How to find it
Navigate to app.trybluemoon.com and open Overview. Commercial reach is the tile immediately to the right of Visibility in the KPI strip at the top of the page. It respects the Overview filter bar exactly as the visibility tile does — time range (30 days by default), platforms, topics, and personas. Change a filter and both numbers recompute over the same slice of polls.The tile only appears when the current slice carries commercial signal. If every question in your filtered slice is bottom-tier calibration, the tile is not rendered at all rather than printing
0%. See When it shows nothing.Why a plain mention rate under-reports
When Bluemoon sets up your account, the topic generator does not produce a flat list of questions about your product. It builds a four-tier library ordered by buyer proximity, and each tier has a different job:Core — buyer intent
Someone is choosing a vendor right now. “best invoicing tool for a 10-person agency”. You should appear here. If you do not, that is a commercial problem.
Adjacent — problem framing
Someone has the problem your product solves but is not yet shopping for the product. You may or may not surface.
Broad — industry and trends
Wide category questions where any single vendor appears among dozens, or not at all.
Peripheral — calibration ballast
Bare conceptual questions. The generator’s own instruction to the model is that a brand should never appear here. These questions exist to prove the scoring is not rigged.
The four tiers and their weights
Each topic in your account carries a tier, set during onboarding and editable afterwards on the Topics page (the Category field). Every poll inherits the weight of its topic’s tier.The weight is a stationary property of the question. It is assigned from the topic tier and is never derived from what an AI answered. A weight that moved from sweep to sweep would move the denominator of the rate, which would make every week-over-week comparison meaningless.
This is the tier weighting, and it is what Commercial reach is computed on today. The per-question intent score described in Question intent does not enter this number unless a per-question weighting has been enabled for your account; that variant exists behind a feature flag and is off by default. See What it does not tell you.
How it is calculated
Both numbers are produced by the same pass over the same set of poll results, so they can never disagree about which polls they saw.- Branded questions are excluded from both. A tracked question that already contains your brand name trivially guarantees a mention, so those polls are dropped before either rate is computed.
- A mention is a recorded mention. Both count a poll as a hit when the scoring pipeline recorded any mention of your brand in that answer. Neither number is re-derived at read time.
A worked example
An invented B2B invoicing tool, 800 polls over 30 days, evenly spread across the four tiers:
Visibility = 100 ÷ 800 = 12.5%
Commercial reach = (60 × 1.0 + 30 × 0.6 + 10 × 0.3) ÷ (200 × 1.0 + 200 × 0.6 + 200 × 0.3 + 200 × 0.0)
= 81 ÷ 380 = 21.3%
Same 100 mentions. Same 800 polls. The tool is mentioned in roughly one in eight AI answers overall, and in roughly one in five answers weighted toward the moment a buyer is choosing.
Why it is usually higher than visibility
Commercial reach is normally the larger of the two numbers, and that is arithmetic rather than optimism. Nothing is added to the numerator — the 100 mentions in the example are the same 100 mentions. What changes is the denominator. The 200 peripheral polls leave it entirely, and the broad and adjacent polls count for a fraction of a poll each. Meanwhile the tier where a brand typically performs best — core — is the only tier that keeps its full value. Removing questions you were never going to win, from a set you are being scored against, raises the ratio. Read it as “the calibration ballast has been taken out”, not as “the number went up”. It can also be lower. If your mentions concentrate in broad and peripheral questions and you are largely absent from core, the weighting works against you: the tier that carries the most weight is the tier where you are missing. In the example above, if all 100 mentions had landed in broad questions instead, commercial reach would be 30 ÷ 380 = 7.9% against a plain visibility of 12.5%. That inversion is a finding, not a glitch.Reading the gap
1
Read visibility first
It answers “across everything we track, how often does an AI name us?” It is the number that is comparable over time and the one that stays honest because it includes the questions you cannot win.
2
Read commercial reach second
It answers “and how much of that sits near a buying decision?”
3
Read the direction of the gap
Neither number alone tells you where you stand. Their relationship does.
When it shows nothing
If the total weight of the filtered slice is zero — every poll in it belongs to a peripheral topic — there is no commercial signal to report, and the tile is omitted rather than shown as0%.
This is the same discipline used across the product: “not measured” and “measured as zero” are different claims, and rendering them identically would be a false statement. Elsewhere in the app an unmeasured rate renders as a dash for the same reason, and a genuinely measured rate that rounds down to zero is shown as <0.1% rather than 0%, because a handful of mentions is not the same finding as none at all.
The most common way to hit an empty tile deliberately is to filter the Overview down to a single peripheral topic. The absence of a number there is the correct answer.
What it does not tell you
Commercial reach is a weighting and prioritisation signal. It is not a forecast.
- It does not predict visibility. The tier weight is assigned from buyer proximity before any polling happens, and it is not a probability of being mentioned. Across the whole library the tiers do separate on measured mention rate — that is why the weighting is worth applying at all — but the tier weight is constant inside a tier by construction, so it says nothing about which questions within one tier you will be named in. Held against the finer per-question intent score, that within-tier relationship measures out as indistinguishable from nothing. Use it to decide what to work on. Do not use it to project what a number will become.
- It does not explain why you are absent. Bluemoon measures whether an AI mentioned your brand in an answer. It does not observe whether you publish anything addressing that question shape, and a low commercial reach is not evidence that you do not. Treat a gap as a place to look, never as a diagnosed cause.
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The weight is per topic, not per question — today. Every question filed under a topic inherits that topic’s tier. A sharply buyer-intent question sitting inside a topic you categorised as
broadis weighted 0.3 like everything else in that topic. This is the known granularity limit of the tier weighting, and it is what Commercial reach is computed on today. The per-question intent score is a separate layer: a per-question weighting built on it exists behind a feature flag that is off by default, and it does not drive the Commercial reach tile you see unless it has been switched on for your account. Until then the practical lever is the Category field on the Topics page: if a topic’s tier is wrong, the weight is wrong for every question inside it. - The tile carries no trend. Unlike visibility, commercial reach currently shows no week-over-week delta and no sparkline. Compare it across time ranges using the Overview filter bar.
- The weights are fixed. 1.0 / 0.6 / 0.3 / 0.0 are not configurable per account, so the same scale applies to every domain and the number means the same thing everywhere.
Both numbers are computed from recorded polls only. When a platform fails to answer, the poll is recorded as a failure and simply is not counted — Bluemoon never fills a gap with an assumed result.