Unlinked brand mentions are unpaid invoices
Somewhere out there, articles already mention your brand without linking to you. Each one is authority you earned and never collected. We find them, convert them, and put them to work.
What are unlinked brand mentions?
An unlinked brand mention is any page that names your brand, product, or people without linking to your site. They pile up naturally — journalists on deadline, roundup writers, forum answers — and most brands have far more of them than they suspect.
Two reasons they matter. For search, a mention converted to a link transfers the authority the coverage already carries — and the ask succeeds surprisingly often, because the writer already chose to mention you. For AI engines, mentions matter even without the link: assistants read text, not just link graphs, and a brand named across many independent pages becomes the brand their answers name. But ambiguous, link-less mentions can get misattributed — the conversion work also cleans up who gets credit.
This is the tidiest corner of digital PR: the coverage exists, someone just has to collect it. It pairs well with PR for SEO campaigns that generate fresh mentions to convert.
How the reclamation works
Find every mention
We sweep news, blogs, forums, and AI answers for your brand, products, and executives — including misspellings and old names — and score each by the authority at stake.
Convert the ones that count
Polite, specific outreach to the writer or editor. No templates blasted at scale — which is why the conversion rate stays worth the effort.
Keep the pipeline running
New mentions appear monthly; monitoring catches them while the article is fresh and the writer still remembers writing it — when asks convert best.
Frequently asked questions
How do you find unlinked brand mentions?
Continuous sweeps across news, blogs, forums, and review sites for your brand names, product names, executives, and common misspellings — minus every page that already links. Each hit is scored by the linking-page authority, so the outreach queue starts with the mentions worth the most.
What share of mentions convert into links?
Fresh mentions on active publications convert best — the writer remembers the piece and the edit takes a minute. Older or syndicated mentions convert less. Across a typical backlog expect a meaningful minority to convert, which is a strong return considering the coverage already exists and nothing new has to be earned.
Do unlinked mentions help SEO even without conversion?
They are not worthless — engines read entity mentions as context about your brand. But a converted link passes measurable authority a bare mention does not. The practical answer: mentions help, links from those same pages help more, so collecting them is close to free ranking value.
How do mentions affect AI answers?
AI engines learn who you are from text across many pages, linked or not. Wide, consistent mentions make assistants name you more and misattribute you less. The audit regularly finds AI answers crediting a competitor for something written about you — exactly the kind of thing the cleanup fixes.
Is the outreach going to annoy journalists?
Not the way we do it. One short, specific note to the person who wrote the piece, pointing at the exact sentence, with the URL ready. No follow-up chains, no templates. Writers mostly oblige — the mention was their choice in the first place.
What Our Clients Say
The audit found 63 unlinked mentions we never knew existed, including two on DR80+ news sites. A third converted within six weeks. Cheapest authority we've ever acquired.
Paulo C.
SEO Director, fintech
ChatGPT kept crediting our biggest feature to a competitor with a similar name. Their cleanup got the source articles corrected and linked — the answers followed a month later.
Jenny K.
Brand Manager
Steady, unglamorous wins every month. Not the explosive kind of campaign, but the ROI math is hard to argue with.
Ravi P.
Founder, dev platform
From the blog
All articlesHow much authority are you leaving unclaimed?
The free mention audit lists every page that names you without linking, ranked by the authority you''d reclaim. Most brands are surprised by the total.
Run my mention audit