Social listening and brand monitoring
How to track brand mentions online
The short answer
Set up free alerts first (Google Alerts, your social platforms' notifications and review site notifications), then add a social listening tool if you need coverage of untagged social posts, forums and podcasts with sentiment analysis. Review mentions on a fixed schedule and track three numbers: volume, share of negative mentions, and response time.
Key takeaways
- Free alerts and native notifications cover web, news and your own accounts.
- Listening tools add untagged social posts, forums, podcasts and sentiment.
- Unlinked mentions are an easy source of links: ask the writer politely.
On this page 4 sections
Free coverage
- Google Alerts for web pages and news.
- Native notifications on each social account you run.
- Your Google Business Profile, Yelp, Trustpilot or industry review sites.
- Search Console's links report, to see which sites link to you.
What free tools miss
Untagged posts on social platforms, comments in forums and communities, podcast and video mentions, and anything in a language or region you did not set up. Listening tools index these sources continuously, add sentiment and reach estimates, and send alerts on spikes.
Unlinked mentions are an SEO opportunity
When a site mentions your brand without linking, a polite note asking for a link to the relevant page often works, because the writer already chose to mention you. Keep a list and work through it monthly.
AI assistants are a new kind of mention
People now ask chat assistants for recommendations. Those answers are not indexed like social posts. See how to track your visibility in AI search.
Next step
Compare the tools for this job
Related guides
Social listening for small business: a practical start
What social listening is, the keywords to track, how to read sentiment and reach, and a weekly routine a small team can keep up.
How to track brand visibility in ChatGPT and AI search
How to find out whether ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot and Google AI Overviews mention your brand, which sources they cite, and what to measure over time.
SEO metrics that matter for a small business
The SEO numbers worth watching (clicks, impressions, queries, landing-page conversions), where to find them free, and which popular metrics to ignore.