Brand mentions without backlinks are becoming increasingly valuable in today's AI-driven search landscape. Engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google's AI Overviews pull from a wide array of high-authority sources, not just those with direct backlinks. Unlinked brand mentions still help shape your credibility, topical authority, and contextual relevance, which all factor into how and where your brand surfaces in generative answers. In other words, even without a link, your brand's name still teaches AI systems what you're known for. At PressRoom, we're starting to treat brand mentions almost like "citations" in a semantic web—signals that reinforce what your brand is associated with across multiple trusted sources. To increase high-quality brand mentions, I recommend: > Original research or insights - Create proprietary data, trend reports, or expert commentary that others will quote and reference. > Media outreach with value-first pitching - Offer your unique POV to journalists, podcast hosts, or bloggers, especially those covering industry shifts. > Active thought leadership - Post consistently on LinkedIn or industry forums. We've had clients quoted in articles just because a reporter saw a sharp take on a trending topic. > Contribute to community content - Participate in webinars, roundups, and open Q&As. AI models often pick up brand signals from these more informal platforms. Even without backlinks, brand mentions are shaping the way AI "understands" your company. The more relevant, trusted, and consistent those mentions are, the more visible you'll be in generative results.
Brand mentions without backlinks are becoming a lot more important with AI-driven search engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google's AI mode. These platforms don't just rely on traditional links, they also look at how often your brand gets mentioned across the web to understand authority and relevance. Even if there's no clickable link, just seeing your name in trusted sources can boost your visibility and credibility in AI-driven results. To increase these mentions, focus on getting your brand into online conversations: answer industry questions on forums and Q&A sites, contribute to news stories or expert roundups, and partner with other businesses for joint projects or features. You can also use tools like HARO or Featured to get quoted as an expert. The key is to show up in as many reputable places as possible, because these brand signals help AI models "know" your business, even if you're not getting a backlink every time.
Brand mentions without backlinks still boost visibility in AI-driven search engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI mode. These AI tools gather data from multiple sources and pick up on brand signals even without direct links. Think of mentions as word-of-mouth in a crowded marketplace, they add credibility and relevance. To increase these mentions, businesses should focus on creating shareable content, engaging in conversations on social media, and building relationships with industry influencers. Sponsoring events or collaborating on podcasts also helps get your name out there. Remember, the goal is to be talked about often and positively. AI pays attention to context and frequency, so repeated mentions across diverse platforms can sway rankings. So, get people buzzing about your brand, even if they don't always link to you directly. It's like planting seeds everywhere and letting the wind spread your name far and wide.
This is the biggest differentiator between SEO and GEO. With classic SEO, you could rank without any brand signals like reviews or brand mentions. But if you want your brand to appear in AI generated responses (for commercial queries), you need new signals. Based on our research at Rankability analyzing thousands of AI generated responses, it seems that unlinked brand mentions are not created equal. For example, getting on a listicle on a trusted website seems to carry more weight. We're finding that your brand must be mentioned with other relevant entities (brands) to have any chance of performance. The best place to start is to focus your effort on getting on all listicles. It's also important to have an active presence on Reddit and YouTube because they're both cited frequently in Google's AI Mode, ChatGPT, and Perplexity. And one other "old, but new again" technique that seems to influence LLMs are press releases. It's not because of the link value. It's likely because of distributing positive sentiment and news about the brand, which is used in the static training corpus for the LLMs.
I'm Enes Gunes, founder of Scaligo, an AI-adopted marketing subscription service for small and mid-market brands. We don't just theorize about AI; we ship it, measure it, and iterate until Google (and humans) clap back with clicks. One client, Join It, saw zero visits from ChatGPT in December. By March, it was getting up to 20 visits on a good day usually early in the week (Monday through Wednesday). What changed? https://www.scaligo.com/blog/saas-seo-case-study-join-it We focused on LLM discoverability, not just rankings: Structured their content with FAQ schema, clear H-tag logic, and natural-language titles. Added entity-rich metadata and citations from trusted sources to strengthen AI confidence Published content designed for AI summarization: dense, skimmable, and fact-first and more. We've also seen clients surface more often when Google's SGE or Perplexity snapshot a response especially when we include how-to guides and lists formatted for zero-click answers. This shift isn't theoretical. We monitor traffic from AI platforms in Looker Studio, segmenting by referrer, and run monthly "AI mentions" checks to keep refining what's working. If this fits your piece, I'd be glad to be part of it and happy to show more data, strategy or structure experiments behind it.
Brand mentions without backlinks can serve a purpose in all AI driven search engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, or Google AI mode. These search engines use traditional SEO signals (like backlinks), but they also look at the broader context of your brand presence across the web as a signal as well. Additionally, AI is more sophisticated now than ever at detecting brand mentions without a linking signal, as it looks at the context of the mention, sentiment, relevancy from multiple pieces of content. When a brand is mentioned regularly in different types of content (i.e. articles, social media, podcasts, news mentions etc.), AI models can then associate brand mentions with a brand's identity, product offerings, and reputation. And seeing a brand mentioned as part of visibility can lead to more instances of your brand showing up in a search engine's AI postings because the search engine tries to provide relevant and timely information, and brand mentions provide the signal. Building brand mentions without backlinks is possible, make sure to use of the following methods: Content Marketing: Develop content that adds value and is shareable so that it will create mentions naturally. The goal in 2025 is to create data-based or fact-based articles that industry leaders want to use as any reference. Influencer and Media Outreach: Collaborate with influencers or media sources that will talk about your brand in their content. Those mentions, even without backlinks, will improve your brands authority and awareness in AI searching. Social Media Engagement: Connect into other conversations across social media platforms like Twitter, LinkedIn, or TikTok. Creating content around trending topics or events typically allows you to be mentioned, increasing your digital footprint. PR and Thought Leadership: Establish your brand as an expert in your field by writing guest articles, engaging speakers, or joining conversations in your industry while being highlighted in creative ways. Each of these opportunities are likely to create a moment for you and get behind authoritative and high-traffic sources. By following these three strategies, companies can increase their online existence as well as the ability to get references within AI-based search engines, altogether without traditional backlinks.
AI-driven search engines assess the authority of a website in some different ways compared to traditional search engines. One way that they differ is that when they are assessing things like links and mentions, they aren't just looking at the existence of those things and the authority of the other sites including them - they actually look at the context of those things. Similar to how quality tends to be better than quantity when it comes to backlinks, AI-driven search engines analyze what is actually being said in links and mentions to assess sentiment and authority.
Brand mentions play a huge role in AI optimization. Large language models are trained on huge volumes of content and use it to "reason" and reach conclusions, meaning the backlink focus of traditional SEO is much less important now than general PR and brand visibility. Simply put, when journalists and other publishers talk about your brand, AI "listens" as it accesses and understands this content. By far the most effective strategy I've found for increasing brand mentions is to do the opposite of what conventional SEOs do. Instead of reaching out with a transparent attempt to win a backlink from a guest post, reach out to publishers with a genuine, value-focused approach and offer them something interesting, like a statistic or study you've commissioned. This approach establishes your brand as an informational leader within its field and gives you a huge advantage both for conventional SEO, as many will be willing to link for you, and also for building the branded mentions that are critical for earning coverage in AI answers.
AI Driven search engines, not only use a mix of various techniques but also a variety of sources unlike traditional searches. One of the key technique that is a part of Natural language processing is Named Entity Recognition, which helps AI tools can identify objects, persons or brands and categorize them. And this is not only by using web crawlers but running the language model on tons of data from various sources like, social media posts, mentions, ads, searches, metadata etc. Also various tools various techniques. For example perplexity heavily relies on web search, Gemini similarly uses google search, but ChatGPT relies on training data patterns and co occurrence relationships. This is crucial, because products will be categorized based on their relations and relevance. For example, if I introduce a new mobile phone brand, the more I can have contents that relates it to Apple Iphone creates more visibility. AI also trains more on Q&A formatted data, which is something businesses can leverage. As some of the strategies to increase brand mentions, businesses must focus on creating diverse contents in various sources. For example, run a ad campaign that spans social media, forums, new publications and community websites (like reddit). Have the brand mention in various places. Instead of traditional back linking, try comprehensive brand mentioning across the various above media. Create more structured metadata content that AI can easily understand and relate to customers questions. For example, using a FAQ model to talk about the product description, and to cover various aspects of the product from customer point of view. Curate the customer reviews and make them available with brand mentions. Relate the brand to known brands so that AI can categorize them together and the more closer the relation, the higher chance the brand shows up in the mention. While these are some techniques and strategies for short term to help a brand mention increase, its crucial that the businesses monitor them and keep improving. For example, a curiosity triggering image is a good ad campaign for human brains but not for AI today, there should be sufficient descriptive comprehensive text. When AI models advance, images and videos should also be used to improve the visibility of the brand.