Mentioned

Mentioned stakes its whole product on one argument: an AI-generated answer is put together from a small number of pages, so getting onto those pages is what changes the answer. Everything downstream follows from that. The crawl targets the format that actually decides crowded categories — '15 best project management tools for agencies (2026)' style editorial listicles, comparison posts and threads — and then reads each one in full rather than skimming titles. What makes the qualification step worth paying for is that it checks two separate things. First, whether the page is now factually wrong: in the published sample, position 4 of a 15-entry list carried a product whose domain had redirected to a registrar parking page since 2 March 2026, with a status page returning 404 and an X account dark since February. Second, whether the page's own stated inclusion criteria already cover you — the same sample article said 'a tool must offer a free tier and native Slack sync — no Zapier workarounds', which turns a cold request into a compliance argument. A stated-pricing error and a dead link at position 12 are two further angles the system ranks, and it ranks them by conversion rather than by email volume: a plain request to be added converts at one to two percent, a correction is a different message entirely. The contact layer is where the product either earns its keep or doesn't, and Mentioned is unusually explicit about it. It works a seven-rung ladder cheapest source first and stops at the first address that survives its filters; only one rung costs anything. In the worked example, the byline check came back active (posted six days earlier) and the address was free on the author page — $0.00 spent, confidence high, and explicitly 'never guessed from a pattern'. That last distinction matters, because guessed addresses are what get outreach marked as spam. The honesty extends to the reporting. Anyone can show a number going up; Mentioned pairs each pitched page with a comparable unpitched page and reports only what that comparison supports, and it says plainly that editors add products for their own reasons and some pages would have added you anyway. It also declines to pitch affiliate listicles — those want a rate card, so they are routed and no send is ever spent on them — and pages with no supportable angle sit in the list uncosted until the next crawl. Where it doesn't fit: it is a remediation workflow, not a monitoring dashboard, and the monitoring it does ship (share of voice, sentiment, competitor gap, monthly) changes nothing about the underlying pages. Teams that want outreach sent for them, or Reddit and forum posting automated, are looking at the wrong tool — Mentioned never touches your inbox, which is the design, not a gap. Categories without active editorial roundups will produce thin consoles, and every draft still depends on you to write to a human being under your own name.