People also ask
In practice
The logic is simple: somebody already did the editorial work of mentioning you. A review, a roundup, a news item or a forum post named your product but stopped short of linking. Reclamation is the outreach that closes that gap — usually a short, polite note pointing the editor at the sentence where the mention sits and offering the exact URL.
Because the publisher chose to cover you once, the ask is small and conversion rates are typically better than cold guest-post pitches, though still far from universal; editors say no for their own reasons, and a reclamation programme should expect a minority success rate, not a clean sweep.
It is worth doing for three reasons. It recovers links you effectively already earned, it uses brand anchors — the safest anchor type — and it is nearly free, since monitoring tools surface mentions continuously. For AI visibility the same mentions matter even when they never become links: in Ahrefs’ study of 75,000 brands, branded web mentions correlated with AI Overview visibility at 0.664 while backlinks correlated at 0.218.
That is a correlation, not proven causation — there’s no public data yet proving that a mention causes a citation — but it explains why we treat the mention itself as an asset and not just a failed link. We track it, we don’t promise it.
Practical cautions: keep the ask precise (link the product page, not the homepage, when the sentence names the product), never threaten or guilt editors, and log outcomes so the same site is not pounced on twice a quarter.
See also: Unlinked mentions: finding and converting, Brand mention, Brand mentions vs link building.
Related service: Brand mentions.
