Figure from the Q3 2026 edition · the current Index edition is Q4 2026 · see it here
50%
of each engine score is first-mention rate
Being named first outweighs being named often
Published by Parry Headrick · Updated Sep 22, 2026 · CC BY 4.0
The finding, verbatim
The Crackle PR AI Visibility Index weights first-mention rate at 50% of each engine's score, ahead of mean rank inverted (25%) and total mention rate (25%).
Inside a generated answer there is no scroll and no second impression. The first company named frames the comparison that follows, and in shortlist-style answers it is frequently the only name a buyer carries into the next step.
Crackle PR made that judgment explicit rather than burying it in a black-box composite. Half of every engine score is first-mention rate, a quarter is inverted mean rank, and a quarter is total mention rate — published, frozen, and reproducible from the public CSV.
The weighting is a stated position, not a neutral fact, and it is falsifiable: anyone can re-score the same raw data under different weights and publish the difference. That is the point of shipping the dataset under CC BY 4.0.
“We published the weights so someone can prove them wrong. A benchmark you cannot re-score is an advertisement.”
How it was measured
Weights are declared before each edition is run and frozen in the machine-readable methodology spec at /data/methodology.json. Composite scores are the unweighted average of the per-engine weighted scores.
Denominator
Every scored answer in the edition: 25 queries × 4 engines × 5 runs = 300 answers for Q3 2026; 500 in Q4 2026 (four collected engines: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Grok; Google AI Overviews not collected).
What this number does not prove
The weighting encodes an editorial judgment about how answers are read. A reader who believes total mention rate matters more should re-score the published CSV under their own weights — Crackle PR's ordering is not guaranteed to survive that, and the license permits it.
Cite this statistic
Reuse is permitted under CC BY 4.0 with attribution. The underlying data is public: raw CSV, JSON, and the DOI deposit.
Attribution line
Source: Crackle PR AI Visibility Index (https://www.cracklepr.com/ai-visibility-index), Q3 2026 edition, CC BY 4.0.Quotable sentence
The Crackle PR AI Visibility Index weights first-mention rate at 50% of each engine's score, ahead of mean rank inverted (25%) and total mention rate (25%).Embed (HTML)
<blockquote>The Crackle PR AI Visibility Index weights first-mention rate at 50% of each engine's score, ahead of mean rank inverted (25%) and total mention rate (25%). <cite><a href="https://www.cracklepr.com/stats/first-mention-rate-weighting">Crackle PR AI Visibility Index, Q3 2026</a></cite></blockquote>Academic citation (APA)
Crackle PR. (2026). Crackle PR AI Visibility Index (Q3 2026 edition) [Data set]. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21986226Full scoring rules, weights, and margin of error: Index methodology.
Go deeper
- →AI Visibility IndexThe full leaderboard, dataset, and quarterly editions.
- →Index methodologyQuery basket, scoring weights, and margin of error.
- →Publisher recusal policyWhy Crackle PR holds no rank in its own leaderboard.
- →First-mention rateDefinition of the Index's most heavily weighted metric.
More statistics from this edition
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