Brand mentions have been a contentious topic in the SEO community for the better part of a decade.
If you read three articles about brand mentions and SEO, you’ll get four or five different answers around whether or not they are an SEO ranking factor and the role that they play in an SEO strategy.
So then, we thought we would throw our hat in the ring and give our two cents on whether or not brand mentions are an SEO ranking factor, some direct insights that we have heard over the years from Google themselves, and whether or not you should be chasing brand mentions as part of an SEO strategy in 2026.
What Are Brand Mentions?
Before we dive into things, let’s start with a little bit of housekeeping. Brand mentions or unlinked mentions of your brand are exactly what it says on the tin.
These are citations or mentions of your brand on the internet that do not feature a link to your website. As opposed to a linked brand mention, where you or your business may be cited as a source and you may receive a link from that article, an unlinked brand mention is a mention of your brand that does not link back to your website, social profiles, or anywhere else that you have an online presence.
For clarity, let’s specify that when we discuss brand mentions and SEO rankings, we mean unlinked brand mentions.
We already know that linked brand mentions or backlinks are a direct SEO ranking factor, so for the sake of this article, whenever we talk about brand mentions, assume we mean unlinked mentions where a brand is mentioned, but no link is provided back to that website.
Are Brand Mentions an SEO Ranking Factor?
No, brand mentions are not a direct SEO ranking factor.
Unlike linked brand mentions or backlinks that mention a brand and link to the corresponding website, unlinked brand mentions are not a direct SEO ranking factor.
As of 2025, there has been no evidence or studies published that confirm that brand mentions improve SEO rankings.
Where Does the Brand Mention SEO Benefit Speculation Come From?
There has been plenty of speculation and debate over the years around the power of unlinked brand mentions. But where did this idea come from?
A lot of the speculation around the notion of brand mentions being an SEO ranking factor comes from Google’s Panda Patent back in 2012 which mentions “implied links” as a signal that could impact SEO rankings in the same way that traditional “backlinks” impact SEO performance.
“An implied link is a reference to a target resource, e.g., a citation to the target resource, which is included in a source resource but is not an express link to the target resource. Thus, a resource in the group can be the target of an implied link without a user being able to navigate to the resource by following the implied link.”
John Mueller actually addressed the speculation back in 2022 in response to a question posed during one of Google’s SEO Office Hours sessions around whether unlinked brand mentions had any SEO merit.
Mueller said the following:
“I don’t know.
I think that’s kind of tricky because we don’t really know what the context is there.
I mean, I don’t think it’s a bad thing, just for users.
Because if they can find your website through that mention, then that’s always a good thing.
But I wouldn’t assume that there’s like some – I don’t know – SEO factor that is trying to figure out where someone is mentioning your website name.”
Final Thoughts
John Mueller confirming that there is no assumed benefit that comes from unlinked brand mentions, as well as the absence of any studies to prove otherwise, is good enough reason for us to say that unlinked brand mentions are not a direct ranking factor.
As search continues to change and the advent of AI Overviews introduces new ranking signals, we may update this article in the future. However, as of late 2025, we would advise that there is no direct SEO benefit from unlinked brand mentions.
