If you are responsible for your brand's reputation, you need to find published mentions that deserve review or a response. Brand Mentions pulls from search results, the Prospect Index and the News Index to find pages naming your business.
What it reads, and what it does not
It covers published pages. News, blog and podcast content in the News Index, stored web pages in the Prospect Index, and search results.
No social platforms and no review sites. If the thing you need to know about within the hour is a complaint posted on social media, buy a listening product. How source coverage separates monitoring tools covers the split.
The News Index reaches this month and last month. It answers what is being published now and it is not an archive, so save the mentions you will want again.
Triage before you read
Monitoring dies when the report turns into something nobody opens. Decide in advance which categories deserve your attention and you can dismiss most rows in seconds.
| Category | Typical share | What it deserves |
|---|---|---|
| Passing mention in a list | Most rows | Nothing. Note the publication if it covers your market regularly. |
| Substantive coverage of your business | Rare | Read it all. Check the facts and whether it linked. |
| Comparison against a competitor | Occasional | Read it all. This is what your buyers find while deciding. |
| Named with an error or out of date | Occasional | Correction request. Best row in the report. |
| Named unfavorably | Rare | Read it first. Decide whether a response helps at all. |
| Not you | Common with generic names | Narrow the term you monitor. |
Deal with the last row early. If your business name is a common word the report fills up with other companies, and narrowing the monitored term beats reading past them every week for a year.
Ask two things of every substantive mention
Is it accurate and current? The usual problem is staleness and not hostility. A description of a product you changed, a price you stopped charging, a feature you removed. Those pages stay up, get cited by other pages and by AI assistants, and the old fact outlives the thing it described.
Did it link? If not, the row belongs in your unlinked mention work. Easiest outreach you will do, because the publisher already decided to name you.
Reading the dates
When a page was found and when it was published are two different dates, sometimes very far apart. A page in today's report is no evidence anything was published recently.
Check the published date before writing to anyone about coverage you are calling new. Treating an old article as fresh tells the publisher a tool found it.
A weekly review that survives contact with a real week
- Open the report. Scan for the categories that matter. Do not read top to bottom.
- Throw out passing mentions fast. They are most of the volume and almost none of the value.
- Read anything substantive in full, and check the facts while the page is still open.
- Send corrections the same day. They are short, they land, and they get harder to send as the page ages.
- Put unlinked mentions on that list instead of acting on each one as you find it.
- Note publications that keep appearing. One that covers your market repeatedly is a relationship to build now, before you want anything.
Twenty minutes a week beats an hour a month. Corrections and link requests both succeed far more often while the page is recent.
What monitoring cannot do
It cannot claim to be complete. No collection of the web sees everything, so nothing found is not proof nothing was written.
It does not score sentiment and it does not report demographics. Reading the context is a person's job here.
And it does not measure reach. You can see that a substantial publication named you. How many people read it is not in the report.
At your regular coverage review, open the relevant mentions and check their context. You can then assign a response or follow-up with the source attached.
See brand monitoring, monitoring competitors, or working the unlinked mentions.