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Date ranges and the top-bar picker

The one date control in the top bar governs every data page at once — presets and custom ranges, how each is labelled, the compare-to-previous toggle, and why durable boards like Actions deliberately ignore it.

MentionFlow has one date control, and it lives in the top bar. There are no per-page date pickers to keep in sync — you set the window once, and every data page moves together. This page explains what the picker governs, how it labels a preset versus a custom range, the compare-to-previous toggle beside it, and the handful of pages that deliberately ignore it.

The one picker

The control is a pill that reads your current window — "Last 7 days" for a preset, or the explicit span "Jun 20 – Jul 3" for a custom range. Clicking it opens the presets and a custom from–to range. Your choice is stored in a cookie (mf-range) that every server-rendered page reads, so the whole dashboard shares one window and two screens can never disagree about which runs they counted.

A window is really two things: a length (how many days) and an anchor (which day it ends on).

Presets — Last 7, 14, 28, 90, or 180 days — are rolling: they anchor at your newest collected day, not at the wall-clock "today". A collection gap therefore never silently stretches the window past real data.
Custom ranges pin both ends to the dates you pick, up to 200 days long. Every page then draws exactly the picked dates — a custom span never bleeds past its end.

How the window is labelled

The picker never lets a label lie about the span behind it:

A preset reads "the last 7 days" in page subtitles and tooltips — the rolling phrasing is honest because the window really is rolling.
A custom range reads its explicit dates instead — "Jun 1 – Jun 15", never "last N days" for a fixed span — and the header shows an extra date badge so it's unmistakable that you're on a pinned window rather than a live rolling one. Presets show no badge.

The same phrasing flows through every page from one shared helper, so a subtitle, a chart axis, and a CSV export always describe the same window the same way.

Compare to previous period

Beside the date pill is a standalone compare-to-previous toggle. When it's on, trend charts draw a dashed overlay of the previous window of equal length, so this period is always read against the one before it; the toggle's glyph is that same solid-over-dashed line. It's indigo-tinted with a pressed state when active and a neutral outline when off, so its state is always visible in the top bar.

Compare defaults on (cookie mf-compare).
It's a separate cookie from the range, so turning comparison off never changes your window, and changing your window never touches comparison.
A chart with no prior data to draw simply hides the overlay rather than inventing a flat baseline — the same data-honesty rule that fills missing days with null, never zero.

Prompt-change markers

A trend line can move for two very different reasons: the AI answers changed, or you changed what's being measured. Add ten prompts halfway through the window and your visibility can jump overnight — not because anything improved, but because the question set behind the number is now different. MentionFlow marks that difference so you never read it as organic movement.

Any day inside the chart window on which you added prompts gets a marker — a dashed vertical rule with a small "+N" badge on the axis. Hover it and the tooltip names the prompts that landed that day (the first few, then "+N more"); several adds on the same day cluster into one marker rather than stacking glyphs. The home trend chart carries these, so a step in the line always sits right next to the reason for it.

Only additions are marked — and that's deliberate. Adding a prompt is the one prompt-set change MentionFlow records with a date, so it's the only one it can mark honestly. Edits, pauses, resumes, and archives aren't timestamped that way, so they draw no marker — the same em-dash-over-fake-zero philosophy applied to the timeline: MentionFlow won't plant an event it can't stand behind. (An archived prompt keeps its original "added" marker — the addition really happened, and it shaped the window it landed in.) Markers show on live brands only; demo data has no real creation dates to mark.

What the picker governs

The picker windows the numbers on every data page — the whole roster moves as one:

Overview, Competitors, Sources, Prompts and Prompt trends, Answers, Fan-outs, Shopping, Crawlers, Pages, Content, and the printable client report.
Detail pages inherit their parent's window — an individual prompt, a single crawler agent, and a product detail page all follow the same pick.

On Pages the roster is a lifetime snapshot, but its windowed columns ("Cited · Nd", "Answers", "Last cited") follow the picker — the snapshot columns stay labelled all-time so the two are never confused.

Pages that deliberately ignore it

Not every screen carries range-windowed numbers, and MentionFlow won't let a control look live while doing nothing. On a non-governed page the picker dims, explains itself in a tooltip and inside its menu, and reports itself as non-governing — the em-dash-over-fake-zero philosophy applied to a control.

These pages ignore the range on purpose:

Actions — the kanban board is durable state. Cards persist what you triaged; they don't come and go as you slide the date picker. (The engine still refreshes its suggestions from the current window, but the board you've built stays put.)
A single receipt — one answer has exactly one date, so an individual receipt isn't windowed.
A single source domain — a domain's page aggregates its whole fetched history rather than one length, so it annotates that instead of pretending to day-window.
Settings, account, brand hub, site health, research, suggestions, the reports hub, portfolio, learn, refer, content detail, and knowledge pages carry no range-windowed numbers, so the picker sits dimmed there too.