Brand24
Media monitoring and social listening that also tracks what AI chatbots say about you
Brand24 is a media monitoring and social listening platform that collects public mentions of a keyword from social networks, news sites, blogs, forums, podcasts, and review sites, scores each one for sentiment and reach, and alerts you when volume spikes. Since 2025 it has added an AI Visibility module that tracks how a brand is described and cited by ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, and other large language models. It is sold on keyword and mention quotas, starting at $199 per month billed annually, with a 14 day free trial and no free plan.
Overview
Brand24 belongs to the older half of the monitoring market: founded in Wroclaw in 2011, listed on the Warsaw Stock Exchange, and built around one deceptively simple job. You give it a keyword, it crawls a very large index of public web and social sources, and it returns every place that keyword appeared, with sentiment, estimated reach, and the author attached. For a PR team the value is that a mention in a trade blog at 2am shows up in a Slack channel before the client emails about it.
What separates Brand24 from a generic alert service is the scoring layer sitting on top of the feed. Every project gets a Presence Score and a Reputation Score, competitor keywords can be tracked in parallel to produce share of voice, an Influence Score ranks the authors who actually move perception, and Storm Alerts fire when mention volume or reach breaks out of its normal band. Those are the numbers that go in a monthly report, and they are the reason the product sells to agencies rather than only to individual founders watching for their own name.
The strategic shift of the last two years is AI Visibility, marketed as LLM listening. Brand24 queries nine chatbot surfaces on a schedule, records whether your brand appears in the answer, in what position, with what sentiment, and which sources the model cited to get there. It is the same monitoring instinct applied to a new channel, and it is the reason the product now shows up in conversations about generative engine optimization alongside dedicated tools. Bundling it with conventional listening means one dashboard covers both what the web says about you and what the models repeat.
Ownership matters for anyone evaluating longevity. In April 2024 Semrush, through its Prowly subsidiary, bought a controlling stake and later raised its holding to roughly 77 percent. Brand24 continues to operate under its own brand with the founding CEO in place, and the practical read is that it is now the listening layer of a much larger marketing suite rather than an independent Polish public company. The other thing to be honest about is price: the cheapest plan is $199 per month billed annually, which puts Brand24 above what most solo operators and very small businesses will spend on monitoring alone.
Best for
In-house comms teams, PR and social agencies, and marketing teams at companies large enough to have a reputation worth watching, particularly those that want conventional media monitoring and LLM visibility tracking in a single subscription and a single monthly report.
Not the right fit for
- Solo founders and very small businesses watching for their own name occasionally; at $199 per month billed annually the entry plan costs more than the problem for most of them, and free alerts cover the basics.
- Teams that need press outreach as well as monitoring; Brand24 has no media database, no journalist contacts, and no pitching workflow, so a separate PR tool sits alongside it.
- Anyone needing deep historical archives; backfill on new projects is limited and long range trend analysis depends on how long you have been running the project, not on how long the internet has existed.
- Buyers who need publishing and engagement in the same tool; Brand24 listens and reports but does not schedule posts or manage a social inbox.
- Organizations whose primary requirement is exhaustive Reddit or niche forum coverage, where reviewers repeatedly report gaps against dedicated listening platforms.
How it works
- 1
You create a project and give it keywords: a brand name, a product, a campaign hashtag, a competitor, an executive. Boolean operators are supported for precision, and Context Search lets you describe the topic in plain language instead of assembling a Boolean string, which is the difference between a usable project and one drowning in noise on a generic brand name.
- 2
Brand24 then collects matching public mentions from its source index, which the company describes as covering more than 25 million domains plus the major social platforms, news wires, blogs, forums, review sites, podcasts, and newsletters. Collection frequency is a pricing lever: the entry plan refreshes roughly twice a day, the middle plan hourly, and real time collection unlocks on the Pro tier and above.
- 3
Each mention is enriched as it lands. Sentiment is classified positive, neutral, or negative across more than a hundred languages, reach is estimated from the source, Intent Analysis flags posts that read like purchase intent, and Influence Score ranks authors by how far their content travels. Filters and tags let you carve the feed into workable slices: one country, one platform, negative only, high reach only.
- 4
The output layer is where PR teams live. Storm Alerts and personalized notifications push to email or Slack when something breaks, AI Insights generates a written weekly summary with charts and recommendations, Brand Assistant answers questions about your own mention data in chat, and reports export to PDF, CSV, or PPTX for the client deck. An API and an MCP server exist for teams pushing the data into their own dashboards.
Feature breakdown
28 features in 4 modulesMonitoring and collection
The crawl layer: what gets found, how often, and how precisely you can define it.- Keyword projects with Boolean logic
- Each project is a set of required, optional, and excluded keywords, which is how you separate a company called Apex from the twelve other companies called Apex.
- Context Search
- Describe the topic you want in natural language and Brand24 builds the query, which removes the main reason non technical users abandon Boolean monitoring.
- Cross channel source index
- Collects from X, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, LinkedIn, Reddit, Telegram, news sites, blogs, forums, podcasts, review sites, and app stores under one project.
- Collection frequency tiers
- Roughly twice daily on Individual, hourly on Team, real time on Pro and above; for crisis work the difference between hourly and real time is the whole point of the upgrade.
- Geolocation and language filters
- Segment conversation by country, region, and language so a global brand can separate a local flare up from background noise.
- Hashtag tracking
- Follows a campaign hashtag independently of the brand keyword, with reach and volume broken out for post campaign reporting.
Analysis and scoring
The layer that turns a mention feed into numbers a client will accept.- Sentiment analysis
- Positive, neutral, and negative classification applied automatically across more than 100 languages, with manual correction available per mention.
- Presence Score
- A single index of how visible the brand is online, useful mainly as a trend line rather than as an absolute value.
- Reputation Score
- Combines sentiment with the reach of the sources carrying it, so one hostile piece in a major outlet weighs more than fifty neutral tweets.
- Share of voice
- Tracks competitor keywords in parallel projects and reports each brand's share of the total conversation, the metric most often requested in a board deck.
- Influence Score
- Ranks authors and sources by how far their content actually travels, which is how you find the five accounts worth responding to out of four hundred mentions.
- Topic Analysis
- Clusters mentions into discussion themes with their own reach and sentiment, so you can see that complaints are about shipping rather than about product.
- Intent Analysis
- Flags posts that read as purchase consideration, turning a listening feed into a thin lead source for social selling.
- Demographics
- Estimates age, gender, occupation, and interest breakdowns of the people discussing the brand, split by platform and region.
- Advertising Value Equivalent
- Estimates what the earned coverage would have cost as paid media; a contested metric in PR circles but still requested by many clients.
AI Visibility and AI features
Monitoring extended to what large language models say, plus AI on top of your own data.- LLM listening across nine platforms
- Runs scheduled prompts against ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot, Grok, DeepSeek, Google AI Overviews, and AI Mode, recording whether and how your brand appears.
- AI share of voice and positioning
- Reports average position in AI answers and your share against named competitors, the closest thing to a rank tracker for generative answers.
- Citation source tracking
- Shows which pages the models cited when describing you, which is the actionable half: it tells you what to go fix or go earn.
- Brand Assistant
- A chat interface grounded in your own project data, so you can ask why negative sentiment rose last week instead of building a filter to find out.
- AI Insights
- Generates a written weekly analysis with charts, trend commentary, and recommendations; capped by project count, with two projects on Pro and five on Business.
- Anomaly detection
- Flags statistically unusual spikes in volume or reach rather than relying on a fixed threshold you have to guess at.
Alerts, reporting, and integrations
How the data leaves the platform and reaches the people who act on it.- Storm Alerts
- Fires when mention volume or reach breaks out of its normal range, with the driving mentions attached so the first response is informed.
- Filtered email digests
- Scheduled summaries that can be narrowed to negative mentions only or to a single source type, which is how executives get value without logging in.
- PDF, CSV, and PPTX export
- Client ready report exports including an infographic format, the main reason agencies buy monitoring tools with a reporting layer at all.
- Quick Share dashboards
- A one click public link to a live dashboard, so a client can watch a campaign without occupying a paid seat.
- Slack integration
- Routes filtered mentions into a designated channel, which in practice is where most day to day monitoring actually gets consumed.
- API and MCP server
- REST API for pulling mentions into a BI tool or data warehouse, plus a Model Context Protocol server so an AI assistant can query the mention data directly.
- Project comparison
- Puts two or more projects side by side, the standard setup for brand versus competitor or campaign versus baseline reporting.
Use cases
4 documentedAgency account lead reporting on three retainer clients
Monthly reports are assembled by hand from Google Alerts, native platform analytics, and screenshots, taking two days per client and producing numbers nobody can reproduce.
One project per client with a competitor keyword alongside it produces share of voice, reach, sentiment trend, and an exportable deck; reporting drops to an afternoon and the numbers survive client questioning.
In-house comms manager at a consumer brand
A product defect starts circulating on TikTok and Reddit on a Saturday, and the team hears about it on Monday from a journalist asking for comment.
Storm Alerts push to Slack when volume breaks out of its normal band, the negative mentions arrive with author influence scores attached, and the team responds inside the first few hours rather than after the story is written.
SEO lead defending organic traffic against AI answers
Traffic is falling and leadership suspects AI summaries are absorbing the clicks, but nobody can say whether the brand is even mentioned in those answers.
The AI Visibility module tracks brand presence and position across nine chatbot surfaces and names the pages the models cite, turning a suspicion into a content plan aimed at specific sources.
Product marketer watching a category rather than a brand
The team wants to know what buyers complain about across the whole competitive set, not just what people say about them.
Context Search projects on category terms plus Topic Analysis surface the recurring complaint themes and their reach, which feeds positioning and the objection handling on the pricing page.
Pricing
from $199 per month billed annually on Individual ($249 month to month)Subscription priced by keyword count and monthly mention volume, with collection frequency and AI features gated by tier. Seats are unlimited from the Team plan upward. Annual billing is roughly 15 to 20 percent cheaper than monthly. There is no free plan; every tier begins with a 14 day trial that does not require a card.
| Plan | Price | Includes |
|---|---|---|
| Individual | $199 per month, billed annually ($249 monthly) |
The single seat and the 2,000 mention ceiling are the real constraints; a moderately known brand name can exhaust the quota in days. |
| Team | $299 per month, billed annually ($349 monthly) |
The usual starting point for an agency, because unlimited seats mean the whole account team can look at the same dashboard. |
| Pro | $399 per month, billed annually ($499 monthly) |
The tier where the AI layer and real time collection both switch on, which is the upgrade most crisis-sensitive buyers end up making. |
| Business | $599 per month, billed annually ($699 monthly) |
|
| Enterprise | From $1,499 per month, custom quote |
Quote based, and the tier where the LLM visibility tracking is presented as fully included rather than partially available. |
Billing notes
- Keyword limits are counted across all projects combined, not per project, so tracking three competitors alongside your own brand consumes four of your allowance immediately.
- Mention quotas are monthly and hitting the cap stops collection for the rest of the cycle, which means a viral moment can blind the tool exactly when you need it most.
- Annual billing is the advertised price on every tier; month to month costs roughly $50 more per month at each level.
- Real time collection, Lightning Search, and the AI assistant features begin at Pro, so the crisis monitoring use case effectively starts at $399 per month rather than $199.
- There is no free plan and no perpetual entry tier, so the trial is the only way to evaluate whether your keyword volume fits the quota you are being sold.
Value assessment: Judged against the enterprise listening platforms it competes with on capability, Brand24 is inexpensive; judged against what a small business expects to pay for brand monitoring, it is not cheap at all. The honest framing is that the entry plan is priced for a company with a brand worth defending, not for a solo operator, and that most buyers who need the product for crisis response will land on Pro at $399 because that is where real time collection lives. The AI Visibility module is the strongest value argument right now, since buying LLM tracking separately typically costs as much again. Agencies get the best return because unlimited seats from the Team plan upward mean the cost does not scale with headcount, only with keywords.
Strengths & limitations
Strengths
- Very broad source coverage for the price, spanning social, news, blogs, forums, podcasts, and review sites in a single project rather than across several tools.
- AI Visibility tracking across nine LLM surfaces bundled into a listening platform, ahead of most conventional monitoring competitors on this specific capability.
- Unlimited user seats from the Team plan upward, which makes it unusually agency friendly compared with per seat listening tools.
- Storm Alerts and anomaly detection are genuinely tuned for crisis response rather than being a fixed volume threshold.
- Context Search removes the Boolean barrier that keeps non technical users from setting up a precise project.
- Reporting exports in PDF, CSV, and PPTX with shareable live dashboards, which is what agencies actually buy monitoring tools to produce.
- Backed by Semrush since 2024, which reduces the vendor risk that usually attaches to a mid-sized independent listening tool.
Limitations
- No free plan and a $199 per month entry point, which puts it out of reach for the smallest businesses regardless of fit.
- Keyword limits apply across all projects combined, so competitor tracking and brand tracking compete for the same small allowance.
- Mention quotas are hard monthly caps; exceeding them halts collection for the remainder of the cycle rather than charging an overage.
- Real time collection is gated to Pro, meaning the entry and mid tiers update on a 12 hour or hourly cycle that is too slow for genuine crisis work.
- Reviewers consistently report coverage gaps on Reddit and niche industry forums relative to dedicated enterprise listening platforms.
- Historical backfill on a new project is limited, so the tool cannot answer questions about conversation that happened before you started paying.
- Native integrations are thin: Slack, Zapier, and an API, with no first class CRM or helpdesk connectors.
- No media database or pitching workflow, so it monitors coverage but does nothing to help you earn it.
- Report layout and branding customization is limited compared with dedicated PR reporting tools, a recurring complaint from white label agencies.
Head-to-head comparisons
6 alternativesBrand24 vs Mention
from From $599 per month on an annual contract, quoted through a demoThe closest direct rival and the more accessible one on price: Mention has a genuinely cheap entry tier and includes social publishing alongside listening, which Brand24 does not. Brand24 answers with deeper analytics, the scoring layer that produces defensible share of voice numbers, and the AI Visibility module. Small teams that want to listen and post from one place start with Mention; teams whose deliverable is a report to a client or a board tend to end up on Brand24.
Full Brand24 vs Mention comparisonBrand24 vs Muck Rack
from Quote only; reported entry points around $5,000 per year for a single-seat Starter license, with most teams reported near $10,000 per yearDifferent halves of the same job. Muck Rack is a journalist database and pitching platform with monitoring attached; Brand24 is a monitoring platform with no outreach at all. If your problem is finding and contacting the right reporter, Brand24 will not help you. If your problem is knowing what is being said and proving it moved, Brand24 does it for a fraction of Muck Rack's typically five figure annual contract. Many agencies run both.
Full Brand24 vs Muck Rack comparisonBrand24 vs Presspage
from From 20,000 euros per year (roughly $22,000) on the Business planPresspage is newsroom and PR workflow software: hosted press pages, media contact management, distribution, and coverage reporting, sold on quote to larger comms teams. Brand24 owns only the listening and measurement piece, but it is self serve, transparently priced, and buyable in an afternoon. Choose Presspage when the mandate is to run a whole communications function; choose Brand24 when the mandate is to know what the internet is saying.
Full Brand24 vs Presspage comparisonBrand24 vs Sprout Social
from $79 per seat per month billed annually (Essentials), or $99 billed monthlySprout Social is a full social media management suite where listening is a premium add-on, often priced higher than a whole Brand24 subscription on its own. If you also need publishing, an engagement inbox, and approval workflows, Sprout consolidates the stack. If you already have publishing handled and only need listening, Brand24 gives you more monitoring per dollar and reaches beyond social into news, blogs, forums, and now LLM answers.
Full Brand24 vs Sprout Social comparisonBrand24 vs Agorapulse
from $79 per user per month billed annually, or $99 billed monthly (Standard)Agorapulse is a social inbox and scheduling tool with basic listening built on the native platform APIs, which means its coverage largely stops at the social networks it manages. Brand24 crawls far wider and analyses far deeper, but publishes nothing. The common pairing at a small agency is Agorapulse for day to day social operations and Brand24 for the monitoring and reporting layer above it.
Full Brand24 vs Agorapulse comparisonBrand24 vs SparkToro
from $0 (Free), then $50 per month (Personal)Complementary rather than competing. SparkToro answers where an audience already spends attention, which is a research question you ask a few times a year when planning. Brand24 answers what is being said about you right now, which is an operational question you ask daily. Teams doing audience research buy SparkToro cheaply and occasionally; teams doing reputation management buy Brand24 continuously.
Full Brand24 vs SparkToro comparisonImplementation & onboarding
- Setup time
- A first project is running in under fifteen minutes: enter keywords, choose sources, set alert rules. The work that actually determines whether the tool is useful is the following week of pruning false positives out of the query, which takes a few sessions on any brand name that is also a common word.
- Learning curve
- Low to moderate. The mention feed and filters are self explanatory; the scoring metrics take longer, because Presence Score and Reputation Score are only meaningful as trends and new users often over-interpret a single number. Boolean query design is the genuine skill, and Context Search exists precisely to let people skip it.
- Onboarding
- Fully self serve with a 14 day trial, in-app guidance, and a large public knowledge base. Chat support opens at the Team plan, priority support with a named client success contact at Business, and structured consulting at Enterprise.
- Migration notes
- There is nothing meaningful to migrate. Historical mention data does not transfer between listening vendors, and new projects backfill only a limited window, so switching means restarting your trend lines. Export what you need as CSV before cancelling, and if continuity of reporting matters, run the old and new tools in parallel for a month rather than cutting over cleanly.
Platform, API & security
- Platforms
- Web applicationiOS appAndroid appSlack appREST APIMCP server
- API
- REST API for retrieving mentions, project metrics, and results, available on higher tiers, plus a Model Context Protocol server that lets an AI assistant query mention data directly. Zapier covers lightweight automation for teams without engineering support.
- Compliance
- GDPRISO 27001
- Data residency
- Company operates from Poland under EU data protection law; data is processed within the EU.
- SSO
- Single sign-on available on higher tiers and by arrangement on Enterprise.
- Security notes
- Brand24 collects publicly available content only and does not access private messages or closed groups. Buyers in regulated sectors should confirm the current certification scope directly, since the published compliance detail is lighter than that of the enterprise listening platforms it competes with.
Support & resources
- Channels
- Email supportLive chat on Team and abovePriority support with named contact on BusinessHelp center and video tutorials
- Documentation
- Practical help center covering project setup, Boolean syntax, and metric definitions, alongside one of the more heavily invested content operations in the category; the Brand24 blog is widely cited on social listening and, more recently, on AI visibility measurement.
- Community
- No formal user community, but the company publishes frequent research reports and its founder has an unusually visible presence, which keeps the product well documented in third party reviews and comparison articles.
Company
- Founded
- 2011
- Headquarters
- Wroclaw, Poland
- Ownership
- Majority owned by Semrush through its Prowly subsidiary (controlling stake acquired April 2024, later increased to roughly 77 percent); shares remain listed on the Warsaw Stock Exchange
- Founders
- Michal Sadowski, Piotr Wierzejewski, Dawid Szymanski, Karol Wnukiewicz
- Employees
- ~100 (est. 2026)
- Funding
- Raised early venture funding from Polish investors including Larq Growth Fund and Unfold.vc, listed on NewConnect in 2018 and moved to the main Warsaw Stock Exchange market in 2021, then sold control to Semrush in 2024.
Timeline
- 2011Founded in Wroclaw, Poland as an internet monitoring service for brands.
- 2018Lists on NewConnect, the Warsaw Stock Exchange alternative market.
- 2021Moves to the main market of the Warsaw Stock Exchange.
- 2023Adds AI features including anomaly detection and automated insight generation on top of the mention feed.
- 2024Semrush, through its Prowly subsidiary, acquires a controlling stake of roughly 58 percent in April, later increasing its holding to about 77 percent.
- 2025Launches AI Visibility, tracking brand presence and citation across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, and other LLM surfaces.
- 2026Ships an MCP server and expands LLM listening to nine chatbot platforms, positioning the product across both conventional and generative monitoring.
Integrations
- Slack
- Zapier
- Google Analytics
- Semrush
- Prowly
- Microsoft Teams
- Looker Studio
- Make
- REST API
- MCP server
Frequently asked questions
12 questionsWhat is Brand24 used for?
Tracking public mentions of a brand, product, campaign, or competitor across social networks, news sites, blogs, forums, podcasts, and review sites, then scoring those mentions for sentiment and reach. Teams use it for reputation management, crisis alerting, campaign measurement, competitor share of voice, and, since 2025, for tracking how AI chatbots describe the brand.
How much does Brand24 cost?
Plans start at $199 per month billed annually on the Individual tier ($249 month to month), which covers 3 keywords, 2,000 mentions per month, and one user. Team is $299, Pro is $399, Business is $599, and Enterprise starts around $1,499 per month with custom terms. Annual billing is roughly $50 per month cheaper than monthly at every level.
Does Brand24 have a free plan?
No. There is a 14 day free trial that does not require a credit card, but no permanent free tier and no perpetual entry plan. If your budget for monitoring is zero, Google Alerts plus native platform search is the realistic starting point.
Who owns Brand24?
Semrush, through its Prowly subsidiary, which acquired a controlling stake of about 58 percent in April 2024 and subsequently increased it to roughly 77 percent. Brand24 still trades on the Warsaw Stock Exchange and continues to operate under its own brand and leadership, but strategically it is now part of the Semrush marketing suite.
What sources does Brand24 monitor?
The company states coverage of more than 25 million online sources, including X, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, LinkedIn, Reddit, Telegram, Twitch, news sites, blogs, forums, podcasts, newsletters, review sites, and app stores. Coverage is strongest on major social platforms and news, and reviewers most often report gaps on Reddit threads and niche industry forums.
Can Brand24 track what ChatGPT says about my brand?
Yes. The AI Visibility module runs scheduled prompts against nine surfaces including ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot, Grok, DeepSeek, Google AI Overviews, and AI Mode, and reports whether your brand appears, in what position, with what sentiment, and which sources the model cited. Availability varies by tier, with the fullest access on Enterprise.
What happens if I exceed my mention limit?
Collection stops for the rest of the billing cycle rather than generating an overage charge. This is the single most important operational detail in the pricing: a viral moment can consume the quota quickly and leave you without data during the period you most need it, so size the plan to your worst month rather than your average one.
Is Brand24 good for a small business?
It works well technically for a small business, but the price is the obstacle: $199 per month billed annually is more than most small companies allocate to monitoring, and the features most often wanted for crisis response, meaning real time collection and the AI assistant, start at $399. Small teams with a genuine reputation risk or an agency reporting obligation justify it; those simply curious about their name do not.
Brand24 vs Mention: which is better?
Mention has a cheaper entry point and includes social publishing, so it suits a small team wanting listening and posting in one place. Brand24 has deeper analytics, better reporting exports, unlimited seats above the entry plan, and LLM visibility tracking. If the output of your work is a client or board report, Brand24 is the stronger tool; if it is day to day social operations on a small budget, Mention is.
Does Brand24 help with press outreach or media contacts?
No. There is no journalist database, no pitching workflow, and no distribution. Brand24 measures coverage rather than earning it, which is why comms teams commonly pair it with a media relations tool such as Muck Rack, Prowly, or a newsroom platform.
How accurate is Brand24 sentiment analysis?
Directionally useful, not exact. Automatic classification into positive, neutral, and negative works across more than 100 languages and holds up well on clearly worded posts, but sarcasm, industry jargon, and short reactions are frequently misread. Mentions can be corrected manually, and the sensible use is watching the sentiment trend line rather than treating any single classification as authoritative.
Can I track competitors with Brand24?
Yes, by setting up a project per competitor and using project comparison and share of voice. The constraint is the keyword allowance, which is counted across all projects combined, so tracking three competitors on the Individual plan is impossible and even the Team plan's seven keywords fills up quickly once you add product names and executives.
Editorial verdict
Brand24 is the most capable listening platform a mid-sized team can buy without entering an enterprise procurement process, and its early bet on LLM visibility tracking is currently its sharpest differentiator: one subscription covers both what the web says about you and what the models repeat. The scoring layer, the unlimited seats above the entry plan, and the export formats explain why agencies keep choosing it. The reservations are concrete rather than stylistic. Keyword allowances are counted across all projects and run out fast, mention quotas are hard caps that stop collection mid-crisis, real time monitoring does not appear until the $399 tier, and there is no free plan to test the fit before committing. It is also monitoring only, with no path from knowing what was said to influencing what gets written next. Buy it if reputation reporting is part of someone's job description and $199 to $399 per month is a defensible line item; look elsewhere if you simply want to know when your name comes up.
Written by the SaaSTracker editorial team. Awards, when shown, are judged against the published criteria in our methodology.