How to Find (Unlinked) Brand Mentions and Turn Them Into Backlinks in 2025?

According to Ahrefs, brand mentions, even without a link, show the strongest correlation (0.664) with search and AI visibility, proving their power in today’s digital marketing. For brands, unlinked mentions aren’t just a sign of awareness. They’re an opportunity to boost credibility, track influence, and secure valuable backlinks. In this article, I’ll show you why unlinked mentions matter, how they can benefit your brand, and how to turn them into backlinks!

Quick Summary:

1. Unlinked brand mentions are references to your brand without a hyperlink. They’re easy opportunities to earn backlinks, boosting SEO, credibility, and visibility.

2. Direct @mentions, replies, hashtags, and blog post mentions carry different value in how conversations spread. Understanding these helps refine your backlinks strategy.

3. Recipe to convert unlinked mentions to backlinks:

Identify unlinked mentions (Brand24/ Google Alerts) → check site authority (Ahrefs/Semrush) → find author/site owner → outreach with a polite request.

Anytime your brand is mentioned online, there’s an opportunity to turn that mention into a backlink.

What is it?

A backlink is simply a link from one website to yours. 

Why bother about backlinks?

They’re beneficial because they are one of the most important factors that improve your website’s search engine optimization (SEO).

In other words, they can help you rank higher in, for example, Google search results, leading to more traffic and higher brand visibility.

There are several methods of acquiring backlinks.

Using unlinked brand mentions is one of them.

Although it is not as popular as other ways (research and then outreach for a specific anchor, for example), it has a very high effectiveness potential. 

How to do it? 

The first step is to find any unlinked mentions of your brand.

Once you’ve found the mention, reach out to the author and ask if they would be willing to add a link to your website.

If they agree, you’ll have successfully turned an unlinked mention into a backlink!

But how to find those unlinked mentions? Let’s get to it.

What are unlinked brand mentions?

Unlinked brand mentions are pieces of content that reference your brand by mentioning names connected to your brand, but don’t link back to your website.

Such mentions are low-hanging fruit waiting for you to pick them up. For example:

• Product name
• Service name
• Brand name
• CEO name

You can find those mentions in many places, such as social media, podcasts, videos, forums, websites, blogs, and news sites.

As you want to expand link building, you should mostly be interested in searching for relevant mentions across websites, blogs, and news sites.

Here’s what TimeCamp says about this method:

“We monitor content on specific topics to identify sites or individuals who can help us with SEO efforts by posting or exchanging links,”

– Maksymilian Kujawa, Product Marketer at TimeCamp.

Types of unlinked brand mentions

When you think of unlinked mentions, you probably start with your brand name.

But that’s just the beginning!

In reality, anything related to your brand can appear in content without a backlink, and that’s where opportunities hide.

Mentions can include:

• Product names
• Services
• Slogans
• Executive team members
• Sampaign hashtags
• Event titles
• Or even your visuals, like a logo or branded image.

Each of these is a potential backlink opportunity hiding in plain sight.

Let’s talk about one of today’s marketing masters – Duolingo.

They’re viral, but are they using this opportunity to its full potential?

If I were Duolingo, here’s what I’d definitely track:

• The main brand name: Duolingo
• Products and services:Duolingo English Test, Duolingo Plus / Super Duolingo
• Mascot: Duo / Duo the Owl
• Campaigns: “Death of Duo” ot “#learnontiktok
• Executives: Luis von Ahn (CEO), Severin Hacker (co-founder), Zaria Parves (marketing)

I’ve seen countless university admissions blogs recommend the Duolingo English Test, but forget to link back to the official site:

Or lifestyle blogs that share Duo memes without crediting the app:

Both have great visibility, but also lose SEO opportunities.

That’s why I recommend making a list like this for your brand.

The wider your net, the more unlinked mentions you’ll uncover, and the more backlink opportunities you can chase down.

How to find unlinked brand mentions?

When someone mentions your brand on social media, you get a notification inside its app. How to find unlinked mentions from other sources?

Well, you need a media monitoring tool to do that.

Although media monitoring tools are not directly SEO dedicated, their functionality makes them very useful when looking for potential backlinks and analyzing mentions. 

These tools search in real-time for predefined keywords on the Internet.

That means you will see who mentions your brand, products, and services across social media, on websites, blogs, discussion forums, review pages, and other publicly available sources online.

Apart from the ability to find your unlinked brand mentions, advanced media monitoring tools offer plenty of analytical features that come in handy, too.

With those insights, you will be able to improve your digital marketing strategy and get to know your target audience better.

So, how to find unlinked mentions?

There are two main methods:

1. Using the advanced tool
2. Using Google Alerts

Let’s go through both of them.

How to use a media monitoring tool to find unlinked mentions?

I’ll show you the first one based on the Brand24 tool example.

01 Define keywords

First thing you need to do in an advanced media monitoring tool is define the keywords connected to your brand you want to keep track of.

They could be your brand name, product names, service names, website address, or a CEO’s name.

In general, those keywords should be proper to become anchors of backlinks.

That’s exactly the analysis I previously did for Duolingo.

To make it clearer – here’s another example.

If I worked for Tesla and wanted to find unlinked brand mentions, I would monitor the following keywords:

• Tesla
• Cybertruck
• Model S
• Model X
• Model Y
• Elon Musk

Now it’s time you should consider keywords that match your business, products, and services.

02 Set up the project

The next step is to set up projects that will track your keywords.

Once you create such projects, the tool will gather web mentions that include them.

The sources of unlinked mentions depend on the tool you use.

For example, Brand24 monitors news sites, blogs, forums, reviews, newsletters, podcasts, Medium, and social media platforms, such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Quora, YouTube, TikTok, and Twitch.

Take a look at the video tutorial:

03 Go to the Mentions Tab

Here you can discover new mentions, and filter them to find the best link-building opportunities.

The Mentions Tab consists of a few sections:

• Mention feed
• Sources
• Volume and reach chart
• Filters

To find unlinked brand mentions, you should focus on the mentions feed.

By default, they’re sorted according to time, but you can also sort them by popularity or influence.

04 Add filters

By default, the tool displays all mentions from all sources.

I advise you to mark News, Blogs, and the Web as sources of mentions as these will be the most probable for backlinks.

As you can see on a screenshot, mentions have an Influencer Score.

This metric gives insight into which source or author has the most significant impact on social media or the web – the higher the number, the more popular the given source is. 

The Influencer Score is a great starting point for evaluating the domain.

The next step you should take is to check domain authority using SEO tools such as Ahrefs and Semrush. 

Pro tip: Brand24 tool conducts sentiment analysis of each mention. Look for online mentions that have positive or neutral sentiments. It will be much easier for you to get backlinks from such sources.

05 Look for other potential keywords

There is one more feature that might be helpful.

The context of a discussion presents the most popular words that accompany the monitored phrase.

After clicking on a particular word, the tool will link you to a list of mentions that contain that word.

Read more: Learn about Backlinks Checker

Ok, but Brand24 is the advanced option and as you can see, it offers much more than just finding those unlinked mentions.

If you want to just be alerted when a mention of your brand occurs, Google Alerts can be suitable.

How to use Google Alerts to find unlinked mentions?

First, keep in mind that many users complain about it missing some mentions or being late with alerts.

So, is it good? It’s free 😉

Here’s how to use it:

01 Create an Alert

Go to Google Alerts and enter your brand name in the search bar. You’ll instantly see a preview of existing mentions.

02 Configure the Alerts

You can customize how alerts are delivered and choose from options like:

• “Deliver to” – Select the email address where alerts should land.
• “How often: – Choose “As-it-happens,” “At most once a day,” or “At most once a week.”
• “Sources” – Keep it on “Automatic” for all sources, or select specific ones (news, blogs, discussions, etc.).
• “Language & Region” – Either track all, or narrow to your market.
• “How many” – Pick “Only the best results” for filtered mentions, or “All results” if you don’t want to miss anything.

03 Click “Create Alert.”

Your brand mention tracker is now live.

04 Repeat the proccess for other variations.

Don’t stop with your company name. Create alerts for:

• Common misspellings
• Product and service names
• Campaign hashtags or slogans
• Key executives or spokespersons

How to turn an unlinked brand mentions into links?

Unlinked mentions of your brand online can be great opportunities to earn valuable backlinks.

However, not all mentions result in links – you need to take action to make that happen.

Yep, link building needs effort.

Now, I’ll show you how I go about claiming unlinked brand mentions and turn them into links. Let’s get started!

1. Find unlinked brand mentions using a media monitoring tool such as Brand24. Choose mentions that have positive or neutral sentiments.
2. Use a SEO tool (Ahrefs or Semrush) to check the website’s authority and other metrics such as URL rating, domain rating, number of backlinks,  referring domains, organic keywords, organic traffic, and traffic value.
3. Find contact information. It could be the author of an article or a particular site owner.
4. Reach out and ask for a link. It’s best to offer something which will provide value mutual value. More tips here: Outreach Email Example.
5. Convert unlinked mentions into links. Rinse and repeat!
   

Discover how Chilli Fruit got such results — read the case study.

And there is one important thing I need to tell you… 

Backlinks monitoring should be a part of your digital marketing strategy.

Why?

Because a website with a backlink can change the owner, or your linked mentions can turn into broken links. 

Thanks to regular monitoring, you will be up to date.

Why are unlinked brand mentions important?

Every unlinked brand mention is an opportunity to acquire a backlink and grow your website’s SEO authority and your brand visibility in search engines.

Your backlinks (links to your website on other websites) are seen by Google as a vote of confidence, and a signal that your website is valuable, relevant, and attractive to users.

However, it’s important to remember that links are not equal, and some might even do more harm than good.

Furthermore, even if you won’t gain a backlink, each mention increases your brand awareness.

Conclusion

Do you want to improve your SEO results? You need backlinks. Lots of valuable backlinks. Yet, link building is a challenge nowadays.

The situation changes when someone has already mentioned your brand online. It is much easier to establish a relationship with site owners and gain a link.

Do you have a link-building tactic? I strongly advise you to build such a strategy.

It’s actually not as difficult as it may seem.

After reading this article, you already know how to do it. It’s time to put this helpful link-building strategy into practice.

What can you do? Reach out to the sites that have mentioned your brand but haven’t linked back to you, and politely ask them to add a link. If you do this consistently, you’ll start seeing results, the number of gained backlinks will rise, and your SEO rankings will improve.

No doubt, the media monitoring tool will help you do that. So sign up for a 14-day free trial to find your unlinked mentions. 

FAQ

1. Do unlinked brand mentions help SEO?

Yes, unlinked brand mentions can help SEO.

While they may not have the same direct impact as a backlink, they can still contribute to increased brand awareness and credibility, which can lead to higher search engine rankings.

Plus, they’re a key factor for AI visibility.

2. How to get unlinked mentions?

You can get unlinked mentions in two main ways: by earning them and by tracking them.

• To earn them, focus on visibility. Publish content people want to share, launch creative campaigns, or appear in interviews and events.
• To track them, set up Google Alerts for your brand name and variations and use monitoring tools like Brand24.

3. How do you get brand mentions?

There are several ways to get brand mentions:

1. Create valuable and shareable content: Publish high-quality, informative, and engaging content that people want to share and talk about.
2. Engage with your audience: Interact with your audience on social media platforms and respond to comments and messages to encourage further discussions about your brand.
3. Collaborate with influencers: Partner with influencers in your industry to amplify your brand’s reach and visibility.
4. Attend and sponsor events: Participate in industry events, conferences, and workshops to network with others in your field, leading to organic brand mentions.
5. Monitor online conversations: Use social listening tools to track brand mentions and join conversations where it’s relevant and appropriate.
6. Provide exceptional customer service: Go above and beyond to satisfy your customers, turning them into brand advocates who will gladly mention your brand.
7. Leverage public relations: Reach out to media outlets and industry publications with press releases, interviews, and guest articles to increase your brand’s exposure.