The brand mentions section of your audit counts how often your brand appears in indexed web content and splits those mentions by sentiment — positive, negative, neutral. It's a presence measure: how much does the web talk about you, and in what tone.
The report always shows which phrase it searched, because that choice is the whole measurement. We pick the best brand identifier we can verify — your business name where it's confirmed, otherwise a clean segment of your homepage title, otherwise the name part of your domain.
It runs inside wizard audits with AI insights on, alongside AI presence →. There's no separate setup, and the searched phrase is printed with the numbers.
Read the numbers
Read it as a baseline on the first audit, then watch direction between audits: mentions growing, sentiment stable or souring. For a services business, mentions are also an AI-search lever — models talk about brands the web talks about.
- Counts are indexed-web mentions of the searched phrase, not social posts or private reviews.
- Sentiment is automatic classification — right in aggregate, wrong on individual edge cases. Trend beats single numbers.
- Check the searched phrase first. If your brand name is a common word, the count includes the common word. A generic-name domain can show thousands of "mentions" that are really the industry phrase — the printed phrase is there so you catch that instead of celebrating it.
Limits and usage
- Rides along with the audit's AI-insights cost; no separate subscription.
- A brand with a unique name measures cleanly; a brand named after a generic phrase measures noisily, and no counting service fixes that — consider the distinct part of your name as the phrase to watch.
- Mentions are of the phrase, not links to your site. Mention growth and backlink growth are related but separate facts.
If something isn't working
The count seems absurdly high. Read the searched phrase — it matched an industry term. The fix is a more distinctive brand phrase, not a bigger number.
The count is near zero for a real business. Small local businesses genuinely have few indexed mentions — the baseline is the point. PR, directories, and reviews move it over months.
Sentiment shifted suddenly between audits. Look at the actual coverage before reacting — one widely-syndicated article moves the split.