Brand Monitoring: 3 Must-Track Areas for Success

Chris Haines

Chris is an SEO director who has 10 years of experience in SEO, agency side. When not involved in SEO, he enjoys messing around with vintage synthesizers, walks on sandy beaches, and a good cup of tea.

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But often, brand monitoring is more than just responding to comments that mention your brand—it’s about understanding customer sentiment and using feedback to shape your brand reputation in real-time.

Whether you like it or not, conversations happen about your brand constantly. Some are good, some are bad. Brand monitoring is the most effective way to keep track of these conversations.

Brand monitoring is the process of identifying conversations and reacting to them. You can amplify positive comments or extinguish negative feedback before it potentially spirals into a public drama and impacts your reputation.

How you react helps shape your brand’s narrative, positively or negatively, which is why it’s important.

The tools you need for brand monitoring are often determined by what part of the online space you need to monitor.

It’s often assumed that brand monitoring only happens on social media, but in my opinion, it can occur in three places online—websites, social media, and LLMs.

So, if you want to monitor your brand effectively, you need to monitor it in these three places.

Here’s how you do it:

Social media is the fastest way for customers to give real-time feedback on your brand, so it’s often the first place marketers think of when they think of brand monitoring.

To get started, consider which platforms conversations about your brand happen on most frequently.

Identify social media platforms your customers are using

Do your customers use LinkedIn, X, Facebook, TikTok, or something else? Wherever they are, you need to find a tool to help you monitor platforms where your customers frequently mention your brand on social media.

Here are a few of the most popular paid social media brand monitoring tools and the platforms they support:

If you don’t want to use a paid tool, there are other ways to monitor your brand for free. For instance, at Ahrefs, we monitor Twitter, or “X” as it’s now known, using a webhook in Slack.

More simply, we get a feed of “ahrefs” mentions in our Slack workspace. It looks something like this.

It still requires a manual review, but it’s useful for tracking brand mentions within your workspace.

Once you’ve decided which platform you want to monitor and picked a tool, brand monitoring becomes more about analyzing the intent of the comments. We call this sentiment analysis.

Understand the dominant sentiment for your brand

Sentiment analysis is a process of classifying text into positive, negative, or neutral groups. It’s an important part of social media brand monitoring because it gives you a clear idea of what your customers think about your brand.

• Positive sentiment – Shows what customers like and about your product and how you can improve it
• Negative sentiment – Shows you what customers don’t like about your product and what you’re doing wrong
• Neutral sentiment – Lacks strong positive or negative sentiment

For most companies, the trick is to find and deal with bad reviews—or negative sentiment—before they get out of hand and decide how to take action (improve service, apologize, offer a voucher.)

The paid tools mentioned earlier have sentiment analysis built into their interfaces, making identifying bad comments easy.

For example, on Brandwatch, here’s an example of how this tool flags negative sentiment reviews.

Here is an example of a positive sentiment review using the same tool. The comments are clearly labeled in these examples.

Sprout Social also has a sentiment summary to see how people react to your social media posts.

Awario is another tool with good sentiment analysis functionality and charts customer sentiment in a clear dashboard.

Mention is also a cost-effective (and my personal favorite) way to monitor your brand, as well as monitoring websites and forums. It also works across social media from TikTok to Pinterest and (even radio and TV in the U.S.)

There is no shortage of paid tools for monitoring social media sentiment—but they often come at a price.

If you want a more cost-effective alternative to these tools and are prepared to do some work, you can use a tool like Text to Data’s Google Sheets API. It costs around $17 for 5000 API calls.

Here’s a demo of how it works, and here’s my 30-second test using the Sheets API and some made-up reviews to test how it classed them.

If you have comments on a particular post you’d like to analyze, you could use this tool to analyze the sentiment and scrape data from your social media feed using a tool like Panda Extract.

With at least 1.88 billion websites online globally, there’s a slight chance a few might mention your brand. So, how can you best monitor your brand mentions? Here’s what I suggest.

Start with Google

Googling your brand name is the fastest way to find out what type of website your brand is mentioned on.

As many different types of websites get pulled into the Google search results as SERP features, it’s a good way to understand what websites you need to focus on as part of your website brand monitoring strategy.

For example, if we Google “Virgin Media,” a UK broadband company, we can see that its brand is mentioned on many news websites.

For this company, monitoring website mentions on news websites would be important, as they have the potential to impact its online reputation.

So, how can we monitor mentions like this? By using alerts.

Set up alerts

In my experience, Ahrefs Alerts is the easiest automated way to monitor your brand mentions across the web.

To start receiving brand mention alerts using Ahrefs:

• Head to the More menu in Ahrefs
• Select Alerts from the menu dropdown
• Select the Mentions tab
• Click + Add alert

Then:

• Enter your brand name in the Search query column
• Add your domain to the Exclude domains field
• Set the Interval to the frequency you desire

I’ve gone for Daily, but you can also select Weekly if you want less frequent updates.

Monitor your organic brand keywords

To monitor the exact keywords people use to search for your brand in Google, you can use the Brand filter in Ahrefs.

To do this:

• Head to Keywords Explorer and enter your brand name in the search box
• Go to the Matching terms report and select Branded, then hit Apply

Once you’ve done that, you can select Clusters by Parent Topic to get an overview of some of the most important keywords for your brand.

Clicking any of the keywords we can find the exact Google search results for this topic. I’m going to click on “cancel virgin media.”

Clicking the keyword (or any of these keywords) takes us to the SERP Overview page—which shows Google’s top results for that keyword.

From here, we can see two things. 1) The community subdomain mostly deals with this keyword. 2) There is one Reddit thread that we probably should be monitoring—as it represents a reputational risk.

Here is an example of how I would approach brand monitoring on Reddit for Ahrefs using Google Alerts. It’s as simple as entering site:reddit.com followed by your brand name.

Or if your brand name is your Reddit username, you could update your Reddit User settings to include Username mentions.

Monitor your paid competitor brand mentions

We’ve talked about organic brand monitoring, but what about when websites put up ads targeting keywords with your brand name in them?

If you want to monitor your brand mentions in your competitor’s Google ads, you can do this in Ahrefs as well—and even see the exact copy they used.

To do this, enter a competitor’s domain in Site Explorer, head to the Paid keyword report, and add a Keyword filter with your brand name.

Then, to see more information about the ad, click the ads dropdown icon to reveal the Ad position history. Hovering over the colored blocks will show all the details of the ad.

Monitoring your brand on competitor ads gives you a sense of which competitors are spending the most on bidding on your brand. It also gives you an insight into which keywords they feel are valuable.

Monitoring paid brand mentions of your brand is important because competitors may bid on key brand terms and siphon off some of your brand traffic.

For example, Peter Shankman recently noticed that his competitor, Qwoted, was bidding on his brand keyword “source of sources.”

If we enter “qwoted.com” into Site Explorer and jump into the Ads report, we can see that Qwoted is bidding on more than just the Source of Sources keyword. It’s bidding on a number of different “alternative” keywords that could potentially impact a wide range of brands.

Across one keyword, this might not make a lot of difference, but if your competitors bid across a large range of your keywords, it could impact your business. This is why it’s a good idea to have a strategy for monitoring ads that mention your brand name.

LLMs present a new brand monitoring challenge, as your brand may be mentioned in any of these tools at any time.

There are already many well-known large language models (LLMs), such as GPT-4o, Claude, Grok-1, and Gemini.

To add further complexity, how your brand is mentioned differs from LLM to LLM. So, how can we effectively monitor all of them? At the moment, the answer is: not easily.

Until that is, we launch our new tool: LLM Chatbot Explorer, which will give you insight into your brand’s visibility on major LLMs.

But, until then, there are two ways to monitor how your brand is portrayed on LLMs.

• Asking LLMs questions about your brand
• Analyzing LLM autocompletes

Let’s take a quick look at each of these in turn.

Asking LLMs questions about your brand

I asked Perplexity what it knew about Ahrefs. This is what it said.

The answer is okay, but, interestingly, one of the sources for the answer is one of our competitors—not ideal. If we re-run the same question in ChatGPT, we get a more simplified answer with less detail.

I’m not convinced that either of these answers is that great, so what can we do to influence how our brand is portrayed in LLMs? The answer is LLMO. My colleague, Louise Linehan, wrote a fantastic article on this topic, which you should check out if you are interested in this topic.

Research LLM autocompletes

If you start typing your brand into LLMs, they usually add some autocomplete suggestions below your search, in the same way that Google has done for many years.

I’ve provided a quick example using Perplexity below and typing in Ahrefs.

For Ahrefs, there aren’t too many big surprises here. One of the autocompletes is for our backlink checker and some of the free versions of our tools, like our SEO extension.

Interestingly—one of these autocompletes is in French, which could provide insights for our international marketing team.

So, what does the future of brand monitoring look like? I think we’ll see three key developments.

• Increased importance of LLMs
• More advanced sentiment analysis
• More Reddit

Increased importance of brand monitoring on LLMs

Brand monitoring currently concentrates on social media, but I believe that as LLMs become more influential, we’ll see more brand monitoring on LLMs as well as websites and social media.

At Ahrefs, we already get a constant stream of leads from ChatGPT, so it doesn’t seem that farfetched to believe that monitoring how your brand is represented on LLMs will soon become more important.

More advanced sentiment analysis

At the moment, sentiment analysis is generally categorized into positive, negative, and neutral categories.

Although this is useful at a basic level, it doesn’t give much indication of the more nuanced emotions and feelings behind these categorizations. I think it’s fair to say that more advanced emotional sentiment analysis will become more popular in the future as it will help you to distinguish more complex emotions.

More Reddit (yes, you read it correctly)

Monitoring your brand on specific forums like Reddit is likely to become more popular in the future.

The main reason is that Reddit has become much more visible on Google than it used to be just a few short years ago. We can see this using Ahrefs by cracking open a fresh Site Explorer screen and typing “reddit.com” in the search box.

Reddit will continue to become more important for brands due to a slight ~1000% boost in organic traffic in Google over the last year, which led some SEOs to poke fun at Google’s expense.

Final thoughts

It’s tempting to think of brand monitoring in its traditional definition—only focusing on social media. But, in my opinion, it has a broader meaning, which includes websites, social media, and now LLMs.

Your brand can be mentioned anywhere online. If you want to track all the conversations around your brand, it follows that you shouldn’t only focus on social media.

Got questions? Let me know on LinkedIn.