Definition
A brand mention is a reference to your brand name in text without a link: in an article, a review, a forum post, a podcast transcript or — increasingly important — in the answer of an AI engine. Where a backlink is a clickable reference, a mention is only the name. Yet it is a signal that search engines and language models use to determine how well known, trustworthy and relevant a brand is.
Google has used mentions for years as one of the signals around entities: the more often a brand is named in trustworthy context next to certain topics, the stronger the link between brand and topic in the Knowledge Graph. With language models it works more directly. A model that repeatedly encounters during training or retrieval that a certain brand is 'the platform for autonomous SEO' will reproduce that association when someone asks which platforms exist.
In AI answers there are therefore two levels of visibility. The citation: your page is linked as a source. The mention: your brand is named in the text of the answer, with or without a source. For questions such as 'which tool should I choose for X' or 'best suppliers of Y', the mention is decisive, because there the model names brands based on what it knows about them, not on the basis of a single page.
You do not build mentions on your own site, but outside it: mentions in industry media and comparison articles, reviews on independent platforms, partner pages, podcasts and webinars, listings in directories and on Wikipedia or Wikidata where justified, and active presence in the communities where your market talks (Reddit, LinkedIn, professional forums). Consistency is crucial: the same name, the same description and the same core facts everywhere.
You measure by asking a fixed set of questions to ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and AI Mode and counting in how many answers your brand is named, in which context and alongside which competitors. Traze does this per engine and per topic and shows share of voice: the share of answers in which you are named versus the competition.