What is a good named rate?
One answer · 15 credible competitorssample
named in this answercredible, and not mentioned
Why is there no absolute benchmark for a named rate?
A recommendation answer is a shortlist, not a directory. Where a category has fifteen credible competitors and an answer has room for three, the average named rate across the category is about 20 percent — a shortlist rewards a few and excludes the rest, and most of the fifteen are excluded from most answers. A 40 percent named rate in sunscreen is a much harder result than 40 percent in a category with four players.
Comparing your number to another brand’s is therefore close to meaningless unless you are in the same category, in the same market, measured on the same panel.
What should a named rate be compared against?
| Comparator | What it tells you | When it applies |
|---|---|---|
| Your own baseline | Movement against the first month’s number is the result | Always |
| The competitor set on your own panel | A same-instrument gap — 20 percent against a category leader’s 65 percent on the same forty questions is a real difference | Whenever the panel records who was named instead of you |
| By question type | Rising on brand questions while flat on category questions means you are only found by people who already know you | Once there are enough questions of each type to split |
What baseline should an international brand entering the US expect?
For a consumer brand from outside the US entering the market with no prior English-language corpus, we scope against a baseline in the low single digits, and zero would not surprise us. SearchD has run no client panels, so there is no distribution to publish — that is an expectation, not an observation.
Beyond the baseline, we are not going to publish a trajectory. SearchD launched in 2026 and has not yet run a client panel for six months, so any month-3 and month-6 numbers we printed would be targets dressed as evidence — the exact move this site exists to argue against.
What we will commit to is the shape of the curve, and why. On-site and entity work lands first because it depends on nobody else and needs no time to age. Off-site corroboration lands second and slower, because it requires other people to publish or correct something. When we have real distributions across enough engagements, this page will carry them with the sample size attached.
Related: named rate, prompt panel.