How To Find Unlinked Brand Mentions

When your brand name is mentioned online on another website, it’s a great feeling. It means people are interested and talking about your business, which can increase people’s awareness of it and how big your reach is. However, it can be disheartening when your website hasn’t been linked to in this process. This is called an unlinked brand mention, and it can actually be an excellent link building technique to include in your SEO strategy.

Keep reading our helpful guide to find out:

• What unlinked brand mentions are
• Why unlinked brand mentions are important
• How to find unlinked brand mentions
• How to track unlinked brand mentions
• How to turn unlinked brand mentions into valuable backlinks
• How to measure the impact of unlinked brand mentions
• The future of brand mentions for SEO and AI search

What Are Unlinked Brand Mentions?

Unlinked mentions are references to your brand, services, product, or website on a third-party site that doesn’t actually link to you with a hyperlink. The good news is that unlinked brand references to your business are a sign that your online reputation is growing, and they can be a link building opportunity. Turning unlinked brand mentions into backlinks can help boost your search engine rankings and drive more referral traffic your way.

Even without linking to your website, unlinked mentions are still recognised by traditional search engines and AI (artificial intelligence) and LLM (large language model) search engines and features like Google’s AI Overviews and ChatGPT. This is because of a shift towards more semantic SEO signals that take into account more of the context surrounding your brand name being mentioned and the feeling around it.

Google views unlinked brand mentions as implied links that are helpful in giving search engines additional context about your business, ensuring that it ranks you for contextually relevant searches. They still help to grow your credibility.

AI and LLMs don’t parse website content in search of backlinks; instead, they look for mentions of trusted brands and assess the sentiment, context, and authority of those mentions to gain a more holistic view of online reputation.

Why Unlinked Brand Mentions Matter

Even without a backlink, brand mentions SEO is still effective in growing your brand authority online. When you are consistently mentioned in respected, industry-relevant publications, your chances of ranking highly in traditional search results and being included in AI and LLM responses are higher as your credibility will be growing. Here’s why unlinked brand mentions matter for SEO and AI SEO:

Entity Recognition

Search engines and AI-driven models use entity recognition to understand real-world things, and that includes businesses and brands. When your brand is frequently mentioned online, it helps traditional and AI-powered search engines to position your brand as a trusted entity within an industry, which is great for inclusion in AI-generated results and knowledge graphs.

Contextual Relevance

Mentions of your business in online content help search engines gain a deeper understanding of your business. In turn, this helps search engines accurately determine the types of search results for which you should appear.

E-E-A-T

E-E-A-T (experience, expertise, authoritativeness, trustworthiness) is still a major ranking factor. Unlinked brand mentions, when they come from high authority publications, tell search engines that your brand can be trusted and that your website and content are worth ranking in search results.

Why Finding Unlinked Brand Mentions Is Important For SEO and AI Search

It’s no secret that SEO has long focused on the importance of backlinks for rankings success. While link building is certainly still a valuable SEO technique, unlinked brand mentions SEO can still do a lot to catapult your brand’s authority in the eyes of Google and AI and LLM models.

For example, Google actually views unlinked mentions as implied links in SEO. So, even without a hyperlink, Google still pays attention to mentions of your brand, including the context and sentiment, which has a significant influence on how it ranks content.

As for AI-driven search engines and features such as ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, Bing’s Copilot, and AI Overviews, entity mentions, context, and sentiment around your brand are far more influential than links when it comes to visibility in these types of responses. AI-driven tools pull information from a wide range of metrics, including brand mentions, to generate their responses for users.

Authority signals and semantic SEO are crucial for AI models as they help to establish context and trust around your brand. The more top-quality mentions from authoritative publications that you have, the more likely you are to be included in AI-generated results.

How To Find Unlinked Brand Mentions: Step By Step

If you’re wondering how to find brand mentions that are unlinked, below are 4 steps you can take to monitor them:

1. Use Google Search Operators

Google search operators are special commands you can enter into the search bar to refine and filter your results. They can help you find specific information, like unlinked brand mentions, more quickly.

Here are a few search operators you can use:

• To find mentions that exclude your own website, search: “brand name” –site:yourwebsite.com
• To find mentions that exclude social media mentions as well, search: “brand name” -site:yourwebsite.com -site:facebook.com -site:instagram.com
• To find mentions of important members of staff online, search: “director name” ”brand name” -site:yourwebsite.com

To get the most out of this method for finding brand media mentions, you should also search for any common misspellings, abbreviations, and variations of your brand name.

2. Set Up Google Alerts

Setting up Google Alerts can help you continuously monitor when your brand is mentioned online. Doing this will send you a notification whenever your brand, or anything related to it that you set alerts up for, gets mentioned. To make it less overwhelming to manage, daily roundup alerts can be helpful, as then your inbox won’t be overloaded with alert emails.

Consider setting up alerts for:

• Your brand name
• Important product or service names
• Founder or director names
• Variations of your brand name and common misspellings

3. Use Brand Monitoring Tools

There are some special brand mention tracking tools that you can use to look out for unlinked mentions. As well as telling you when and where your brand is mentioned, they also provide insights into sentiment analysis and competitor tracking, which can be helpful.

We’ll be going into the details of each tool in the next section, but the most helpful tools for tracking brand mentions are:

• Mention
• Brand24
• BuzzSumo
• Ahrefs
• Semrush

4. Keep An Eye on Social Media and Forums

AI models and search engines also recognise mentions of your brand on social media. These types of mentions are significant when it comes to increasing your brand’s reach and driving new, interested traffic your way.

Social media mentions on LinkedIn, Reddit, and specialist industry forums all carry SEO weight and can have a positive impact on your authority, visibility, and rankings.

Tools and Platforms For Tracking Unlinked Brand Mentions

Manually looking for unlinked brand mentions can be a complicated and time-consuming task. The good news is that there are some pretty handy brand mention tracking tools out there that you can put to good use.

Of course, there are free tools out there like Google Alerts to help you track unlinked mentions, and while they are fine for identifying mentions, they do not provide insights into nuance or sentiment analysis.

Below is a list of paid tracking tools that really provide a lot of value when it comes to tracking unlinked mentions:

• Mention – A real-time tracking platform that monitors brand mentions across websites, blogs, social media, and forums. It allows you to set up alerts for all things related to your brand. It also allows you to filter mentions by platform, sentiment, and influence level, making it an excellent option for businesses that want to monitor their online reputation. However, the pricing tiers can become expensive for those who want to unlock all features.
• Brand24 – A solid brand monitoring tool that gives detailed data analysis so you can get a strong picture of how unlinked brand mentions are impacting your online reputation. Brand24 offers detailed sentiment analysis to help you gauge whether a mention is neutral, positive, or negative. It also scores mentions based on their influence, which can be helpful for outreach when it comes to converting unlinked references into backlinks. As well as this, Brand24 uses AI-driven insights to help you pinpoint trends and themes. An excellent choice for businesses seeking to identify unlinked mentions and assess brand perception.
• Ahrefs – As well as being an excellent tool for tracking backlinks, Ahrefs’ Content Explorer is also a great way to find mentions of your brand that aren’t hyperlinked. It’s not a dedicated brand mentions tracker, so it doesn’t offer real-time alerts. However, it scours a huge number of websites to find unlinked mentions. It’s great for digital marketers who use Ahrefs for link building and want to start turning unlinked mentions into fresh backlinks.
• Semrush – Sends daily alerts for brand mentions across a range of websites and online media. It provides clear metrics, allowing you to gain a solid overview of your unlinked brand mentions. It can be integrated with other Semrush tools for link building campaigns.

Turning Unlinked Mentions Into Backlinks

We’ve already explained how unlinked brand mentions are beneficial when it comes to growing authority and establishing a strong online presence. However, if you work to turn unlinked mentions into backlinks, you will be able to maximise their SEO value, which will result in even higher rankings and will also strengthen your visibility in AI results.

To convert brand mentions, SEO basics are essential. For successful link reclamation, you need to have a solid, bespoke blogger outreach strategy. This is how you can increase your chances of turning unlinked mentions into valuable backlinks with the right approach:

• Take a Polite and Friendly Approach

It might sound basic, but it’s best to take a friendly and polite approach when contacting authors to link to your website. If you go in all guns blazing and make immediate demands for a link, you’ll likely be ignored or rejected. Instead, you should take a softer approach to outreach that:

• Says thank you for the mention
• Gives them additional helpful context
• Politely ask them to include a link to your website that will provide value to their readers.
• Get the Timing Right

If you’re keeping an eye on your unlinked brand mentions, you’ll stand a better chance at getting the timing right for success in turning them into backlinks. When you reach out a few days after publication, the content will still be fresh in the author’s mind, which means you stand a greater chance of converting the mention into a backlink. If it’s been months since the unlinked mention, too much time might have passed for it to be converted to a backlink.

• Offer Value

If you can show the author that including a contextual link to your company will bring value to their readers, then it is more likely that they will agree to link to you. For example, if your link features interesting facts or statistics about a topic, you can provide an expert quote or paragraph of additional information in the form of a curated link to further enhance the original article, or you can provide quality images, infographics, or other resources that bring value.

• Build Ongoing Relationships

If you’re hoping to build a lasting relationship with a publication, either as part of a Digital PR campaign or a wider link building effort, then you should exercise caution when asking for a link straightaway. To build an ongoing relationship with a journalist or author, it helps to follow their work closely and genuinely engage with it. Another way to get into a journalist’s good books is by offering them exclusives or early access to news about your company. As well as this, you can make yourself available for expert quotes or industry comments. Doing this will increase your chances of getting your business linked to in the future.

Measuring The Value of Unlinked Mentions

It can be tricky to measure unlinked brand mentions, but even without a backlink, they have a positive impact when it comes to your search engine rankings and AI search recognition. However, when you manage to convert unlinked mentions into links, this transfers valuable link juice to your website, which can result in even better rankings and higher trust signals.

As with regular link building, where your brand mentions, linked or unlinked, come from is important. Links and mentions from highly respected, relevant publications will carry a lot more weight than those that come from less authoritative sources with low domain authority scores (DA).

The value of brand mentions also relies heavily on the sentiment around your brand. Sentiment analysis can help you determine if your business is being referred to in a positive light or a negative one. Obviously, mentions in a positive context are going to have a bigger media impact than those in a negative context.

Other brand monitoring metrics that can help you determine the power of brand mentions are:

• How high ranking the content that mentions your brand is
• How much reach the content has
• How contextual the reference to your brand is
• How much referral traffic you’ve received as a result of a brand mention
• The future relationship between you and the publication that mentions your brand

Whether your brand mentions convert into backlinks or not, they are still vital for getting AI search models and traditional search engines to trust you.

Future of Unlinked Mentions in SEO and AI Search

There is no denying that a search evolution is happening. An increasing number of users are turning to AI-driven search engines and features to find answers to their queries. AI features like Google’s AI Overviews and LLMs like ChatGPT are increasingly influenced by brand mentions and the sentiment behind them. When your brand name, products, staff, or website are repeatedly referenced in other content across the web, it signals to these AI models that you are a reputable source of information, increasing the likelihood of inclusion in AI-powered responses. Being widely referenced online also helps strengthen AI’s understanding of entities (how it understands and interprets real-world ideas and things), strengthening your entity SEO. This is also true for traditional search.

The future of brand mentions SEO will only become even more critical. On their own, brand mentions help to grow your trust, authority, and online visibility in AI and traditional search. When paired with links, they directly support your rankings for specific webpages and keywords you are targeting. To put it simply, for traditional and AI SEO, brand mentions and backlinks on their own can do wonders for your online visibility, but combined, they can bring even bigger results.

Make Unlinked Mentions Work For You

SEO authority signals are always evolving. Unlinked brand mentions are an off-page SEO essential. They help grow your brand visibility and are recognised by traditional and AI search models to positively increase your credibility and authority in results and responses. The more mentions your brand has, the greater your online influence is. Monitoring your unlinked mentions for link building opportunities can put you in an even stronger position, although mentions are still valuable without the hyperlink. Unlinked brand mentions SEO is the way forward as the shift to AI-driven search gets even stronger. If you need help with crafting a stellar digital PR and brand mentions strategy, then reach out to our professional team of experts today.