When it comes to SEO (search engine optimisation) and LLM (large language model)-powered search engines, brand mentions are an effective way to grow your website’s authority and boost your visibility in results. Brand mentions are all the times where your business name, products and services, or website is mentioned on a third-party website. Sometimes these mentions are linked, and sometimes they won’t be. It’s no secret that a diverse backlink profile that’s packed full of authority links is great for your traditional and AI (artificial intelligence)-powered search engine rankings, and brand mentions are an excellent way for you to do this.
However, what makes brand mentions such a powerful classic and AI SEO technique is that they don’t always have to be linked to carry weight and improve your status in results pages. If this has piqued your interest, our Knowledge Hub guide is here to tell you everything you need to know about brand mentions and why they’re so important for traditional SEO and LLM-driven search.
Why Brand Mentions Matter Today
Brand mentions are vital because they act as social proof that your business is reputable. Every time your business name, products, or website is referenced on an external website, it helps to boost your brand visibility online. This has a positive knock-on effect when it comes to Google search results and results on LLM-powered search engines.
In the context of traditional SEO, brand mentions serve as authority signals for search engines, resulting in higher rankings in the search engine results pages (SERPs).
The same applies to AI-driven search engines and search features like ChatGPT and Google’s AI Overviews. The more instances of your business being mentioned on third-party sites, the more likely your brand and its content will be used in AI-powered responses, as brand mentions tell them you are relevant.
Traditionally, backlinks from high authority, industry-relevant websites were the best way to build trust with search engines for improved search visibility. Traditional link building service strategies are still relevant, of course. However, brand mentions are the new kids on the block and the natural evolution of backlinks that can do a lot to boost your online presence. Some sites might naturally mention your brand name within content, but brand mentions can also be achieved through a highly targeted digital PR campaign.
What Are Brand Mentions?
To put it simply, a brand mention is any time your business name, products, or website is mentioned online. There are 2 types of brand mentions:
- Linked Brand Mentions – When another brand references your business with a hyperlink to your site, earning you a backlink in the process.
- Unlinked Brand Mentions – When your business is mentioned but with no link to your website.
You might earn a brand mention in a news article, blog post, podcast, social media posts, industry directories, review content, and many other types of online content. Linked mentions are great for your traditional SEO in terms of earning you a backlink, but unlinked mentions still carry weight.
Unlinked mentions are more challenging to keep track of, but they can still help to boost your online reputation and increase your chances of being featured in AI summaries and search results. It’s not just AI search engine models that unlinked mentions help; they can also help traditional search engines understand the context of your business within its industry. When a mention of your brand does this, it can be described as an entity mention.
The Role of Brand Mentions in Classic SEO
You might wonder what brand mentions do for Google rankings. Well, brand mentions are incredibly important for authority building when it comes to traditional search results. You’d be forgiven for thinking that Google values linked brand mentions the most because they result in a backlink to your business. However, the truth is that even unlinked brand mentions can influence your rankings.
Google’s search engine ranking factors algorithm classifies unlinked brand mentions as implied links. This means that trusted references to your site will still strengthen your credibility and relevance. In fact, these implied links are incredibly helpful in giving search engines additional context about your business, ensuring that it ranks you for contextually relevant searches.
In short, when Google sees your brand name without a link, it will:
- Be able to associate your business with key topics.
- Evaluate where and how often your brand is mentioned.
- Measure the credibility of the sources that mention you.
Being consistently mentioned in respected publications and platforms will increase your chances of ranking, whether you have earned a backlink or not. That’s because brand mentions help to strengthen your business’s E-E-A-T (experience, expertise, authoritativeness, trustworthiness). Brand mentions for SEO are a win-win.
In the age of AI and LLMs, traditional search engines like Google aren’t just crawling websites in search of backlinks; they’re looking at sentiment, context, and authority to get a more holistic view of a brand’s reputation online. In other words, it’s not all about backlinks anymore.
Brand Mentions and AI and LLM Search Engines
Large language models like ChatGPT, Bing Copilot, and Google Gemini get their information by trawling large amounts of articles, web pages, databases, and transcripts. When your brand is mentioned in lots of quality sources, LLMs will start to recognise this and associate your business name with certain topics. This is called entity recognition and increases your inclusion in AI knowledge graphs, which is how machines organise information to then use in responses to user queries. The more this happens, the more likely it will be that your business appears in AI search responses and features like AI Overviews.
Backlinks are still helpful for building authority and credibility, but brand mentions are more likely to get you appearing in AI-generated responses as they help LLMs learn what your brand is about and the sentiment around it. Then, when a user makes a query that’s relevant to your business, it is more likely to mention you in its response.
Brand Mentions vs Backlinks: What’s Changing?
Link building has always been a trusted SEO technique when it comes to boosting rankings for specific pages and keywords. Due to this, backlinks SEO in 2025 certainly isn’t dead, and they’re still helpful for increasing your rankings and authority. However, it’s true that when it comes to off-page SEO, brand mentions are gaining weight in both traditional and AI search.
Thanks to the rise of AI, traditional and new wave search engines are now focusing more on semantic SEO and the connection and sentiment around brands when it comes to rankings or being featured in AI results. It’s no longer all about how many quality backlinks you have, but how many quality third-party and relevant sites are mentioning your brand.
Just like any link building campaign, the results of brand mentions can take some time to translate into better visibility, but know that each brand mention you acquire will help you grow your overall trust and brand authority in the SERPs and AI responses.
How To Earn Brand Mentions
If you aren’t doing it already, brand mentions need a spot in your digital marketing strategy. To really grow your brand authority with brand mentions, the focus needs to be on ensuring that any mentions your business gets come in the form of authentic and contextually relevant content.
Here at Click Intelligence, we have a dedicated Brand Mentions service, but here are some strategies you can implement to increase brand mentions for your business:
Digital PR
A well-executed digital PR strategy is a great way to gain media coverage and exposure for your brand. Digital PR involves getting articles, features, and interviews in the form of expert quotes published in trusted online publications. If they link to you, you earn a precious top-quality backlink, but whatever happens, this tactic also means that you secure a brand mention in trusted websites that AI is likely to take note of.
Guest Blogging
Although it may be a more traditional SEO technique, guest blogging is an effective way to earn brand mentions when taken with a highly targeted approach. Concentrate on high-authority and industry-relevant websites where your content can bring value. If you can prove to web admins that your content is worth linking to and actually brings value to their users, you will be able to earn brand mentions and backlinks that really help your credibility in the eyes of AI and traditional search engines. A relationship-based approach to blogger outreach here is essential for success.
Create High Quality Content
Following on from the above point, producing high-quality content that fulfils search intent and offers fresh insights into topics is a great way to increase the likelihood of brand mentions. When you regularly produce this type of content, it also helps position you as a thought leader in your industry, which is great for building credibility. The more interesting your content is, the more likely it is that people will mention you online, whether that’s on social media, forums, or blogs.
The same applies to your services. If your services are top-notch, people won’t be able to stop talking about them on social media and in reviews, which can increase your brand mentions and buzz around your business.
Get Featured In Industry-Relevant Listicles
When AI-driven tools generate answers, they often look at ‘Top 10’ lists first. With this in mind, it makes sense to make sure that you’re included in as many industry-relevant listicles as possible. When you secure these types of digital media placements, you increase the likelihood of being cited in AI responses and overviews, which is a huge boost to your online visibility.
Collaborations with Influencers
There are influencers in nearly every imaginable industry. From big names to smaller, micro-influencers, collaborating with them can lead to authentic brand mentions that really boost your online reputation and reach. For successful influencer marketing, ensure that you select creators who genuinely align with your brand and industry. Allow them to talk about your brand in a way that works for their audience and tone of voice. This will result in a valuable real-world brand mention that gets shared by their followers, which will be picked up by search and AI models.
Social Media Campaigns
Running engaging social media campaigns is another way to earn precious brand mentions and increase your reach online. For your campaigns to be successful, you need to tap into your audience’s interests. Branded hashtags, user-generated content challenges, and responding to comments and posts about your brand can all help you earn more brand mentions.
Whichever way you choose to secure brand mentions, it’s important to share them on social media for even more impact.
Measuring The Value of Brand Mentions
It’s all very well collecting brand mentions, but you won’t know if they have helped your online visibility if you don’t know how to measure them.
Here are some tools to help you measure brand mentions:
- Google Alerts – A free tool that tracks brand mentions across indexed pages. You can set up alerts for your brand name, website domain, product, or competitor names, and it will send you an email notification when there is a mention. A helpful tool for basic monitoring, as it doesn’t offer detailed analytics.
- Mention – A paid-for, real-time tracking tool that monitors brand mentions across websites, blogs, social media, forums, and more. You can set up alerts for all things related to your brand name as well as important keywords. It gives you a lot more data than Google Alerts, as it allows you to filter mentions by platform, sentiment, and influence level.
- Brand24 – A brand monitoring tool that monitors media coverage. It provides sentiment analysis data so you can evaluate the quality of mentions.
- Ahrefs – As well as being an excellent tool for tracking backlinks, Ahrefs also allows you to monitor brand mentions that could be excellent linking opportunities.
- Semrush – Provides media coverage metrics so you can get a solid overview of your online mentions. Semrush also enables competitor tracking, allowing you to identify opportunities for new brand mentions.
Brand mention tracking isn’t just about how many times your brand gets mentioned. There are 3 critical factors that you need to track to evaluate how influential your brand mentions are:
- Sentiment – When your brand is mentioned in a positive and relevant context, it boosts trust signals and your authority for AI models and traditional search. On the other hand, negative mentions or mentions that are off-topic are less likely to be detected by models and can actually harm your authority.
- Reach – This is how much exposure a particular brand mention has had. Take a look at the publication’s traffic and social media following, including how many people have shared the content. Mentions with a large reach make you even more discoverable in AI search algorithms.
- Source Authority – Mentions in high-authority and well-respected online publications and platforms carry more weight than those in low-quality ones.
When your brand mentions are scoring highly on these points, you are putting your business in the best position to be discovered by traditional search engines and AI models.
Future of SEO: Brand Mentions and AI Search Integration
As the search evolution continues towards AI and LLMs, many have been left wondering what brand mentions mean for backlinks and vice versa. When it comes to the future of SEO, brand mentions will become an increasingly important SEO tactic for growing digital authority and visibility in both traditional and AI search. That doesn’t mean that AI SEO in 2025 doesn’t have room for backlinks.
When used together, brand mentions and backlinks can lead to some big SEO wins and help score you some hefty semantic SEO points in the process, which allows AI models to understand your brand and makes it more likely that you’ll be featured in LLM and AI responses.
Why Brand Mentions Are The New Backlinks
Classic SEO is evolving as AI-powered search engines gather more momentum. Traditional link building techniques are still essential, but brand mentions backlinks are the new surefire way to build your authority and visibility in the new age of search.
The importance of brand mentions is not solely about whether they have a link attached to them, though. This is because the way that AI discovers content means it recognises unlinked mentions as digital trust signals too. The more your brand is mentioned online and in a positive light, the more impact this will have on your AI search discoverability. To have a successful SEO strategy in 2025 is to have a strong brand presence online, and brand mentions are an important off-page SEO signal going forward. Need help with brand mentions? Get in touch with our professional team today!
