Measuring brand awareness might seem abstract, but it’s fairly straightforward if you know which signals to look for and where to find them.
This guide covers nine ways to gauge whether people are actually discovering, recognizing, and remembering your brand — including through AI platforms.
What is brand awareness?
Brand awareness is how well consumers recognize and remember your brand and its products or services. It takes into account brand recognition, recall, and market dominance.
Think of it this way: If consumers can easily mention a brand by viewing its logo or by being asked to mention top companies in a particular category, that brand has strong awareness.
Awareness is a key part of the buyer’s journey — the stages a customer goes through to become a customer. The more brand awareness you have, the more customers you’re likely to have.
Why is measuring brand awareness important?
Measuring brand awareness is important because it helps you understand your position in the market and whether you have a good chance of being selected during purchase decisions.
More specifically, measuring brand awareness helps you:
- Benchmark against competitors: Comparing your brand awareness against your competitors’ awareness reveals how competitive you are in your niche
- Assess the effectiveness of marketing campaigns: Growing awareness suggests that your campaigns are producing positive results
- Guide business and marketing decisions: Monitoring your level of brand awareness can inform strategic decisions about where to invest
9 ways to measure brand awareness
Here are nine methods to effectively measure your brand awareness over time:
1. Track brand mentions
Tracking brand mentions on social media, blogs, forums, and elsewhere on the web shows how often your brand comes up in conversation.
You can also get a sense of audience sentiment (how people perceive your brand) when tracking mentions.
You can use a social listening tool to track brand mentions specifically across social media platforms. Or opt for something like the Media Monitoring app, which tracks mentions more broadly and also includes additional metrics.
To get started with Media Monitoring, enter your branded keywords or hashtags, select your language, and click “Create Project.
Media Monitoring will look for mentions of your keywords and generate a report with its findings.
Click the “Mentions” tab to review all your mentions sorted by date. And see the sentiment (positive, negative, or neutral) for each one.
Click on the “Analysis” tab to see:
- Mentions over time
- Brand reach
- An overall sentiment breakdown
- The most influential websites that mention your brand
Keep in mind that AI assistants like ChatGPT and Perplexity often rely on information from forums and other websites. Aiming to keep those mentions positive can improve how you’re presented in AI answers.
2. Monitor your share of voice
Share of voice (SoV) measures how much of the market’s conversation your brand owns compared to rivals.
The higher your share of voice, the more influential your brand likely is.
There are numerous ways to measure SoV, but one of the most reliable methods is to see how visible and prominent you are for your target keywords in search engines (i.e., your SEO share of voice).
To find your SEO share of voice, use Position Tracking. Click the toggle next to “Share of Voice” at the top to show that metric across reports.
You can also track share of voice in AI systems using Semrush’s AI Visibility Toolkit. Go to Brand Performance and select which platform you’d like to view your share of voice and sentiment for. Then, see how you compare against your top rivals.
3. Measure your social media reach
Social mediareach is the total number of unique users who see your content in their feeds, so it’s a great barometer for measuring brand awareness on social media.
An increase in reach signals that your brand awareness is improving. This could be from paid or organic social.
Use the Social Analytics tool within Semrush’s Social Toolkit to measure reach across multiple platforms. Just go to the “Overview” tab.
Choose a social media platform to view reach specific to that platform.
4. Monitor website traffic
Monitoring website traffic gives you a good indication of whether your brand awareness is improving, particularly when you focus on specific channels.
Measure the following in Google Analytics 4 (GA4):
- Direct traffic: Visitors who land on your site by typing the URL into their browser or using a bookmark
- Referral traffic: Visitors who land on your site via links from other websites
- Organic traffic: Visitors who land on your site from search engine results pages
- Organic social traffic: Visitors who land on your site from organic social media posts
- New users: People visiting your site for the first time
High direct traffic is one of the strongest signals of brand recall as these visitors didn't need a search result or social post to find you. Just be aware that traffic from other sources can sometimes get misattributed as direct traffic, so your actual direct traffic may be a bit lower.
If you’re looking at overall traffic from users and new users, you might want to consider filtering out traffic from paid advertising campaigns.
Ad traffic is great for revealing campaign performance, but it’s highly volatile and can mislead you into thinking you’ve rapidly grown brand awareness when one or more campaigns are active.
5. Track your search engine visibility
Search engine visibility is how prominent your brand appears in search engine results when people enter queries relevant to your business.
Search engine visibility helps you gauge the effectiveness of your search engine optimization (SEO) efforts. But it’s also an indicator of brand awareness. Because the more you appear in search results, the more likely it is that searchers will start to recognize you.
Use Domain Overview to see where your domain appears for various keywords.Simply input your domain name, set your location, and click “Search.”
The “Overview” tab reports your domain’s performance across various SEO metrics. Scroll down to “Keywords” and select the “Organic” tab to see how your rankings have changed in Google over time.
An increase in keyword rankings indicates that more people have potentially become aware of your business.
To track visibility for a specific set of keywords, use Position Tracking. The “Overview” tab shows a visibility score based on your progress in Google’s top 100 results for your chosen keywords.
6. Measure your branded searches
An increase in the number of people searching for your brand, products, and/or services indicates that people are not only becoming more aware of you, but actively seeking you out.
You can easily see how your brand’s popularity in search has changed over time using Google Trends.
Even if your rankings for branded terms don’t change much, an increase in the number of searches says a lot about how effectively your brand-building efforts are working.
The other benefit of getting more branded searches is it typically means users with high intent are looking for you. So, you may see more conversions and sales as a result.
7. Distribute surveys and monitor reviews
Consumer surveys provide a clear way to measure whether your awareness is growing.
You can use platforms like Pollfish to distribute brand awareness surveys. Simply design a survey asking about how well consumers know your brand and use the platform’s distribution function to send it to a pool of respondents.
Another option is to track how many reviews you get on places like Yelp and Google. If the number of reviews is increasing, that means you’re remaining top of mind for customers after a transaction.
8. Measure your backlinks
A growing number of backlinks from other websites to your site reveals that other publishers are becoming more aware of you.
If more publishers are linking to you, that also means your overall brand awareness is likely growing.
Plus, backlinks are crucial trust indicators that can improve your performance in search results.
Use the Backlinks tool for a comprehensive view of your backlink profile. You can easily see whether your total number of backlinks is growing or declining.
9. Monitor your AI search visibility
AI search platforms offer a new form of brand visibility, and you can use specific tools to see how often you appear in AI responses and the overall sentiment of responses.
Use Semrush’s Visibility Overview report to track your brand's presence across AI-powered search platforms like ChatGPT and Google AI Mode.
Visibility Overview also helps you measure:
- Your total number of brand mentions in AI responses
- How many of your pages are cited in AI responses
- Which topics you appear for in AI tools
- The specific responses you appear in — this allows you to dig into sentiment that may influence users
To improve your AI visibility and the way you’re presented in AI responses, these activities can help:
- Engage in brand-building activities like digital PR
- Ensure consistent messaging across your website, social media accounts, and other owned channels
- Build topical authority by constantly publishing high-quality content around a group of queries that are highly relevant to you
- Structure your content with clear subheadings and direct answers to ensure AI systems can easily understand and cite your content
Brand awareness FAQs
What are the four levels of brand awareness?
The four levels of brand awareness that reflect how deeply your brand is known are zero awareness, brand recognition (aided recall), brand recall (unaided recall), and top-of-mind awareness.
Surveys are one way to determine what your main level of brand awareness is.
What is a good KPI for brand awareness?
Good key performance indicators (KPI)s for brand awareness can include branded search volume, share of voice, and AI visibility.
How often should you measure brand awareness?
How often you should measure brand awareness depends on the specific KPIs you’re tracking. In general, most metrics can be tracked on a monthly basis.
No matter how frequently you measure, always start with a baseline to measure against going forward.