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Research Reports

This page explains how to create and manage Research Reports — Mention's "design your own research agent" feature.

What is a Research Report?

A Research Report is a structured report that Mention researches once and — if you want — refreshes on a schedule you choose. You describe the topic you want covered, Mention interviews you to draft a report schema (the sections and sub-fields the report should contain), and once you approve the schema, Mention researches each section using the web and structures the findings into your approved shape. The report can then refresh automatically on the cadence you set, or stay put until you refresh it by hand.

Reports are useful when you want an always-current summary of something — a market overview, a competitor landscape, a topic-area digest — without re-running research by hand.

Creating a report

  1. From the Reports section, start a new report by describing what you want it to cover. A short sentence or two is enough — for example, "I want a weekly overview of new developments in AI agent frameworks for product managers."
  2. Mention's interviewer asks follow-up questions until it has enough to propose a schema. Answer them in plain language.
  3. When Mention has enough, it proposes a schema: a one-line summary and the sections the report will contain. Each section has typed sub-fields — prose, bulleted lists, or labelled data points with sources.
  4. You can keep talking to refine the schema — sending another message reopens the interview. When you're happy, approve the schema and choose a refresh schedule (or pick Manual only if you'd rather refresh it yourself).

Approving the schema kicks off the first research run.

How research runs

When a refresh starts (either from your initial approval, your manual trigger, or the scheduler), Mention researches each section independently:

  1. A web-search pass gathers freeform notes for the section.
  2. A structuring pass turns those notes into the typed sub-fields the schema asked for.

If one section can't be completed after retries, that section is marked with an error and the rest of the report still publishes. The next refresh tries it again.

Refresh schedule

Each report has its own refresh schedule, expressed as a value plus an interval (hours or days). Examples: every 6 hours, every 1 day, every 7 days.

You can change the schedule any time — from the report's settings. You can also trigger a refresh manually without waiting for the next scheduled run.

Manual only

If your report is a one-shot — a competitor snapshot, a point-in-time market overview, or anything you'd rather re-run on demand — pick Manual only when you approve, or switch any report to Manual only later from its schedule settings. Mention still researches the report once when you approve, but no automatic refreshes are queued after that. Use the manual refresh button whenever you want a new run, and switch back to a cadence at any time.

Reading a report

A finished report shows the rendered markdown — the title, the summary, and each section's structured content (prose, bullets, or data-point tables with source links).

The schema-interview transcript is available from the report's settings if you want to see how the schema was drafted.

Managing reports

  • List all reports — see each report's title, status, refresh schedule, and last-refreshed timestamp.
  • Trigger a refresh — start an immediate refresh outside the schedule.
  • Update the schedule — change cadence without re-running the interview.
  • Delete a report — removes the report and its stored content, and also removes the report from your Audience's source material (see below).

If a refresh fails as a whole (not just an individual section), the report's status moves to failed and the error is shown alongside the last-refreshed timestamp. The next scheduled run — or a manual trigger — retries. Manual-only reports retry only when you trigger them.

Reports as source material

Once a report completes a refresh, its content joins your Audience's source material alongside the documents your admin connected. That means:

Each refresh replaces the previous content, so citations always reflect the latest version. Deleting a report removes that source material — anything previously grounded in it is no longer cited from the report.