The year 2025 is the year of AI, where linkbuilding has changed. Simple backlinks in content are not as essential nowadays as brand mentions are. In modern SEO, brand mentions are not an element of PR now, but are an important aspect for boosting visibility in AI.
People today search for everything on AI models like ChatGPT, Gemini, etc, rather than Google because AI is fast and gives an answer to their point. Brand mentions made your website visible in AI searches. How?
This guide helps you to clear all your questions about brand mentions.
What Are Brand Mentions?
A brand mention happens when your brand, company, or site is featured in a blog, listicle, news outlet, forums, podcasts, etc.
Brand mention can be a linked or unlinked. A linked mention includes a backlink to your site’s homepage, and an unlinked brand mention just includes the name of the brand only.
In the following example, the following are the brand mentions of QuickBooks, Xero, and LinkMyBooks are provided, in which there’s a clickable hyperlink to the respective sites.
In the 2nd example, there’s a mention of QuickBooks, but it is unlinked(no hyperlink back to the site).
According to modern SEO and LLMs, an unlinked brand mention is considered equal to a linked one. Why?
Because Google AI overviews and AI search models look at which sites are more mentioned or featured in blogs. It shows trust and the worthiness of the featured site that even its competitors are taking and mentioning their brand’s name.
Why Brand Mentions are important in 2025
AI Visibility
Google’s AI-driven results, like AI Overviews, prioritize brands that are frequently mentioned online. A study by Ahrefs shows that branded mentions on the web have the 0.664 strongest correlation with brand visibility in AI Overview. Backlinks are far behind in correlating with the AI overview.
Keeping in view the last example, when we search on Google for the top accounting tools. In the AI overview, Google shows QuickBooks on the 1st number. This is due to the brand mentions across the web of QuickBooks, whether it is linked or unlinked.
In my opinion, it’s better to be featured in listicle blogs rather than in between the content because Google AI Overview and AI models get their content from the web.
When you look at the right side of this AI overview. There are links of blogs from where the content has been taken, that what accounting tools are best. These are all listicle blogs like “top 10 accounting tools” or “best 5 accounting tools”
In the AI world, listicle linkbuilding means featured in listicles are more effective for AI visibility than being featured between the content.
Building Authority Through Mentions
Every brand mention, whether it’s linked or not, has the power to boost your entity footprint. As Google connects mentions across the web, it strengthens your brand’s authority within its knowledge graph, directly impacting search visibility and trust signals.
Dofollow backlinks to the homepage with randomly anchored texts can affect the domain authority, but homepage links with the anchor of your brand name must increase visibility and domain authority.
Link-Building Opportunity
Unlinked mentions exist on authoritative domains that already endorse your brand.
With a simple outreach strategy, you can turn these into high-quality backlinks with minimal effort.
How can you find unlinked brand mentions?
The tool I personally used to find unlinked Brand mentions is Ahrefs Content Explorer. Suppose you are the “Nike” company. You just have to write the brand name in Content Explorer.
Here are 951,336 mentions. Quite a lot!
You have to apply the filters of the domain rating and domain traffic to lower this number.
Let’s restrict the sites to a domain rating of 30-50 and traffic of 1k-5k, as there is no need to chase unlinked brand mentions on lower-quality sites. When you apply these filters, you will be restricted to a short number of sites.
Export the 1000 sites into a Google Sheet and outreach the unlinked brand mentions.
How can you know which sites are linking to Nike and which are not? You can use tools like the Free link checker tool(by Scrapebox) or Screaming Frog SEO Spider to check this.
You can also use Google to do so. Just copy the code and add your brand name first. We are using Nike as an example, so,
intext:nike -nike.com -twitter.com -facebook.com -pinterest.com -youtube.com |
By doing this, you must know where my brand is mentioned, whether it’s on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, or YouTube.
Conclusion
Brand mentions are no longer a PR tactic, but it is essential for your brand visibility in AI-driven searches and on Google. They do not just give you AI visibility but also give you domain authority and traffic.
If you want to be featured in listicles and on different sites before your competitors, feel free to contact us.
