Remember when link building was all the rage in SEO?
While it never disappeared, its role evolved as Google introduced clearer guidelines and placed greater emphasis on quality, relevance, and intent.
Today, as AI search reshapes the organic landscape, link building has shifted into a closely related – and increasingly prioritized – initiative: brand mentions.
You might think of brand mentions as “citations,” but in the context of AI search, citations describe how brands are referenced by LLMs.
Brand mentions are the input that leads to those citations. To avoid confusion, this article uses brand mentions to describe the tactic itself.
Beyond their role as a leading – if not the leading – factor influencing AI search citations, brand mentions are also gaining weight in traditional SEO algorithms.
To build durable organic visibility for your brand or clients, brand mentions should be a priority in 2026.
Let’s break down what that looks like in practice.
How and why to prioritize brand mentions
Brand mentions have moved from a nice-to-have tactic to core infrastructure in an AI search environment.
LLMs look beyond links, so this is not a return to the backlink strategies that once dominated SEO.
Instead, they evaluate mentions, context, and repeated co-occurrence between your brand and the topics you want to rank for.
Brand mentions are part of the ranking moat.
They compound over time, and they matter even more when competitors are not investing in the same signals.
From a prioritization standpoint, brand mentions should come:
- Right after technical and content fundamentals are in place, including crawlability, structured data, and on-page clarity.
- Before heavy long-form expansion or content produced for its own sake. You can publish 200 articles, but without a citation footprint, LLMs have little reason to surface them.
Dig deeper: In GEO, brand mentions do what links alone can’t
How to find high-priority brand mention opportunities
Like backlinks, brand mentions vary widely in influence depending on their source.
At my agency, we look beyond standard SEO tools to identify high-priority opportunities, including:
- Using Profound to surface existing brand mentions tied to prompt topics that matter.
- Reviewing the links that appear in AI Overviews for key SEO queries.
- Examining Reddit threads ranking on Page 1 to see which entities show up most often for important keywords.
In AI Overviews, you can find links to source articles by clicking the chain-link icon shown here:
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How to drive passive brand mentions
Passive brand mentions occur when something you produce fills a gap in the broader information ecosystem.
The goal is to make your brand the easiest source to reference.
They are earned by creating referenceable assets, not just content. Examples include:
- Original data or insights: Think mini research drops, annual reports, or proprietary trends. These stand out from the generic web, and LLMs are effective at finding and citing them even when overall citation volume is limited.
- Highly scannable definition or explainer pages: When a brand becomes the canonical definition of a concept, it is cited disproportionately. The objective is to become the primary source, as I’ve been saying for a while now.
- Useful tools, templates, or calculators: These encourage habitual linking from blogs, forums, and communities, helping brands surface broadly for relevant queries.
- Active participation on visible platforms, including Reddit and industry forums, approached as a knowledgeable contributor rather than a brand billboard. These discussions are scraped and can surface in LLM training data.
Dig deeper: A smarter Reddit strategy for organic and AI search visibility
How to actively solicit brand mentions
The most effective outreach for earning brand mentions is relationship-driven and anchored in information value.
Key guidelines include:
- Lead with the asset, not the ask: For example: “We published new proprietary data on [X] and thought it might support your upcoming coverage.”
- Use narrative relevance, not conditional relevance: Pitch journalists and creators who have recently covered the topic, not those who might someday.
- Deliver a clear angle: Providing a ready-made hook, such as a specific data comparison, significantly increases the likelihood of brand inclusion.
- Blend outreach with thought leadership: Podcasts, community AMAs, expert panels, and webinars increase surface area for discovery and research.
- Follow up with new value, not reminders: If there is nothing new to add, wait until there is.
The long-term objective is to build an outreach engine by developing relationships with writers and personalities who are more likely to reference your brand in future work.
In some cases, there is added value when those relationships extend into content collaboration.
When to bring on a PR resource
Beyond budget considerations, PR support is most effective for building brand mention momentum when:
- A strong story or data engine exists, but distribution is limited.
- Brand mentions need to scale quickly, such as for fundraising, major launches, or highly competitive categories.
- Internal teams are not structured for ongoing media relationship management.
- Credibility from tier-one sources, such as The Wall Street Journal or TechCrunch, is needed to strengthen perceived authority in LLM evaluations.
- The category is reputation-driven, where trust and authority directly affect rankings. Health, finance, legal, property management, and AI fall into this group.
If technical SEO fundamentals are still unresolved or reference-worthy assets are not yet in place, PR is premature.
When a brand is ready to function as a source, PR accelerates the signal flywheel.
Dig deeper: How to build search visibility before demand exists
Building brand mentions that compound across search engines and LLMs
Many of the long-standing lessons from link building still apply.
Avoid low-quality publications, and do not confuse volume with impact.
With a prioritized source list and a disciplined approach, brands can:
- Earn more mentions.
- Increase AI search citations.
- See meaningful improvements in search rankings.
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