Unlinked brand mentions are a gold mine for finding SEO backlink opportunities, collaboration opportunities, and more.
Here’s how you can find unlinked brand mentions for your own brand.
What are unlinked brand mentions and why should you care?
Unlinked brand mentions are mentions of your brand where someone writes your name, but does not add a clickable link to your site.
This matters because the person already knows your brand and felt your brand was worth mentioning. That is a warm lead for outreach compared to cold backlink requests.
When you track these mentions, you can:
- Turn existing mentions into high-quality backlinks.
- Build relationships with writers, creators, and niche site owners.
- Spot positive social proof you can reuse in your own marketing.
- Catch incorrect product details and ask for quick fixes.
In short, this is one of the easiest link-building workflows because the hard part is already done: they already mentioned you.
Step 1. Find your own brand mentions
You can either use ‘ol Google or a social listening tool. But since we’re doing this for free, let’s use Google.
Inside search, enter your brand "brandname" in quotes. This will tell Google to do a exact domain search.
Also do searches for variations of your brandname, including one with the domain name. For instance, if your website is xyz.com, do a literal search for “xyz.com”.
Here’s an example of me searching for the brand Plausible, an analytics tool:
I’ve added -site:plausible.io filter in the search so the brand’s own website isn’t shown.
You’ll obviously find your own website first. If you keep scrolling down and go through the next 2-3 pages, you’ll find people who talk about your brand organically.
You want to bookmark these links for later.
Next, do the same search but inside Google Forums. This will also give you opportunities to find potential partners/affiliates, etc.
Step 2. Reach out to these people
Once you’ve saved them somewhere, get the contact details of these website owners. You can use Hunter.io or any other email finder tool to find their email.
After getting their email, send them an email asking for a backlink to your site.
Reference the text where they mention you and ask nicely. Tell them how this can be helpful for their visitors. You can try to give them something back. An Amazon gift voucher works well. Or a Canva subscription, as highlighted in this example.
What else can you do with unlinked mentions?
Backlinks are great, but unlinked mentions can also help with growth, product, and customer education.
- Find collaboration opportunities. If someone writes about your niche often, invite them to a partner webinar, guest post swap, or affiliate deal.
- Improve your messaging. Look at how people describe your product in their own words, then reuse that language in your landing pages.
- Collect real customer voice. Save mention snippets for testimonials, case studies, and ad copy ideas.
- Fix confusing information. If someone explains your pricing or features incorrectly, ask for a small correction.
- Build a prospect list. Many mention pages are written by people who are actively testing tools, which can turn into demos and sales conversations.
Conclusion
Unlinked brand mentions are a practical, repeatable growth channel. You are not starting from zero because the mention already exists, and that makes outreach easier and faster.
Even if only a small share of requests convert into links, the process still pays off over time through stronger authority, better relationships, and clearer market feedback.
If someone says no to adding a link, that is still useful. Google can still read brand entity signals, and you now have a warm contact for future collaboration.
Run this workflow every month, track your win rate, and refine your outreach message each cycle. Small weekly effort compounds here.
