different kind of threat than one that is simply mentioned more often.
Prompt Performance gets a new switch with two views:
- Trending Up lists the prompts where your performance is improving.
- Trending Down lists the prompts where your Brand Coverage is slipping.
Trending Down is the list to check first each week. It tells you where to act before the drop shows up in your overall numbers.
Which metric answers which AI visibility question
Ratio metrics beat raw counts in AI search because the inputs keep changing: prompt sets grow, date ranges differ between reports, and AI answers vary from day to day. After this update, each common reporting question has one place in the Brand Report that answers it.
| Question | Where to look |
|---|---|
| Is my brand part of the answer? | Brand Coverage |
| Am I named early or late? | Average Brand Position |
| How do AI answers describe my brand? | Brand Sentiment |
| How do I compare with competitors? | Share of Voice and the Brand Ranking table |
| Which prompts need work this week? | Prompt Performance, Trending Down |
| Did my work make a difference? | Annotations on the timeline |
Brand Coverage is only as reliable as the prompt set behind it. In an OtterlyAI study of a 320-prompt dataset, moving from 10 to 100 prompts reduced variation in reported Brand Coverage by about 73%. With only 10 prompts, 90% of the Brand Coverage results fell between 39% and 71%. At 100 prompts, that range narrowed to between 51% and 60%. The full method is in We Measured How Stable AI Citations and Brand Mentions Really Are.
The practical rule: track enough prompts to get a stable coverage number, then use position, sentiment and annotations to explain why it moves.
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