In October 2026 our searches found 93 public Instagram posts naming Liquid Death, and 11 news articles in the index we search named it too. A backlink report would show you some of the 11. It would show you none of the 93, because an Instagram caption cannot carry a clickable link, and a crawler that counts links has nothing to count there.
That gap is the whole reason for this guide. A recent Exploding Topics video on monitoring brand mentions for SEO gives four sensible methods: a brand monitoring tool, review sites and forums, your backlink profile filtered by your brand name, and Google Alerts as the free option. Those cover the web well. For a consumer, CPG or D2C brand, the web is the smaller half of the conversation. Below are the same jobs rebuilt for a brand people post about, with real examples from our collection. Our counts are what our searches found, a sample of what was posted, so the comparisons matter more than the totals (how we count).
What counts as a brand mention
A brand mention is any public reference to your brand by name. For SEO, people split them into linked mentions, which point at your site, and unlinked ones, which only name you. For social, the split that matters is tagged and untagged: did the post tag your account, or only type your name?
On Instagram the second split is the one you can act on. Of the 93 Liquid Death posts we found, 40 tagged @liquiddeath, fewer than half. For Alani Nu it was 28 of 66, and for Bob's Red Mill 1 of 10. The untagged posts never reach the brand's notifications. Our explainer on tags and mentions covers the difference in detail.
Method 1: web and news alerts
Start with a free alert for your brand name in quotation marks, plus one for each product name people use instead of the brand. Google Alerts is the usual choice. It sends you news and blog pages as it finds them, and it is free. What it does not do is read Instagram or TikTok captions, or tell you whether a page is about you.
That second weakness matters more than it sounds. In the news index we search, 15 articles published between 23 and 29 October 2026 named Celsius. One of them was about a bitcoin miner. Ten were about lawsuits, mostly law-firm notices about a securities class action against the company. An alert that counted all 15 as press would have told the marketing team it had a busy week in the news, which was true and not the kind of busy anyone wanted. Read news mentions before you count them. Add exclusion words to the alert when your name is shared with something else.
Method 2: forums, reviews and Reddit
Reddit and review sites are where people say what they actually think, often in more words than an Instagram caption allows. Search Reddit for your brand name sorted by new, and do it for your competitors too. A free Reddit alert, such as the one compared on our F5Bot page, emails you when a post or comment uses the name. Review sites need a person to read them, and the recurring complaint is worth more than the star average.
For a food or drink brand, check the subreddits about the category as well as the ones about the brand. A thread asking for a gluten-free flour that actually works is a buying question, and the brands named in the replies are the ones that get the sale.
Method 3: turn unlinked mentions into links
The backlink method in the video is the right instinct: look at who already references you by name. Take it one step further and look for the pages that name you without linking at all. Those are the cheapest links you will ever earn, because the author already decided to write about you.
Your news alert is the list. In October 2026 the index we search held 11 articles naming Liquid Death, 11 naming Poppi and 7 naming Olipop. For each one, open it, check whether the brand name is linked, and if it is not, send the author one short note with the page a reader would want, such as the product page or a store locator. Some will add it. Keep a sheet so nobody is asked twice.
The same move works with creators. Many people who post recipes or reviews on Instagram also keep a blog, a Pinterest board or a YouTube channel where a link is possible. A baker who tagged you in a reel is a reasonable person to ask whether the recipe on their blog could link the flour.
Method 4: Instagram and TikTok, the mentions SEO tools miss
This is the method missing from most SEO advice, and for consumer brands it is where most mentions are. Search tools crawl web pages. They see little of what is said in captions and videos, and nothing of a post that types your name without tagging you.
The platforms do not behave alike either. In October 2026, King Arthur Baking and Bob's Red Mill each turned up in 10 public Instagram posts in our searches. On TikTok, in videos posted from 25 to 31 October, we found King Arthur Baking more than three times as often: 23 videos from 22 accounts, with 280,894 views between them, against 7 for Bob's Red Mill, with 17,019 views. A team that monitored one platform would have drawn the wrong conclusion about the other.
Why should an SEO care? Because a video with a hundred thousand views that names a brand is the kind of thing that sends people to type the brand into a search bar, and branded search is the traffic that converts. You cannot measure that path cleanly, but you can see the mentions that start it. By hand: check your Instagram Tagged tab, run a hashtag and a caption search for each version of your name, and run a TikTok search for the same terms, every week.
Method 5: check what AI assistants say about your category
Shoppers increasingly ask an assistant which brand to buy, so the answer is a mention you want to be in. Nobody outside the companies that build them can say exactly how an assistant picks its brands, so treat this as measurement and not as a lever: ask the questions, write down the answers, and watch them over time.
We do this every month for every category we track. On 1 November 2026, ChatGPT and Gemini both answered "What are the best baking brands?" with King Arthur Baking first and Bob's Red Mill second (the baking answers are public). On 28 October, Gemini named Olipop and Poppi in two of its three answers about soda brands, and ChatGPT named neither in any of its three (the soda answers). Two assistants, the same week, different answers. Checking only one would give you half the picture.
How to sort what you find
One sheet, one row per mention, five columns: where it was, who posted it, whether it tagged or linked you, what it said in a few words, and what you did. The action column decides whether this is monitoring or collecting. Most rows will be one of five things: a reply, a request to repost, an outreach note for a link, a note to product or customer service, or nothing.
Read the tone post by post before you summarise it. Our labels for Liquid Death's October posts came out 20 positive, 18 neutral and 1 critical, and the critical one was about a single collaboration. That is a note, not a trend, and only reading it tells you so.
What this will not tell you
Every count here is a sample. Each search returns a limited number of recent posts, so a busy brand is mentioned far more often than we count; compare the numbers rather than quote them as totals. A caption search also does not hear the audio or read the text inside a video, so a creator who says your name on camera and writes nothing is invisible to it. Small brands also get small numbers: in October, 55 of the 109 beverage brands in our beverage report were not tagged in a single post we found. If that is you, a monthly check by hand is enough, and the work worth doing is giving people a reason to post.
How to set up brand mention monitoring this week
Monday, fifteen minutes. Write the list of names: brand, handle, hashtag, misspellings, product names. Create a news alert for each, in quotation marks, with exclusion words where the name is shared.
Tuesday, fifteen minutes. Search Reddit for each name, set a Reddit alert, and note the two subreddits where your category is discussed.
Wednesday, twenty minutes. Go through the month's news mentions and mark every one without a link. Send the first three outreach notes.
Thursday, twenty minutes. Check your Instagram Tagged tab, then a hashtag and caption search, then TikTok. Add every account that posted about you to a creator list.
Friday, ten minutes. Ask two assistants the three questions a shopper in your category would ask, and record the answers with the date.
After that week, the social check is the one that needs doing every week, and it is the one we automate. Add your brand on the Monitor Mentions dashboard by typing your website and confirming its Instagram account, and the posts naming it are collected for you, tagged or not. One brand is free on a weekly collection; competitors, TikTok and news are on the paid plans, listed on the pricing page. For the background on every surface, the brand mentions guide is the long version.