If you are responsible for published brand coverage, you need to find relevant mentions and decide which ones warrant a response. Brand Mentions finds your tracked names in collected search results, the Prospect Index and the News Index. Add the relevant names and website hosts to an organization marked Owned Brand.
Know where each match came from
The sources return different amounts of context, and the difference decides how much you can conclude.
- Search Engine Results checks the title and snippet from the campaign's collected searches. A snippet is a fragment, so it establishes that your name appeared and little else.
- The index views search the title and body for tracked name phrases, so a match comes with the surrounding page text.
Use the News Index for recent coverage. Use the Prospect Index to investigate existing pages without assuming they were recently published.
What is not read
Social platforms and review sites are not read. This report covers published pages, and no result from it should be presented as social listening.
The News Index draws from more than four million feeds and keeps two monthly tables, so its reach is the current month and the previous one, roughly two million documents in a typical 30-day window. It answers what is being published now rather than serving as an archive, so keep your own copy of coverage you will need later.
Triage before reading
Decide which types of mention need attention before reviewing results. This lets you dismiss irrelevant matches quickly.
| What you find | What it merits |
|---|---|
| A passing mention in a list | Nothing, beyond noting a publication that recurs |
| Substantive coverage of your business | Read fully; check accuracy and whether it linked |
| A comparison against a competitor | Read fully; this is what buyers find when deciding |
| A factual error or an out-of-date description | A correction request, the highest-value row |
| A reference to your research | Suggest a link to the original report |
| Another company with a similar name | Refine the tracked name phrase |
An ambiguous company name will match other organizations, so read the page before reporting anything as coverage.
Choose the response from the actual wording
Open Details for the stored page text and links, then inspect the current page before contacting a publisher. The report finds references; it does not classify any reference as praise, a recommendation or an outreach opportunity.
The most common problem is staleness rather than hostility: a description of a product you changed, a price you no longer charge, a feature you removed. Those pages persist and get cited by other pages and by AI answers, which is how an old fact outlives the thing it described.
Two dates on every row
Each result carries the date it entered the index and the date its publisher put it online. Sort and read by the second when the question is whether coverage is recent.
The gap between them can be years. A resource page from 2019 collected last night is a genuinely new finding for you and old news to its publisher, and an email that confuses the two says a tool found the page rather than a person.
What this report cannot claim
Not completeness, since no collection of the web sees everything and an absence is not evidence that nothing was written. Not sentiment, which is not scored here. And not reach, since you can see that a substantial publication named you but not how many people read it.
During coverage review, attach the source passage and date to any correction, sharing decision or follow-up you assign.
See Brand Unlinked Mentions, a weekly monitoring routine, or how source coverage separates monitoring tools.