Hundreds of sites already say your name. Most of them never linked. We search the web for pages mentioning your brand, cross off everyone who already links to you, and hand you what's left.
Almost every brand name is shared with something else. A marketing agency called Sandstorm Digital competes with a video game weapon skin; a UAE wallet called Payit shares its name with a bank product, a delivery app and a US government supplier. These two lines tell us which one is you. Not competitors: a page listing you next to your rivals is a good result, not a bad one. Only put words here that belong to something completely unrelated that happens to share your name.
A page that names your brand in its text but never links to your site. The writer already knows who you are and thought you were worth mentioning, which makes them far warmer than a cold pitch. Asking for the link is usually a short, friendly email.
Two searches run at once. One looks across the web for pages naming your brand. The other pulls every site that already links to your domain. We subtract the second from the first, drop your own pages, and what remains is the list.
Because most brand names are shared with something unrelated. One agency scan came back with a third of its results selling a video game weapon skin that happened to have the same two words in its title, plus a photo frame, a golf driver and a novel.
The first box takes words that appear when someone writes about you: your city, your industry, a founder's name. The second takes words belonging to the other thing that shares your name.
One thing to avoid: don't put competitors in the second box. A page listing you alongside five rival agencies is exactly the kind of page worth emailing. Excluding your competitors' names would throw away some of your best opportunities.
Confirmed means the page carried one of your words. Needs a look means it carried none either way, usually because the summary text was too short to judge. Another company means it carried one of your exclusion words, so we set it aside rather than delete it, in case we got it wrong.
We remove sites that will not give you a link no matter how well you ask: software directories, press release wires and their copies, free blog hosts, and pages that are machine generated. We also collapse the same article when it appears on several sites. Every removal is counted on your results so you can see what went and why.
Not always. A well known brand can have thousands of mentions, and each scan reads the strongest few hundred. When there are more than we read, the results say so and give you the total.
Open the page, find who wrote it, and send a short note thanking them for the mention and asking if they would add the link. Keep it to a few lines. You are asking for a small favour from someone who already likes you enough to write your name.
Monthly is plenty for most brands. Coverage builds slowly, and running the same scan twice in a day returns the stored result rather than searching again.