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Today, brand awareness is everything. 

No matter what your business is about, you need to boost brand awareness to stand out in the market, and particularly in AI search results. 

These days, modern search isn’t about keywords and Google rankings anymore. AI-powered search tools and chatbots, like the ones people use to ask questions or find products, are shaping what users see first.

And, this is where brand mentions come in. They signal to both humans and AI that your brand is legitimate, valuable, and worth talking about. In this guide, we’ll explain what brand mentions are, why they matter, and how to get your brand mentioned in trusted sources. 

What are Brand Mentions?

Brand mentions are instances where a company’s, product’s, or service’s name is mentioned online, such as in articles or reviews. 

Here’s an example of one of SayNine’s brand mentions in a relevant listicle about the best SEO agencies providing contextual link building services.

Why Are Brand Mentions Important?

You may ask why brand mentions matter if I can just build a regular backlink.

Brand mention is a backlink too, but with added value, which is brand credibility and awareness. The more recognized your business is, the more users and search engines are likely to trust your brand. 

Especially now, with AI advancements, it has become essential to optimize your website for Google’s AI results for more visibility.

And it’s not just us saying this. Ahrefs analyzed 75,000 brands to see what influences brand visibility in AI Overviews.

Here’s what they found․

In short, you need brand mentions for SEO more than ever to appear in AI overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and other LLMs people turn to find answers to their questions.

Types of Brand Mentions

Brand mentions break into two main categories: linked and unlinked. 

Linked brand mentions, as the name suggests, are mentions of your brand that include a clickable link back to your site. This can improve traffic and overall SEO.

Unlinked brand mentions, in contrast, are mentions of your brand without a hyperlink. While they don’t directly improve SEO, they increase brand awareness and credibility.

Ahrefs allows users to track brand mentions, both linked and unlinked. And, your goal should be to find and turn unlinked brand mentions into linked ones, if possible.

Here’s how to find them. 

Here are some things we recommend:

Get Your Brand Mentioned With SayNine

We’ve already spilled the tea: yes, we do brand mentions. It’s real.

And honestly, Mariam explains it way better than we ever could in text, so check out her video. And when that spark of “oh, I need this” hits, just ping us.

Curious how it all works? Here’s a quick look behind the scenes.

Below, you can see a client spreadsheet example.

When building brand mentions for clients, we focus on these key priorities and suggest you do the same:

Pricing:

At first, you may think the price is a bit higher than what you’d pay for a standard backlink. It’s true, but there’s a good reason for that. 

Brand mentions are way harder to build than regular backlinks, as they are promotional to some extent. Not all websites agree to link to a homepage. That’s why we provide a limited number of brand mentions each month: from 2 to 10 maximum. 

If other agencies promise more than that, then it’s probably not legit, or these brand mentions come from spammy and suspicious sources, which can do more harm than good. 

So, what does this all mean? We spend more time, effort, and resources to build brand mention that improves authority and brand visibility at the same time. 

Here’s how our brand mention packages break down: 

You pick the plan that feels right, and we manage the rest. By the time you know it, your brand is becoming the topic of conversation.

Big or small, every brand has a story worth sharing. Let’s make sure people hear yours.

So, what do you say? Ready to build a brand people talk about?

FAQ About Brand Mentions