Unlinked mention
An unlinked mention is an occurrence of a brand name on another site that does not carry a hyperlink back to it.
Classic SEO treats these as an opportunity to reclaim a link. That framing is now mostly wrong. Ahrefs measured 75,000 brands in 2026 and found brand mentions correlate with AI Overview visibility at 0.664 against 0.218 for backlinks, because a model has no link graph, it has text.
So the mention is most of the value already delivered, and chasing the link is a marginal improvement rather than a rescue. Both are worth tracking; only one of them was ever the point.
Related
Internal link
An internal link is a link from one page of a site to another page on the same site, used to pass authority, establish topical relationships and give crawlers a path through the site.
Entity
An entity is a thing a search or answer engine can identify and hold facts about, such as a company, a person, a product or a place, as distinct from the words used to describe it.
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