What an unlinked brand mention is
An unlinked brand mention is a page that names your company, product or website in its text without linking to it. A review that calls your tool "the one we switched to", a roundup that lists you in a table, a news story that quotes your founder: if none of them link to your site, each one is a link you could ask for.
They are the friendliest kind of link request. You aren't asking a stranger to consider your product. The writer already chose to mention you, and readers who see your name have no way to click through to you. Asking to fix that helps them as much as it helps you. Getting the link back is usually called link reclamation.
How this brand mention finder works
- Search. We look up your brand name in an index of recently crawled English web pages (one search per lookup).
- Filter. We remove your own website and every subdomain of it, software review directories and listing profiles, forums, spam pages, non-English pages and pages older than three years. We keep one page per site.
- Check each page live. We open the top pages and look for any link to your domain, including subdomains like
app.orblog., and note whether a link is dofollow or nofollow. - Sort. Pages that mention you with no link come first, each with the reason it's worth an ask. Pages that already link to you and pages we couldn't verify are folded away below.
A page is only called unlinked when we loaded it in full, found your brand in it, and found no link to your site. Anything we couldn't verify is labelled "couldn't check", never unlinked.
How to ask for the link
Keep it short and specific. Find the person who can edit the page, usually the author named in the byline (the free author contact finder can help), and send one plain note:
Hi Sam,
Thanks for including Acme Analytics in your piece on churn dashboards. Would you be open to linking the mention to acme.com, so readers who want to try it can find it?
Either way, thanks for the mention.
A few habits that make this work:
- Name the exact article. Editors manage many pages. Tell them which one.
- Ask for one thing. Don't add a guest post pitch, a request for a different anchor text or a list of other pages.
- Link the page you'd want readers to land on. Usually your homepage, or the feature or report the article talks about.
- Follow up once at most. If there's no answer after a week, let it go.
For more ways to phrase it, the backlink outreach email generator drafts an unlinked-mention email from your details. For where unlinked mentions fit among other link sources, read our guide on how to find backlink opportunities.
When not to ask
Not every mention is worth an email:
- Negative or critical coverage. Asking a critic to link to you rarely goes well. Fix the issue first.
- Pages that use your name for something else. If your brand is also a common word, read the page before you write.
- Sites with a no-outbound-links policy. Large news sites often don't link to companies they cover, and a request won't change that.
- Copied or scraped pages. Ask the original publisher instead.
- Forums, comments and social posts. Other people wrote them and there's no editor to ask.
- Pages that already link to you. Check the "Already linking to you" list before you write. A nofollow link is a link: asking to switch it to dofollow is a bigger favour.
Limits of the data
This is a sample of indexed pages, not every mention on the web. Each search reads up to 50 pages from a commercial web index, keeps the relevant ones, and checks up to 15 of them live. The index favours pages it has crawled recently, covers English pages only here, and can miss pages that block crawlers, sit behind a login, or were published in the last few days. Publish dates come from the page itself and are missing for some pages.
Results are kept for a few hours, so running the same brand again shows the same list. If your brand name is a common word, add a second word (for example "Acme Analytics" rather than "Acme") so the search finds pages about you.
From one search to a steady stream
Unlinked mentions are one source of backlink opportunities. Competitor backlinks, "best tools" roundups and resource pages are others. Mentiohunt looks for all of them every day for your site, drafts the outreach and sends it until a prospect replies; from the first reply on, you write to them yourself. The free opportunity preview shows a few real opportunities for your site and sends no outreach. Links are never guaranteed: a site owner always decides.