How to Measure Brand Awareness in 2025 (AKA the Year of the Brand)

Louise Linehan

Louise is a Content Marketer at Ahrefs. Over the past ten years, she has held senior content positions at SaaS brands: Pi Datametrics, BuzzSumo, and Cision. By day, she writes about content and SEO; by night, you’ll find her playing football or screaming down the mic at karaoke.

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Below I’ve laid out 11 workflows you can follow to measure the success of your brand awareness—including some little-known Ahrefs use cases.

Brand awareness refers to a series of marketing tactics that help audiences recognize and recall a brand name, logo, or product.

It’s a “death-by-a-thousand-cuts”/ ”sales-by-a-thousand-sightings” approach to marketing: lots of tiny actions working together to create big benefits for your company.

If you’re thinking of advertising, eyeballs, and impressions, you’re in the right ballpark.

Big brands spend millions building awareness, because with recognition comes a certain level of legitimacy and trust—which can turn into sales further down the line.

There’s no right way to manufacture awareness. Brands use different formats, channels, and varying levels of creativity to capture audience attention.

Examples of different types of brand awareness include:

• Sponsored content: Content that a brand pays to be featured alongside (e.g. their logo, product, or marketing message) to get in front of their target audience.
• Podcast adverts: Audio ad space that brands can buy to get in front of their target audience. Ads play before, during, or after the podcasts that their audience listen to.
• Billboard/out-of-home (OOH) advertising: Physical, offline ad space that brands can buy in the form of billboards, digital screens, or posters on transportation (e.g. busses).
• PR stunts/Guerilla marketing: Marketing that uses shock value or attention-grabbing ideas to create buzz and media coverage—typically executed in a creative, scrappy way.
• Branded content: Mass-appeal entertainment content that’s either sponsored, commissioned, or created by a company to match its audience’s values.
• Product placement: The subliminal advertising of a branded product in a piece of entertainment content, made to look natural within the storyline (e.g. in film, TV, or video games).

B2B companies spent 28.9% of their marketing budgets on brand awareness in 2024, according to Gartner—investing more than at any other stage of the customer journey.

Companies can burn through cash on brand awareness campaigns, hoping people will recognize and love their brand. But generating a buzz with no sales is a situation no marketer wants to find themselves in.

“The key to building a successful brand with ads is that those ads need to actually convert people into buyers—otherwise you’ll waste a ton of money and could bankrupt your company if everyone knows your brand but doesn’t buy it.” 

Tim Soulo, CMO, Ahrefs

That’s why it’s crucial to measure the impact of your brand awareness strategy as you build it.

The events of the last year mean it’s harder than ever to build brand awareness, what with AI eating into top-of-the-funnel traffic, near-constant search reshuffling, declining social reach (hello, TikTok ban), and a flood of low-quality AI content eroding consumer trust.

But I also, counterintuitively, think it’s the best time to build and measure your brand.

The more brand awareness, trust, and loyalty you build now, the less troubled you’ll be by these challenges in future. That’s because the benefits of brand awareness compound. Building awareness will bring you more:

• AI traffic. AI is an entirely new channel, giving you first mover advantage. The more your brand name crops up in topically relevant conversations online, the more likely it is to be mentioned and cited by LLMs and AI.
• Organic traffic. According to Mark Williams-Cook, Google assigns sites a “site quality” score, based on brand metrics. To understand your website’s quality, it analyzes your branded keywords, brand mentions that attract clicks (e.g. brand rich anchor text), and site clicks. Proactively building your brand awareness will inflate these metrics, boosting your site quality score and search ranking. Any ranking improvements will reinforce your brand visibility, creating a feedback loop of compounding awareness.
• Brand protection. Brand awareness means less dependence on any one channel, and diversified traffic from multiple sources and channels.
• Brand loyalty. Once your audience is aware of your brand, you can nurture that interest throughout the customer journey, turning it into positive brand sentiment and loyalty.
• Customers. Despite being tricky to attribute, when awareness booms, sales and conversions are often pulled along in the slipstream.

Brand awareness is the fuzziest form of marketing, built on emotional resonance rather than measurable metrics. Outcomes like brand recall, recognition, perception, affinity, and sentiment are notoriously tricky to quantify because they rely on subjective, emotional responses.

What’s more, some of your brand awareness is earned and beyond your direct control, such as PR, word of mouth, user-generated content, and social media. You can’t control the narrative, and since you didn’t create the content, you lack full performance data, making it even tougher to evaluate.

For example, you won’t know the traffic or impressions a New York Times article mentioning your brand has generated without access to their analytics.

Similarly, your brand will inevitably generate awareness you can’t track—and may never even know about—through offline channels or dark social.

And another thing!

Me at 9.09am writing this blog while eating my toast.

Brand awareness sits right at the start of the customer journey, so following the breadcrumbs through to conversion is not easy and, at times, impossible.

But don’t let all that put you off. Measuring brand awareness can still be done, and when done right, it’s hugely valuable, helping you to:

• Justify investment: Pinning down the brand awareness metrics you can measure will help you prove growth. With that evidence, you can secure investment, attract partnerships, and get sign-off on those harder-to-measure creative projects.
• One-up your competition: Measuring brand awareness through methods like share of voice analysis can help you work out your market positioning, set realistic goals, and repurpose strategies that have worked for your competitors. Even if your competition has more awareness, if they’re not measuring and proactively building on it, you can close that gap.
• Figure out what works: Measuring your brand awareness strategy lets you review which tactics lead to the biggest surge in interest. Once you know what works, you can repeat successful campaigns, justify resource allocation, and more accurately tie output to ROI.

So, it’s hard to justify spend on brand because it’s so… fluffy. But you can remove a lot of that fluffiness by measuring awareness in smart ways, and paying attention to what works.

Here’s how to do that.

Let’s dive into 11 different methods and metrics you can use to figure out how well your brand awareness strategy is working.

There are so many moving parts when it comes to increasing brand awareness. Different ads, creative formats, channels, messages.

You really need a top-level view of performance to know if it’s all working.

Share of Voice (SoV) is that in a nutshell—a top-down metric that helps you quantify your brand awareness in the context of your market and competitors.

The formula to calculate share of voice is:

| SoV = Your brand visibility / Total market visibility * 100

Social share of voice shows you the percentage of the market you’ve cornered on social media, measured by your share of brand mentions vs. total brand mentions in the remaining market.

The formula to calculate social share of voice is:

| Social SoV = Your brand mentions / Total brand mentions in your market * 100

Brandwatch Consumer Research helps you measure your social share of voice

Search SoV calculates how much organic traffic you own as a proportion of the total market.

The formula is:

| Search SoV = Your organic traffic / Total organic traffic in your market * 100

Ahrefs Rank Tracker will show you your brand’s search share of voice for up to 10K keywords.

Just list out your branded or campaign-specific keywords, and see whether your brand awareness is falling, growing, or going steady.

You can also benchmark your brand awareness against competitors in Rank Tracker, if you’ve specified them in your project setup.

To see that data, head to the “Competitors > Overview 2.0” tab on the left for Share of Voice and Share of Traffic Value timelines.

In this example, we’ve seen a 6.2% increase in our search share of voice over the last six months, bringing us up to an overall share of 23.1% for the keywords we care about.

These are the kinds of metrics to look back on when you’re proactively building your awareness.

Rank Tracker is great if you want to see your SoV trending over time, but for a snapshot view, head to Keywords Explorer.

Same as Rank Tracker, this report lets you track 10K keywords, so you can benchmark your brand’s top-level search presence against your closest competitors.

Here’s an easy workflow you can follow:

1. Head to the Organic Keywords report and select the 10,000 highest ranking keywords for your domain
2. Hit “Copy”
3. Head to Keywords Explorer and paste them in the searchbar
4. Pull up the “Traffic share by domain” report
5. See how you much share you own for your top keywords, vs. the rest of the market

Advertising is a huge part of increasing brand awareness. You need to watch how your ads are performing before, during, and after each campaign—and keep tracking at scale—to see if your brand awareness efforts are actually paying off.

Most ad platforms have built-in ad managers (e.g. Google Ads Manager, Google Display Network, Facebook Ads Manager) which show you key brand awareness metrics like impressions, traffic, clicks, or CTR.

We run our own ads on Quora, for example, and have access to all of those figures.

Here are a couple more ways you can measure the success of your ads using Ahrefs.

Measure the success of PPC brand awareness campaigns

Head to Site Explorer and enter your domain¹, then find the Paid Pages report². Other reports in Ahrefs let you dive into the minutiae of your search ads, but this is one of the best places to study overarching ad awareness.

Once you’re there, make a note of your Total Traffic³ at the top of the keyword table, and then study your paid traffic growth over time⁴—especially in relation to ad cost. When your paid traffic exceeds paid traffic cost, it’s a good sign that your brand awareness ads are doing the trick!

In this report, you can also filter by keywords in URLs, titles, and descriptions to better report on the campaign-specific brand awareness.

Track total uplift in PPC traffic

For a birdseye view over your brand ads, pull up the Overview report in Site Explorer. It’s great for checking your:

1. Total ad traffic vs. organic traffic
2. Gross ad traffic growth and decline
3. Location based and regional awareness

If you want to know whether people care about your brand, watch your traffic during a campaign.

It’s not a perfect science, but it can help you quantify intangible goals like brand recall and recognition.

When people recognize your brand, they’re more likely to visit your site. If they visit it directly, that’s further proof that they know you exist.

In other words, if you run an ad and your direct traffic goes up, there’s a good chance it’s working.

You can monitor total and direct traffic without fuss in Google Analytics 4, via the report:

Acquisition → Traffic Acquisition: Session default channel group report

And now you can view your web traffic in Ahrefs, via our Web Analytics tool in the Dashboard¹ part of the platform. When you get there, just head to Projects² to see your total web traffic³.

Then, to see your direct traffic, add a “Channel” filter for “Direct”.

When you set the date range to align with your campaign, you can see whether your promotion is having any impact.

You can also segment your total and direct traffic by campaign URLs or UTMs.

People may like your brand and visit your site, but you know your awareness is really growing when they care enough to talk about it.

This will look like a steady stream of backlinks and referral traffic back to your site from publications, blogs, review sites, forums, and social media.

But not all links are created equal. When you report on earned awareness, you need to focus on the growth of quality referrals—not just the sum total.

Here are some things to consider when you’re working out what constitutes a “good” link:

And you’ll also want to think about what “good” looks like to your brand.

For instance, some companies may see a link from a national publication as being the zenith of awareness—regardless of whether it drives referral traffic.

Here are some practical ways you can use Ahrefs to measure growth in your backlinks and referrals.

Track how many high-quality backlinks you pick up

Once you decide what quality referrals look like, you can configure a “Best links” filter to speed up your monthly reporting.

This filter allows you to set specific criteria for your links.

For example, you might choose to only see “dofollow” links in an attempt to pick up more link equity, or “in content” backlinks, to sidestep spurious links in footers or comment sections.

Here’s how to measure your best brand backlinks:

1. Head to the Overview report in Site Explorer
2. Drop in your sites’ domain OR a campaign link—depending on what you’re measuring
3. Click on the “Backlink profile” tab
4. Set the filter to “Best links only”

This configuration will give you a macro-level view of your highest-quality links. Then you can record link numbers each month…

…and roughly correlate spikes in backlink acquisition with the dates of your brand campaigns.

Measure how much your brand name gets mentioned in anchor text

If someone links to you, but doesn’t mention your brand, is that even brand awareness?

To really understand the strength of your brand presence, tracking your brand name in link anchor text is a must.

Head to Ahrefs’ Anchors report, set an “Anchor with surrounding text” filter for your brand name (and any common misspellings).

This will show you every occasion where a site has either hyperlinked your brand name, or mentioned your brand name in the content immediately surrounding a link to your site.

This is important to quantify because the more your brand name gets repeated, the more likely audiences will be to recall it.

Remember, you can limit your analysis to “Best links”, as above, so you’re focusing on the mentions that really count.

Tracking how your brand anchors grow over time will give you a better idea of how your brand awareness is growing.

You may also want to work out your brand anchors as a percentage of your total anchors, and track how that changes.

For instance, right now at Ahrefs we have 22,072 “brand name” anchors, and 96,640 anchors overall, meaning that 23% of our links are driving overt brand awareness.

We can check back on this figure every month, and even segment the analysis to focus on the uptake of specific brand campaigns, like the Ahrefs Podcast.

Measure brand awareness in terms of referral traffic

If you want to see which one of your brand awareness tactics have pushed users through the funnel, then it’s a good idea to report on referral traffic—this will show you the number of users that actually made it back to your site.

You can track this in GA4, via the report I mentioned earlier on:

Acquisition → Traffic Acquisition: Session default channel group report.

Or you can dig into your traffic in Ahrefs Web Analytics.

Just add a “Channel” filter for referral traffic.

Whether you’re paying a princely sum for a 30 second election ad like Calm…

…or doing a lo-fi brand spoof like smartphone manufacturer Nothing…

…the very least you can hope for is a spike in social media engagement following your brand awareness campaigns.

Here are some metrics to look at when you’re assessing your brand awareness on social.

Social media mentions and sentiment growth (earned)

You can use social listening tools to scour for earned mentions of your brand, and set up queries for your:

• Campaigns
• Products/services
• People
• Any other brand associations

Once you’ve tapped into brand-relevant conversations, you can make note of your total reach, and measure how much awareness your brand has sparked in the market.

Brandwatch’s social media management tool, highlighting the total reach of social content

For years, social tools have been able to analyze the language of your brand mentions, and decree whether they’re positive, negative, or neutral in sentiment. I imagine this kind of analysis is only going to get better with advancements in AI and LLMs.

If you want to quantify the qualitative (read: “fluffier”) parts of your brand, then sentiment scores are another great metric to include in your reporting.

Sentiment trends and scores in Sprout Social

Sentiment scores in SproutSocial

Companies are losing up to ~40% of their organic traffic as AI Overviews take over popular brand awareness searches, like FAQs and definitions.

But at the same time, AI overviews are sending more awareness and traffic to certain (cited) brands.

It’s a similar story with AI chatbots: They’re encroaching on organic traffic, but what they take with one hand, they give with another—mentioning, recommending, and linking to brands in customer conversations.

Whatever you make of them, these new awareness channels are still largely untapped, and offer huge potential for brands that get in early.

Here’s how to increase brand awareness in AI.

Track your ownership of AI overview keywords

Keeping a handle on your awareness today means tracking your brand ownership of AI overviews. There’s a straightforward way to do this in Ahrefs:

1. Head to the Organic Keywords report
2. Set a SERP feature filter
3. Click “Where target ranks”
4. Select AI overview
5. Set your monthly date range

This will show you which AI overview keywords you have picked up since last month, along with any organic traffic uplift.

Make a note of the total keywords each month (shown in the position history chart) to measure your AIO awareness over time.

Track your AI /LLM referral traffic

To find out how often your brand is cropping up in AI conversations, you can configure a report in Ahrefs Web Analytics.

Just select the “Channel” filter and choose ”LLM” to assess your traffic from popular AI chatbots.

Pay close attention to the types of pages and content getting cited. This will give you a better idea of the content formats to double down on.

For instance, we’re getting most of our AI brand visibility from stats, tools, courses, and trend-based blogs, so we should probably create more of that content to continue turning up in relevant AI conversations.

Measure your brand ownership of relevant topics

Large language models generate content by calculating the statistical proximity between topics and entities.

The more commonly topics appear together in training data, the more statistically significant their connection, and the more likely an LLM is to mention those topics together in a response.

Meaning, if you make a conscious effort to align your brand with relevant topics, it’s more likely to crop up alongside those topics in AI.

You can track your brand alignment efforts in Ahrefs by measuring co-mentions of your brand alongside key topics.

Just head to the Content Explorer and:

1. Do a search for your brand name
2. Check your total brand mentions
3. Do a boolean search for your brand name AND “topic”
4. Check the number of topic mentions

In this example, 3.2% of Patagonia’s brand mentions also mention the keyword “sustainability”.

Monitoring these figures can give you a solid sense of your overall topical authority.

Your branded keyword search volume is a crucial indicator of your brand awareness.

According to our own research, 45.7% of all searches made on Google are branded. That’s nearly half of all searches made on Google.

If that isn’t the best justification for tracking your branded keywords, I don’t know what is.

Google Trends can help you visualize brand search volume growth and decline…

…but it doesn’t give you exact search volumes or growth figures to report on. And it can’t predict whether your brand awareness will be sustained.

Here’s how you can measure those metrics in Ahrefs.

Track your brand demand

Head to the Matching Terms report in Keywords Explorer and search your brand name, plus any misspellings.

At the head of the report, you’ll see some top-line brand metrics including your overall…

• Number of branded keywords
• Brand search volume (based on the location you searched in)
• Global brand search volume
• Growth rate (3/6/12 month)
• Global growth rate (3/6/12 month [not pictured below])

And if you want to anticipate demand, there’s data for that too. In the column section, just hit “Growth forecast” to see a 12-month search volume trend for every brand term on your list.

Or alternatively, search your brand name in Keywords Explorer, and check the overview page for a larger visual forecast of your organic brand demand…

This data will show you the trajectory of your brand demand. Growing? Show it off and repeat what works. Declining? Study it and consider changing tack.

Whenever you want to prove the success of past brand campaigns, or get buy-in for future brand awareness projects, this kind of data is invaluable.

You can also use it for backcasting: defining your brand search volume goals and working backwards from there. One obvious way to do this would be to repeat the analysis for your competitors, then model your awareness on the one with the strongest brand growth and growth forecasts.

So, you can now prove your awareness campaigns are paying off through brand search volume growth—but how many of those searches actually result in traffic to your site?

To answer this, start tracking your branded keyword traffic and positions on an ongoing basis—any uplift should correlate nicely with effective brand awareness.

There’s a few ways you can go about this in Ahrefs.

Track branded search traffic vs. non-branded

In Site Explorer, hit the Overview report, set your date range, and scroll down to the “Avg. branded vs. non-branded organic traffic” and “Organic keywords by intent” reports.

Here, you’ll be able to track and record the organic traffic you’re receiving for branded keywords, and how that’s changed over time. Bear in mind that, for now, this report tracks your traffic for any keyword in our database that’s identified as a brand, so that could be your brand name—but it could also be your competitors’. This is something we’re working on changing in the near future.

Measure your organic traffic for specific brand keywords

If you want to narrow your search traffic reporting to specific brand awareness keywords, here’s how to do that:

1. Head to the Top Pages report in Ahrefs
2. Set a “Keyword” filter for your select topics (I’ve tracked the Ahrefs brand name and any misspellings in this example)
3. Set your MoM date range
4. Track the trend of your branded search traffic
5. Make note of the number of pages, total traffic, and total traffic growth/decline each month

Not everyone links! Journalists are notorious for withholding backlinks, and discussions will be had about your brand that you’re not privy to if you’re only checking your links.

Accounting for unlinked brand mentions in your reporting is an absolute must—not only can it equate to a serious amount of brand awareness, you’ll find out a lot more about your audience in the process—including their opinions, preferences, and demographics.

Plus, unlinked brand mentions are as good as links in the eyes of LLMs and AI.

According to research from Seer Interactive, links actually display the weakest correlation of all common SEO factors when it comes to LLM visibility.

Disregard brand mentions at your peril!

Track your brand mentions

In Content Explorer¹ do an “Everywhere”² search for your brand name³, and note down the number of pages⁴ that return. Keep hold of that figure, until you update it the following month—then note the number of new pages⁵.

You might not expect direct sales to result from brand awareness campaigns, but it does happen—and it’s worth tracking.

You can monitor this using analytics/attribution tools like Google Tag Manager and GA4.

Example of a conversion report in GA4 for specific conversion events. Image courtesy of Mauro Romanella

Using Google Tag Manager, for example, you can track when a user comes to your site via a brand campaign link, clicks on a converting CTA, loads a specific URL fragment, or takes any other action that infers/equates to a conversion. Then, you can measure all those events in GA4.

Once you have that data to hand, you can calculate conversion rates—just divide conversions by the number of total visitors.

For example, imagine the UK meal delivery brand Cook running a “CookTok” campaign of recipe challenges on TikTok. If 1,000 users visit the campaign landing page after watching the videos, and 50 sign up for a subscription, the conversion rate would be 5% (50/1,000).

If you can’t make event tracking work, then another alternative is tracking conversions and sales increase during periods of high brand awareness, so you can loosely connect the dots between awareness and revenue.

While it’s true that brand awareness campaigns don’t always neatly track back to conversions, if your conversion rate is nonexistent over an extended period of time, you might need to start troubleshooting—it could signal that there’s something wrong with your brand messaging, UX, or tracking.

Final thoughts

Measuring brand awareness in 2025 isn’t just possible—it’s a prerequisite.

These are 11 concrete ways I think you can successfully prove your brand’s impact.

The next step would be to combine these metrics to build a complete picture of your brand awareness.

Once you’ve brought everything together, you’ll have a much better understanding of how to increase your brand awareness.

I’m looking to create a Looker Studio dashboard of Ahrefs’ brand data for this very reason. If you have any smart techniques I’ve missed off, ping me on LinkedIn. I’m all ears!