Media Monitoring in the AI PR Toolkit doesn’t just track your coverage online. It also helps you understand the broader media context and demonstrate the impact of your PR efforts. Here’s how to read the data that comes with each result and how to use it in your reporting.
What each mention shows
When you look at each mention in the Media Monitoring feed, you’ll see a set of useful metrics:
- Earned Mention – links the mention back to a pitch you sent, so you know which stories worked.
- Mention Reach – counts the audience size likely reached by this mention.
- Authority Score – gives a 1-100 rating of a domain’s overall quality and SEO influence.
- Backlinks – shows if the article includes one of your tracked URLs.
- AI Citations – shows how many times a specific monitored article or link is referenced as a source across AI-generated answers from platforms like ChatGPT, Google AIO, and Claude (available at the link level).
- Sentiment – shows whether the mention is classified as positive, neutral, or negative.
- Date and source – shows when and where the content appeared.
- Headline and preview text – a short excerpt from the article that helps you understand the context of the mention. You can read the whole thing by clicking the Open in another window icon in the top right of each result.
All of this helps you assess the value of a mention beyond just whether it exists.
Tracking Overall AI Visibility
To evaluate how your overall media coverage influences AI-driven discovery engines, navigate to the Overview tab of the Media Monitoring tool. Here, you will find a dedicated summary widget containing two key metrics:
- AI-Cited Mentions: The total volume of monitored articles or posts that are referenced or linked directly within AI-generated answers.
- AI-Cited Earned Mentions: The subset of AI-cited mentions directly attributed to your active PR outreach. This is automatically calculated from the journalist emails you've sent, allowing you to quantify how your PR campaigns feed into AI visibility engines.
Note: The AI Citations metric, along with the AI-Cited Mentions and AI-Cited Earned Mentions widgets, is only available to AI PR Toolkit Pro users who also subscribe to the AI Visibility Toolkit.
Why this data matters
Each metric gives you a different lens to understand coverage:
- AI Citations and AI-Cited Widgets connect your PR efforts directly to AI outcomes. These metrics show that your media coverage serves as a trusted source that shapes the answers generated by AI engines.
- Reach helps show coverage visibility
- Backlinks help prove SEO or referral traffic value
- Sentiment adds a layer of interpretation to assess the tone and context at a glance
Together, they support:
- Internal reports (e.g., monthly PR updates)
- Campaign performance reviews
- Client reporting if you’re an agency
Exporting mentions for reporting
To use your coverage in presentations or documents:
- Go to Mentions tab in Media Monitoring feed
- Select one or more mentions
- Click the Export button and choose the format (CSV or Excel)
Summary
Mentions in the AI PR Toolkit are more than just links. Use available metrics, such as Reach, Sentiment, Backlinks, and AI Citations, to add robust, actionable data to your PR reporting.
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