Disclosure: Hobo Web uses generative AI when specifically writing about our own experiences, ideas, stories, concepts, tools, tool documentation or research. Our tool of choice is in this process is Google Gemini Pro 2.5 Deep Research. This assistance helps ensure our customers have clarity on everything we are involved with and what we stand for. It also ensures that when customers use Google Search to ask a question about Hobo Web software, the answer is always available to them, and it is as accurate and up-to-date as possible. All content was verified as correct by Shaun Anderson. See our AI policy.
I’ve been in the SEO trenches for over 20 years.
I remember when you could get a new website ranking with a few well-placed directory links and a flurry of article submissions.
I was there for the rise and fall of private blog networks (PBNs), the terror of the first Penguin update, and the painstaking process of auditing backlink profiles and filing disavow reports for clients who had chased the algorithm a little too aggressively.
For two decades, the link was king. I have a giant article about link building from those years. Also, a giant article about unnatural links. I was there.
It was the undisputed currency of the web, a direct vote of confidence that Google’s PageRank algorithm could count, measure, and reward.
We built entire industries around acquiring them, trading them, and sometimes, cleaning up the mess they left behind.
But the ground has irrevocably shifted over the last decade (although some folk still build links like it was 2011).
While links certainly haven’t vanished, and paid links and unnatural links are still a blackhat strategy used today, and high-quality links will always matter, their reign as the absolute monarch of ranking signals is coming to an end.
A valuable currency in the new AI-driven search landscape, the world of AI Overviews and so-called ‘Answer Engines’ is the mention.
This article is the second part of a broader strategy I’ve been developing.
In my first piece, I introduced the concept of the “Optimising for the Synthetic Content Data Layer Opportunity Gap” – the AI’s fog of understanding about your entity, constructed from fragmented data across the web.
That article explained the what. This article is the how.
It’s the tactical manual for influencing that synthetic layer in a deeper way.
The argument I’m making here is simple but profound: Authoritative, contextually relevant mentions are the new link economy.
They are safer to acquire, more difficult to fake at scale, and ultimately more impactful for shaping how AI systems like Google’s AI Overviews understand and represent your brand.
We are entering an era where being talked about matters more than being linked to.
Let’s dive into why.
Section 1: Decoding Google’s Contradictions: Are Mentions a Signal or Not?
I was talking to Paul Madden on X. Paul is a seasoned link expert, link broker and link cleaner who has been in the game as long as I have – way back to the blogging wars of the early 2000s. When it comes to links, he’s seen it all.
He has been thinking of mentions, too.
For years, the SEO community has been tangled in a seemingly contradictory web of statements from Google representatives about the value of unlinked brand mentions.
On one hand, we’re told they aren’t links.
On the other hand, we’re told to build our brand.
To understand the true value of a mention, we have to dissect these statements and understand the difference between a precise, technical answer and a broader, strategic one.
Perhaps it might not be the mentions themselves directly influencing the algorithm, but how the user, by proxy, feeds Google Search brand mentions into the search box when seeking out your brand.
The Official “No”: The Link Graph Perspective
When asked directly if an unlinked mention is treated like a link, Google’s John Mueller has been consistently and technically precise.
His answer is, essentially, no.
In various webmaster hangouts, Mueller has clarified that Google does not use unlinked brand mentions for link-related purposes like calculating PageRank or understanding the link graph of a website.
He has stated, “If there’s no link to your pages then it’s not really a link there… Essentially, there is no link, so there is no signal passing like there would be with any normal link there”.
He further explained, “We would pick that up as a mention on another website, but it’s not a link, it doesn’t pass any PageRank”.
From my perspective as a technical SEO, Mueller is doing exactly what a Google engineer should do: he is answering the literal question.
An unlinked string of text is not an <a href> tag.
It doesn’t have the structural components that the PageRank algorithm was built to evaluate.
SEOs hear this and often conclude, “Mentions don’t matter for ranking.”
This is a critical misunderstanding.
It’s like asking if a thermometer can measure wind speed.
The answer is no, but that doesn’t mean the temperature is irrelevant to the weather.
Mueller may be talking about the mechanics of the traditional link graph, the foundational system that powered Google for two decades.
But Google’s systems are now vastly more complex than just PageRank.
The Strategic “Yes”: The E-E-A-T and Brand Perspective
While Mueller may be technically precise in certain cases (which some call Googlespeak), other senior figures at Google have been sending a much broader, more strategic message.
So has John:
QUOTE: “One piece of advice I tend to give people is to aim for a niche within your niche where you can be the best by a long stretch. Find something where people explicitly seek YOU out, not just “cheap X” (where even if you rank, chances are they’ll click around to other sites anyway).” John Mueller, Google 2018
They have been systematically de-emphasizing the importance of links while simultaneously championing the value of brand building.
At PubCon in 2023, Google’s Gary Illyes famously stated that links were not even in the top three ranking signals and hadn’t been “for some time”.
He was quoted as saying, “Over the years we’ve made links less important”.
This wasn’t a one-off comment. John Mueller himself has said, “I think already, that’s something that’s been changing quite a bit,” and that he imagines “over time, the weight on the links… will drop off a little bit”.
So, if links are becoming less important, what is replacing them?
The answer, according to Google’s Search Liaison, Danny Sullivan, is brand.
When addressing concerns about Google favouring big brands, Sullivan advised smaller sites: “If you’re a smaller site that feels like you haven’t really developed your brand, develop it”.
He clarified this wasn’t because of a direct “brand ranking signal,” but because the activities that build a brand are what Google’s systems are designed to reward.
He stated, “It’s probably the things that cause people externally to recognise you as a good brand may in turn co-occur or be alongside the kinds of things that our ranking systems are kind of looking to reward”.
This “co-occurrence” is the key.
The activities that build a brand – getting featured in reputable publications, being cited by experts, earning positive reviews, and being discussed in relevant forums – all generate mentions. These mentions could be the tangible signals of brand recognition that Sullivan is talking about.
The final piece of the puzzle, the statement that bridges the technical “no” with the strategic “yes,” comes from a quote attributed to Gary Illyes by SEO expert Marie Haynes.
She notes that Illyes stated E-A-T (now E-E-A-T) is “largely based on links and mentions on authoritative sites“.
This is the Rosetta Stone for understanding the modern SEO landscape.
The contradiction is resolved.
Mentions are not links in the PageRank sense.
But they are a primary, foundational signal for E-E-A-T. In a world where Google is desperately trying to verify Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness, a pattern of authoritative mentions is a far more robust signal than a simple backlink profile.
It shows that your entity is a recognised and respected part of the conversation in your niche.
Section 2: The ‘Answer Engine’ Era: Why Mentions are the New Currency
The rising value of mentions is not happening in a vacuum.
It’s a direct consequence of a fundamental evolution in how Google works.
For most of its life, Google was a “Search Engine,” a tool designed to find and rank documents.
Today, it is rapidly becoming an “Answer Engine,” a system designed to understand information and construct direct answers. This shift fundamentally changes the value of every signal we, as SEOs, try to influence.
Validating the Term ‘Answer Engine’
The term “Answer Engine” isn’t just a catchy marketing phrase; it describes a profound technical shift.
The late, great Bill Slawski, who dedicated his career to analysing Google’s patents, provided the evidence for this transformation.
One of the most significant patents he analysed was titled “Natural language processing with an N-gram machine”.
As Slawski explained, this patent outlines a system that doesn’t just match keywords to documents.
Instead, it ingests a body of text (like a collection of top-ranking web pages), uses an “encoder model” to transform that text into a structured knowledge graph, and then uses a “programmer model” to execute a program on that graph to produce a direct answer to a question. This is not retrieval in the expected sense; it is computation. It’s a system that seeks to understand the relationships between entities (people, places, things, concepts) and use that understanding to construct a new, synthesised piece of information.
This is the core function of an Answer Engine.
It moves beyond simply pointing to the best document (a link) and towards providing the best answer, synthesised from many documents. In this model, a link is just a pointer to one piece of evidence.
A collection of contextually aligned mentions, however, provides the raw data needed to build the knowledge graph itself.
How AI Overviews Forge Consensus from Mentions
AI Overviews are the most prominent and disruptive product of this new Answer Engine.
Google’s own help documentation states that AI Overviews appear when their systems determine that generative AI can be “especially helpful, for example, when you want to quickly understand information from a range of sources”.
This is a critical distinction from older features like Featured Snippets.
A Featured Snippet typically extracts text from a single, high-ranking source. An AI Overview, powered by Google’s Gemini models, is different. It is a generative feature that synthesises information from multiple sources to create a new, coherent summary.
The entire process is built on the idea of creating a consensus view. Analysis of how these systems work, based on patents and observation, shows a technique called retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). The AI doesn’t just rely on its pre-trained knowledge; it actively retrieves fresh information from the web to construct its answer, grounding its statements in citations from ranking web pages.
This is where the power of mentions becomes undeniable.
In this new world, corroboration is more valuable than PageRank. Consider this scenario: you want to be featured in the AI Overview for “best project management software for remote teams.”
- Scenario A (The Old Economy): Your website has one extremely powerful, high-domain Rating backlink from a major tech publication. This is a strong, but singular, signal.
- Scenario B (The New Economy): Your software is mentioned, even without a link, in five different articles on reputable tech blogs, a feature in a remote work publication, and a positive discussion thread on a popular forum.
For a traditional search algorithm focused on PageRank, Scenario A might win. But for an Answer Engine trying to build a confident, synthesised answer, Scenario B is just as powerful, if not more.
The multiple, independent mentions create a verifiable consensus that your brand is a relevant and authoritative entity in this specific context.
The AI can ingest these disparate mentions, recognise the pattern of positive association, and confidently include your brand in its generated overview.
The collection of mentions has become more impactful than the single, powerful link because it provides the proof of consensus that the AI requires.
This is the new link economy in action.
Without external validation on other websites about what you claim on your website, coupled with foundation trust and transparency issues, as I go into in my disconnected entity hypothesis, your website is laterally WEB GRAFFITI to Google, especially after the HCU update in September 2023.
Section 3: The Inevitable Corruption: Brace for ‘Mention Pollution’
As someone who has navigated Google’s ever-changing guidelines for over two decades, I can tell you one thing with absolute certainty: every valuable SEO signal eventually gets spammed.
From the early days of keyword stuffing to the industrial-scale link schemes that triggered the Penguin updates, if a tactic works, it will be exploited until Google is forced to act (because only Google controls Google).
Folks hate Google algorithm changes, but if Google didn’t do this, spammers would have a field day, and you would have zero chance of getting a ranking for any keyword and getting ANYTHING out of Google. Believe me. Sometimes it’s the devil you know that’s best for you.
Google took us all out, so you could rank. It will take you out so others can rank, unless you meet E-E-A-T standards over the coming years. The wheel continuously turns and
The rise of the mention as a primary signal for E-E-A-T and AI Overviews means we are on the cusp of a new era of spam.
I call it “Mention Pollution.”
History Repeats
To understand what’s coming, we only need to look at the past.
The history of Google penalties is a graveyard of tactics that were once effective.
- Paid Links & Advertorials: High-profile sites like Forbes and Interflora were penalised for selling links or using paid articles with “do-follow” links to manipulate PageRank. The modern equivalent will be paying for unlinked brand mentions in low-quality “sponsored content.”
- Link Exchanges & Networks: Rap Genius (now Genius) was famously penalised for a scheme offering social media promotion in exchange for links. Guest blogging networks like MyBlogGuest were dismantled for creating low-quality links at scale. We will see the rise of “mention exchange” networks and services that promise to get your brand mentioned in hundreds of low-tier blogs.
- Low-Quality Directories: The infamous UK bank penalty was, in part, due to spammy link schemes involving directories. The next evolution will be “mention directories” – sites that are nothing more than lists of “recommended brands,” created solely to generate mention signals for AI crawlers.
The pattern is always the same: a signal is identified, it’s exploited at scale with low-quality methods, and Google eventually brings the hammer down.
Defining ‘Mention Pollution’ and Its Tactics
Mention Pollution will be the practice of generating deceptive, low-quality, and scaled mentions designed to manipulate an AI’s perception of an entity’s authority and trustworthiness.
Based on my experience and Google’s recent focus areas, I predict the following tactics will become rampant:
- Fake Expert Networks: This is the most insidious tactic. Spammers will use AI to generate entire fake personas—complete with AI-generated headshots, fake LinkedIn profiles, and a portfolio of low-quality articles published across a network of spam blogs. These “experts” will then consistently mention and recommend a target brand, directly attempting to manipulate the “Experience” and “Expertise” signals of E-E-A-T. Google is already wise to this, with its updated Rater Guidelines specifically targeting “deceptive EEAT content,” such as “made-up author profiles or AI-generated personas”.24
- Mention Directories & Lists: As noted above, these will be the 2025 version of the old-school link directory. They will be simple websites with long lists of brands categorised by industry, offering no real value to a human user but designed to be easily scraped by AI systems looking for entity associations. The owner scrapes some directories, then lets AI scrape them, with minimal oversight, and sometimes, a clear conflict of interest.
- Automated Content & Forum Spam: Using generative AI, spammers will create thousands of mediocre blog posts, forum comments, and Q&A site answers. These pieces of content will be seeded with strategic, contextually relevant mentions of a client’s brand. This is a direct evolution of the blog comment and forum signature spam that plagued the web a decade ago.26
- Citation Spam: This tactic will target the “Authority” signal by generating mentions in fake or low-quality “research papers,” pseudo-academic journals, and self-published “studies” on platforms designed to look credible. The goal is to create a false trail of academic or expert citations.
These tactics share a common thread: they are designed to create the appearance of authority and consensus without substance.
They are a form of information pollution aimed squarely at the new Answer Engine.
The Coming ‘Trust Penalty’
So, how will Google fight back?
I don’t believe we will see a “manual action for unnatural mentions” in the Google Search Console – but you never know – maybe for a bit of publicity, like the unnatural links penalties of the last decade.
I’d wager the approach will be far more sophisticated, algorithmic, and devastating. Google will not be playing whack-a-mole with individual mentions; it will be assessing the integrity of a brand’s entire entity profile.
Google’s systems are already incredibly advanced at understanding language.
They can perform sentiment analysis to determine if a mention is positive, negative, or neutral.
They can assess the authority of the source, the context of the mention, and the overall reputation of a brand across the web.
The penalty for “mention pollution” will not be a simple devaluation of a bad signal. It will be an entity-level Trust Penalty.
A drop in QUALITY SCORE.
Here’s how it will probably work:
Google’s algorithms will analyse the entire graph of mentions surrounding your brand entity. If it finds that a significant percentage of these mentions originate from low-quality sources, spam networks, fake personas, and sites with negative sentiment or unnatural language patterns, it won’t just ignore those mentions.
SEOs might even start talking about NEGATIVE MENTIONS like the way we used to talk about Negative SEO. I mean, think it through…. cleaning up brand mentions…. might even be a new link economy in itself – today, for some (not me). Ill stay out of that one.
Google will draw a conclusion about the entity itself: this brand is consistently associated with spam and deception, and therefore, it cannot be trusted.
This algorithmic judgment will result in a catastrophic loss of visibility.
A low entity-trust score will make your brand ineligible for inclusion in the high-trust environment of AI Overviews. It will cause your legitimate, high-quality content to be demoted in organic search results.
And because this is an algorithmic assessment of your brand’s fundamental trustworthiness, it will be incredibly difficult to recover from.
You can’t just “disavow” your reputation. You will have to rebuild it from the ground up with genuine, authoritative signals, a process that could take years. This is the real danger of “mention pollution” – it doesn’t just risk a penalty; it risks the algorithmic erasure of your brand’s credibility.
And let’s not forget DEINDEXATION. If you aren’t indexed by Google, you are toast!
The Panda in the Room: How Branded Search Became the Ultimate Quality Score
To fully grasp why mentions have become so critical, we have to look back at one of Google’s most foundational shifts: the Panda update. Launched in 2011, Panda was officially designed to “reduce rankings for low-quality sites” and reward high-quality ones.
For years, the community focused on its impact on “thin content” and “content farms”.
But Panda’s true legacy is far more profound. It wasn’t just about punishing bad content; it was about algorithmically identifying what makes a site trustworthy and valuable to a user.
The question is, how does Google measure that trust?
The answer, buried in patents and evolving algorithms, leads directly back to our discussion of mentions and brand.
There is a tangible connection between a user seeing your brand mentioned, them actively searching for you, and Google rewarding your entire site with a higher “quality score.”
From Panda to Patents: Defining a Site-Wide Quality Score
The term “Quality Score” is most famously associated with Google Ads, where it’s a diagnostic tool for ad relevance. However, the concept of an organic, site-wide quality score has been a subject of speculation and research for years, and for good reason.
In 2011, in the wake of the Panda update, a Google representative stated that “low-quality content on part of a site can impact a site’s ranking as a whole,” implying a site-level quality assessment.
The concrete evidence for this site-wide score comes, as it so often does, from patents analyzed by the likes of Bill Slawski.
A 2012 patent application, filed shortly after Panda’s launch, describes a system to determine a “score for a site… that represents a measure of quality for the site”. Most revealingly, the patent outlines how this score could be calculated:
“A site quality score for a particular site can be determined by computing a ratio of a numerator that represents user interest in the site as reflected in user queries directed to the site and a denominator that represents user interest in the resources found in the site as responses to queries of all kinds.”
Let me translate that from patent-ese into plain English.
This system calculates a site’s quality by comparing how many people search directly for your brand (navigational or branded queries) versus how many people just happen to find your pages through general, non-branded searches. It’s a direct, mathematical measure of brand salience.
A high score means people are actively seeking you out, which is one of the strongest possible signals of trust and authority.
The connection to Panda is undeniable. One of the inventors listed on this very patent is Navneet Panda, the engineer for whom the update was named. This wasn’t a separate idea; it was part of the same philosophical shift to reward sites that users genuinely prefer.
The Branded Search Feedback Loop
This brings us full circle. The entire “mention economy” feeds directly into this site quality mechanism. Here’s how the modern user interaction plays out:
- The Mention: A user sees your brand mentioned positively in an AI Overview, a reputable news article, or a trusted forum. This builds awareness and piques interest.
- The Branded Search: Instead of clicking a link, the user opens a new tab and searches directly for your brand name (e.g., “Hobo Web,” “Shaun Anderson SEO”). This is what the patent calls a “reference query” or a “navigational query”. It’s a powerful user action.
- The Quality Signal: This branded search becomes a data point. It increases the numerator in that site quality score ratio, telling Google that your brand is a destination people seek out intentionally. As Bill Slawski’s research into “query chains” has shown, Google doesn’t just look at isolated searches; it analyzes the sequence of user actions, and the journey from a third-party site to a branded search is a powerful, positive chain.
- The Reward: A higher site quality score can then be used as a signal to “rank resources… that are found in one site relative to resources found in another site”. In other words, a strong brand reputation demonstrated through branded search behaviour can lift the rankings of all pages on your domain.
This creates a powerful feedback loop.
Authoritative mentions drive brand awareness, which leads to branded searches. Those branded searches are a direct input into a site-wide quality score, which improves your overall visibility, making it more likely you’ll earn more mentions.
This is the engine of the new mention economy, and its blueprint was written over a decade ago with the Panda update. The goal is no longer just to acquire a link; it’s to build enough brand authority that users actively look for you. That search is the ultimate vote of confidence, and it’s a signal Google has been measuring for a very long time.
Conclusion: Building a Defensible Brand in an AI-First World
The transition from a link-based economy to a mention-based one is not a fleeting trend; it is the logical outcome of Google’s long journey from a search engine to an Answer Engine. In this new world, the old rules of chasing a single, quantifiable metric are obsolete.
The new goal is to build a verifiable, authoritative consensus around your brand, and the currency for that is the high-quality, contextually relevant mention.
This brings me back to my “Synthetic Content Data Layer” strategy.
The only durable path forward is to proactively manage the information ecosystem that AI uses to understand your entity.
You must feed it the truth.
You must ensure that when Google’s AI looks at your brand, it sees a clear, consistent narrative of expertise and trustworthiness reflected across multiple, independent, and authoritative sources.
For my fellow SEO professionals, the message is clear.
The game has changed.
The future of our discipline is not about finding the next loophole or gaming the next metric.
It’s about aligning our work with the fundamental principles of brand building.
The hard, patient work of creating value, earning respect, and building a genuine reputation is no longer just a good business practice – it is now the most effective and defensible SEO strategy we have.
Appendix: The Modern Mention-Builder’s Toolkit
For those ready to adapt to this new economy, here are the strategies and tools you’ll need to start building a powerful and defensible mention profile.
Part A: Ethical Mention Acquisition – A Mini-Guide
Earning high-quality mentions is not about spam or manipulation. It’s about creating value that others want to talk about. Here are three core strategies:
- Digital PR: This is the art of creating newsworthy stories and assets that earn coverage in authoritative publications. Successful digital PR campaigns often involve creating interactive tools (like calculators or quizzes), data-driven studies, or compelling visual assets that tell a story journalists want to share. By providing unique, valuable content, you make it easy for media outlets to mention your brand as a credible source.
- Leveraging HARO (Help a Reporter Out): Platforms like HARO connect journalists seeking expert sources with professionals willing to provide quotes. To succeed, you must respond quickly, provide genuinely helpful and unique insights (not generic advice), and clearly establish your credentials. A well-crafted HARO pitch can land you expert quotes and brand mentions in top-tier media outlets, directly building your E-E-A-T profile.
- Creating Original Research: One of the most powerful ways to generate mentions is to become the source of data. By conducting your own surveys, analysing unique datasets, or compiling industry benchmarks, you create a “linkable asset” that bloggers, journalists, and other researchers will cite for years to come. The key is to find a trending topic, use a large sample size to ensure credibility and present your findings with clear, “bite-sized” stats and visuals that are easy to reference.
- Unlinked Mention Reclamation: This is the lowest-hanging fruit. Use brand monitoring tools to find existing articles where your brand is mentioned but not linked. A simple, polite outreach email to the author or editor, thanking them for the mention and suggesting they add a link for their readers’ benefit, has an incredibly high success rate. It’s a straightforward way to turn existing brand awareness into a tangible SEO signal.
Part B: The Mention Monitoring Tech Stack
You can’t manage what you don’t measure.
Building a robust mention profile requires a dedicated tech stack for monitoring your brand’s presence across the web, social media, and now, AI-powered search results. The table below compares some of the leading tools to help you choose the right one for your needs and budget.
Table 1: Comparison of Leading Brand Monitoring Tools for SEO
| Tool Name | Key Monitoring Features | Starting Price (Approx Annual Billing) | Ideal User |
| Ahrefs | Web Mentions, AI Overview Tracking (Brand Radar AI add-on), Backlink Alerts, Keyword Alerts | $129/mo (Lite Plan) + $99/mo per index for Brand Radar AI 41 | SEO Professionals & Agencies |
| Semrush | Web & Social Mentions, Real-time Alerts, Sentiment Analysis, Share of Voice | $208.33/mo (Guru Plan, includes brand monitoring) or $79/mo for standalone app 43 | All-in-One Digital Marketers |
| Brand24 | Web & Social Mentions, Real-time Updates, Sentiment & Emotion Analysis, Influencer Score, Podcast Monitoring | $149/mo (Individual Plan) 46 | Small Businesses & PR Teams |
| Mention | Web & Social Mentions, Real-time Alerts, Sentiment Analysis, Customizable Reports | $41/mo (Solo Plan) 48 | Individuals & Small Businesses |
| BuzzSumo | Web & Social Mentions, Journalist Alerts, Trend Analysis, Coverage Reports | $199/mo (Content Creation Plan) 50 | Content Marketers & PR Professionals |
| Talkwalker | Web & Social Mentions, Real-time Alerts, Sentiment Analysis, Image Recognition, 150M+ sources | Starts at $500/month (Basic Plan) 52 | Large Enterprises & Agencies |
Written and edited by Shaun Anderson.
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