Definition
A self-referential question is one that contains the brand's own name, such as asking whether a named company is legitimate. An assistant will of course mention a brand you just named, so these questions cannot measure whether it surfaces on its own.
Why it matters
They inflate mention rate silently and expensively. In one real case a brand's reported visibility of 13% came entirely from a single brand-named question; the true unprompted figure was zero, and every run had been spending quota on questions that could not move the metric.
How to measure it
Exclude them from visibility scoring by rule, at generation time and again at scoring time, and keep them in a separate reputation view where the question is what the assistant says about you, not whether it brings you up.