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Google looking at how to measure brand awareness for search

Will Google ever give sites credit for brand name mentions or citations without an actual link? Gary Illyes from Google said Google's UX team is looking at ways to measure brand awareness.

Barry Schwartz on October 11, 2016 at 9:09 am

In A conversation with Google’s Gary Illyes (part 1) podcast at Marketing Land, our sister site, Gary Illyes told us that Google is looking at ways to measure brand awareness in search.

Gary Illyes said this when we asked about how Google sources featured snippets with Google Home voice assistant. Gary explained that measuring brand mentions, without links, is hard, but the user experience team at Google is looking at ways to do this.

In context, Danny Sullivan asked Gary what publishers get out of Google Home saying the name of the site. Is there any ranking benefit to it? Does it lead to any traffic to your site? Gary explained that he first discovered Search Engine Land through brand mentions in forums, not through a link. He then goes on to explain that the Google team is looking at ways to measure “brand awareness.”

Here is the snippet of the audio where Gary Illyes said this:

Here is the audio transcript:

Danny Sullivan: So the feeling is that you’ll get enough brand awareness?

Gary Illyes: Something that you can’t measure easily. We are thinking about how to actually, like, measure that in aggregate. I think that UXers are on it.

You can listen to part one of the interview at Marketing Land.

About The Author

Barry Schwartz

Barry Schwartz is Search Engine Land's News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on SEM topics.