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In 2023, a Futurism report alleged Sports Illustrated used AI to generate articles and writer headshots. The magazine’s rebuttals did little to stop the PR storm – The New York Times, Variety, and The Daily Beast are just a few publications that shared the report, fueling an online storm.
When a PR crisis like this unfolds, businesses need a simple way to track brand mentions across the web, social media, and even TV and radio. It allows them to analyze audience sentiment, stay on top of new developments, and adjust their PR strategy.
Tools that track brand mentions aren’t only helpful in a crisis. Brands regularly use them to track their visibility, keep tabs on their competitors, and monitor industry trends.
In this guide, we compiled a list of 10 free and paid tools to help everyone from one-person marketing teams to big agencies track brand mentions.
1. Ahrefs Alerts
Alerts is part of Ahrefs’ SEO toolset. It combines backlink monitoring, keyword rank tracking, and web mentions into a single tool.
To set up a web mentions alert, enter the search queries you want to track, such as “ahrefs.” You can also track multiple similar search queries, like typos, by adding “OR” between each query: “ahrefs OR ahref.”
The “search query” field in Ahrefs Alerts support advanced operators, allowing you to set up creative alerts. For example, you can get notified when your competitors were mentioned on a newly published page, but your brand wasn’t:
+mailchimp +aweber -mybrandname.
Whenever Ahrefs’ crawler comes across a mention of your brand name online, you’ll receive an email notification.
The Alerts tool is just a by-product of Ahrefs’ SEO toolset, so if you’re interested in brand mention tracking and also need a comprehensive SEO toolset, Ahrefs is a perfect choice.
To use the Ahrefs’ Alerts for brand mention monitoring, you’ll need a Standard Ahrefs subscription or higher.
2. Google Alerts
Google Alerts is a free tool that lets you track brand mentions seen by Googlebot.
To set up an alert, enter your query in the search bar. Adjust the language, region, and how often you want to receive alerts.
Under “Sources,” you can pick a specific source from which to pull alerts. This includes blogs, news, videos, and more.
Add Google search operators to get more specific results, such as:
- Ahrefs AND ubersuggest: to combine multiple mentions into one alert
- site:youtube.com ahrefs: to receive mentions from a specific website
- ahrefs -ubersuggest: to exclude a specific query, such as “ubersuggest”
If you’re tracking multiple brand mentions, choose “Digest” as the delivery method. It merges all mentions in a single email, sent once a day or once a week, which prevents your inbox from being flooded by notifications.
3. Mention
Mention is a comprehensive social and web monitoring tool. It’s built for marketing teams who need in-depth monitoring capabilities, as well as analytics and customer engagement.
The platform crawls one billion sources, which includes forums, blogs, and social media platforms such as TikTok.
Here’s just a sample of what Mention can do for you.
First, you can choose between three types of alerts: basic, standard, and advanced.
Image source: Mention product demo
When you’re building an alert, the tool lets you input primary and secondary keywords to get the most relevant results. Add any irrelevant keywords to the “excluded” list.
Image source: Mention product demo
Your mentions will appear in a feed in the web interface like this:
Image source: Mention product demo
The pricing starts at $41 per month (yearly billing) with a cap of 5,000 mentions monthly. A free trial is available.
4. Sprout Social
Sprout Social is a social media management platform with features that cover community management, content publishing, and analytics.
The platform also allows you to track brand mentions via its social media listening tool. Build queries (called Listening Topics) that monitor your brand health, competitors, events, industry insights, and more.
Choose the title, description, and type to build a Listening Topic.
In the example below, the topic tracks brand health.
Then, select the sources the tool will listen to.
When building your query, you can opt to track specific words, hashtags, phrases, and user mentions and messages.
The “Proximity Match” feature allows you to track conversations where two keywords are mentioned simultaneously.
This tool also comes with a noise management feature that filters irrelevant results. For example, you can exclude keywords related to contests and coupons.
Sprout Listening is an add-on feature to paid plans, which start at $199 per seat per month on an annual contract. Pricing for Sprout Listening isn’t public, so contact their sales team for a quote.
5. BuzzSumo
BuzzSumo is a content marketing tool that helps agencies and in-house marketers discover influencers, research and find content ideas and monitor trends and mentions.
Their brand monitoring tool tracks brand mentions in blog posts, articles, discussion forums, and comments.
When setting up a brand alert, add extra keywords to include or exclude from the results.
When setting up your BuzzSumo Alert, you may receive a large number of notofications. To manage this, you have the option to set minimum levels of social engagements, allowing you to receive only the important mentions in your inbox.
BuzzSumo also offers country, domain, and language filters.
BuzzSumo offers a 30-day free trial. Paid plans start at $199 per month.
6. BrandMentions
In their own words, BrandMentions helps you discover how the internet is talking about your brand. They effectively monitor social media and the web, as confirmed by positive user reviews.
To start tracking your brand mentions, create a new project and add the keywords you want to monitor. Keywords can include your business name, hashtags, social media usernames, and industry topics.
Select whether the results should include exact, broad, or case-sensitive matches.
Similarly to other monitoring tools, you can select the sources to track, such as web pages, various social networks, Quora, Reddit, and Twitch. You can also specify countries and languages.
One feature I’ve never seen in other tools is “Image Monitoring,” which allows you to upload your logo or brand image and get notified whenever it’s used online.
Here’s a snapshot of the mentions dashboard:
BrandMentions offers a free trial. Their paid plans start at $79 per month with yearly billing.
7. Mentionlytics
Mentionlytics allows you to track brand mentions across the web and social media. The platform also provides a dashboard with insights such as share of voice, sentiment analysis, and brand awareness.
Like other tools in this category, Mentionlytics tracks keywords. Specifically, it can monitor hashtags and words or queries related to your brand, industry, or competitors.
To track brand mentions, click “Something About my Brand” in the setup flow.
Next, name your tracker. You can monitor multiple keywords under a single tracker.
Type in your main keyword and add any additional required keywords. Or, enter keywords the tool should ignore.
When you’re done, you can test this query to make sure you’re happy with the results. For example, your filters might be too restrictive. Running a test allows you to readjust your filters to get the best insights.
Once you’re done with the setup, your dashboard will look similar to this:
Scroll down to see more insights, such as sentiment analysis.
You can test drive Mentionlytics with a 14-day free trial. Paid plans start at $41 per month with yearly billing.
8. Meltwater
Meltwater is an online media monitoring platform with a suite of products that includes a media intelligence tool.
With Meltwater Media Intelligence, brands get real-time alerts whenever a keyword they’re tracking appears on a podcast, the news, print media, radio, TV, and social media. You can monitor unlimited keywords.
The data is presented in a sleek dashboard with insights into total mentions, mentions per day, and unique authors. Customize your searches by entering multiple keywords at once or adding which keywords to exclude.
Like Muck Rack, Meltwater doesn’t publicly share its pricing. However, the average annual contract is estimated to be between $6,000 and $10,000.
9. Brand24
Brand24 is a social listening tool that tracks mentions from 25 million online sources. It’s used by PR teams, in-house marketers, and marketing agencies.
Setting up your first project is very easy. Enter your target keywords and select the language.
The tool generates a searchable dashboard containing all of your mentions. You can connect your social media accounts to get more data.
The mentions in this tool include a sentiment analysis score (neutral, positive, negative) for easier filtering.
A 14-day free trial is available. Paid plans start at $79 per month with annual billing.
Final words
As you can see, there is a wide variety of tools available for tracking brand mentions. Often, mention tracking is included as part of a larger PR or SEO toolset, with only a few tools dedicated exclusively to mention tracking.
Choose the tool that best fits your needs and stay ahead in the ever-evolving world of digital marketing and brand management.
By Aida Knežević
Versatile content marketer
Aida Knezevic is a versatile content marketer working primarily with B2B SaaS companies. Having launched her career at a major content marketing agency, she has helped leading companies in fintech, digital marketing, and many other verticals achieve growth using SEO blogs, case studies, thought leadership, and other types of content.
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