TikTok has moved well beyond its origins as an entertainment platform. For travel, it’s become a genuine driver of discovery, research, and, increasingly, bookings. The numbers tell the story: 84% of TikTok users watch travel content at least once a month, and 66% say the platform is their most helpful source of travel inspiration. Perhaps most significantly, users are 2.6 times more likely to book an experience after searching on TikTok.

Travel content on TikTok has exploded, with views growing by over 400% since 2021 and the #travel hashtag amassing more than 125 billion views. What’s changed is that this isn’t just top-of-funnel inspiration anymore. Users are actively planning, comparing, and booking trips based on what they see in their feeds. For travel brands, TikTok has evolved from a nice-to-have into a critical part of the media mix, and with the launch of TikTok Travel Ads, the platform is now purpose-built to convert that engagement into revenue.

What are TikTok travel ads?

TikTok Travel Ads are the platform’s first ad format built specifically for the travel industry. Launched in late 2025 and powered by TikTok’s AI-driven Smart+ technology, they’re designed to help travel brands promote hotels, flights, destinations, and experiences through dynamic, catalogue-integrated creatives that target high-intent users.

Unlike standard TikTok ad formats, Travel Ads use travel-specific optimisation models to identify users who are actively researching and planning trips, then serve them personalised ads based on their in-market behaviour and preferences.

There are three core formats:

Single Video Ads: A standard video paired with up to 10 clickable travel cards (dynamically generated from your product catalogue), displaying details like hotel names, flight routes, pricing, and ratings. Cards appear two seconds into the video and auto-slide every four seconds.

Catalogue Video Ads: Video assets are uploaded directly to the catalogue and matched to individual products (a specific hotel, flight, or destination). Each ad features a single travel card overlaid on the video, linking directly to the relevant product page.

Catalogue Carousel Ads:  A scrollable, swipeable format that pulls images directly from your product catalogue. Each image includes a clickable product tag, making it easy for users to browse multiple options and click through to book.

Each format includes interactive booking elements, clickable cards and tags, that allow users to move from discovery to booking without leaving the TikTok experience.

Why should travel brands invest in TikTok travel ads?

TikTok is reshaping the entire travel funnel,  and TikTok travel ads are the mechanism for capitalising on that shift. Here’s what makes them a compelling investment for travel marketers.

Discovery and booking are converging

Traditionally, travellers moved from inspiration (social media, magazines) to research (search engines, review sites) to booking (OTAs, brand websites) in a fairly linear path. TikTok compresses this. Users discover a destination in a video, research it through comments and related content, and can now book directly through dynamic travel ads tiktok, all within a single session. For brands, this means fewer drop-offs between stages and a more efficient path to conversion.

Intent-driven targeting at scale

TikTok’s Smart+ AI doesn’t just serve ads broadly, it identifies users who are actively showing travel intent based on their in-app behaviour: the travel content they watch, the searches they run, and the creators they engage with. This means your tiktok catalog ads are reaching people who are already in the market, not just passively scrolling.

Proven results from early adopters

The brands that tested TikTok Travel Ads during the alpha phase saw significant returns. Accor, one of the world’s largest hotel groups, achieved a 46% reduction in cost per booking and a 1.8x increase in total bookings through dynamic travel ads. Etihad Airways, the first airline globally to adopt the format, recorded a 17% uplift in flight bookings and a 232% increase in incremental ROAS. Meliá Hotels saw ROAS gains of up to 291% in the UK compared to standard web conversion campaigns.

A growing, high-value audience

TikTok’s travel audience is expanding beyond Gen Z. Older users with higher disposable income are increasingly using the platform for trip research and planning, a demographic shift that makes TikTok particularly attractive for premium and mid-market travel brands alike.

For travel marketers, the message is clear: TikTok is no longer just a brand awareness play. It’s a performance channel with the tools and audience to drive real bookings.

How can you get started with TikTok travel ads?

Getting started with TikTok Travel Ads involves a structured setup process through TikTok Ads Manager. Here’s a practical overview of how to launch your first campaign.

Campaign objectives

TikTok Travel Ads sit within the catalogue-based campaign structure. Your primary objective will typically be catalogue sales (driving bookings or purchases), though you can also use Travel Ads to support traffic and conversion goals depending on where you want to focus within the funnel.

Catalogue setup

You’ll need to connect your product catalogue to TikTok, this includes your inventory of hotels, flights, destinations, or experiences. The catalogue feeds the dynamic creative elements (travel cards, pricing, imagery) that make the ads personalised and relevant. Ensure your catalogue data is clean, up to date, and includes strong imagery and accurate product information.

Targeting

TikTok’s Smart+ technology handles much of the targeting automatically, using travel-specific intent signals to find high-value users. However, you can layer on additional targeting by geography, demographics, interests, and behaviours. For TikTok catalog listing ads, retargeting users who’ve already engaged with your catalogue or website can be particularly effective.

Budget and bidding

Budgets can be set at campaign or ad group level. TikTok recommends starting with enough budget to allow the algorithm to optimise, typically at least 50 conversions within the learning phase. Bidding strategies include cost cap (for controlling CPA) and maximum delivery (for spending your budget as efficiently as possible).

Reporting and metrics

Key metrics to track include ROAS (return on ad spend), cost per booking or conversion, click-through rate (CTR), and video completion rate. TikTok’s Events API integration allows you to feed booking and conversion data back into the platform, improving future campaign optimisation. Tracking should be set up before launch to ensure accurate attribution.

Key tips for travel brands to succeed with TikTok ads

TikTok Travel Ads are still relatively new, which means there’s a genuine first-mover advantage for brands that get them right. Below are the key strategies to help you make the most of this format and create some of the best tiktok travel ads in your category.

1. Lead with compelling offers

Travel is inherently aspirational, but bookings are driven by value. Make sure your ads clearly communicate a strong offer, whether that’s a discounted rate, an exclusive package, a limited-time deal, or a unique selling point like free cancellation. Accor’s successful TikTok Travel Ads campaign, for instance, prominently featured discounts of up to 25% alongside membership perks, giving users a tangible reason to click through and book. The travel cards within the ad format are ideal for displaying pricing and offers upfront.

2. Tell stories, don’t just sell destinations

The best TikTok travel advertising campaigns don’t look like ads, they look like content. TikTok users respond to authentic storytelling: a first-person walkthrough of a hotel room, a creator’s honest reaction to a destination, or a “day in the life” style video that captures the feel of a place. Think less polished commercial, more genuine experience. Etihad Airways leaned into this with TikTok-first creative that combined storytelling with dynamic travel cards, delivering a 17% increase in flight bookings.

3. Invest in high-quality, native-feeling visuals

Production quality matters, but “quality” on TikTok doesn’t mean corporate polish. It means visually compelling, authentic-feeling content that matches how users naturally consume the platform. Vertical video shot on a smartphone in beautiful natural light will typically outperform a slick, over-produced brand film. Use movement, transitions, and sound to keep viewers engaged, TikTok rewards content that holds attention throughout.

4. Test multiple creative formats

Don’t rely on a single ad format. Test Single Video Ads for top-of-funnel storytelling, Catalogue Video Ads for retargeting with specific properties, and Catalogue Carousel Ads for showcasing multiple options. Each format suits a different purpose within the travel funnel. Carousel formats, for example, are excellent for users who are comparing options, while a strong hero video can capture attention during the discovery phase. Varying your creative also helps reduce ad fatigue over longer campaign periods.

5. Use Spark Ads to amplify what’s already working

Spark Ads allow you to boost existing organic content, either your own or a creator’s, as a paid ad. This is particularly powerful for travel, where user-generated content (UGC) and creator-led content tend to feel more trustworthy and engaging than brand-produced material. If a piece of organic content is already performing well, putting paid spend behind it via Spark Ads can extend its reach significantly while maintaining the authenticity that drives engagement.

6. Optimise your catalogue data

Your TikTok catalog sales performance is only as strong as the data behind it. Make sure your product feed includes high-resolution images, accurate pricing, compelling descriptions, and up-to-date availability. The travel cards that appear in your ads pull directly from this catalogue, so any gaps or inaccuracies will show up in front of potential bookers. Regularly audit and refresh your catalogue data to keep everything current, especially during peak booking periods.

7. Leverage seasonality and trending moments

Travel is inherently seasonal, and TikTok is trend-driven, the intersection of the two creates excellent campaign opportunities. Align your ad spend with key booking windows (January wave, summer planning, Black Friday travel deals) and tap into trending travel content on the platform. Hashtags, trending sounds, and emerging destination trends can all be incorporated into your creative to increase relevance and discoverability.

8. Retarget with purpose

Retargeting is where TikTok catalog listing ads really shine. Users who’ve browsed your website, viewed specific properties, or started but not completed a booking can be re-engaged with personalised catalogue ads showing the exact hotels, flights, or destinations they showed interest in. This keeps your brand top of mind during the consideration phase and provides a direct path back to booking.

9. Track, learn, and iterate

As with any paid media campaign, continuous optimisation is key. Monitor your core metrics closely, ROAS, cost per booking, CTR, video completion rate, and be prepared to adjust creative, targeting, and budgets based on what the data tells you. TikTok’s algorithm improves with more data, so the more you test and learn, the better your campaigns will perform over time. The brands running the most successful tiktok travel ads are the ones treating this as an ongoing optimisation programme, not a one-off campaign.

Ready to drive bookings with TikTok?

TikTok Travel Ads represent a significant opportunity for travel brands to reach high-intent audiences and convert discovery into bookings – all within a platform where travel content is already thriving. Whether you’re a hotel group, airline, tour operator, or OTA, the brands that move early and invest in the right creative and campaign strategy will be best positioned to capture demand.

At Found, we’re a travel digital marketing agency with deep expertise in building and scaling campaigns across every major platform. Our paid social services cover everything from strategy and creative to execution and optimisation – including TikTok. And as a paid media agency with a proven track record in travel and hospitality, we know how to turn platform innovation into real results.

Ready to explore what TikTok Travel Ads can do for your brand? Get in touch and let’s build your next campaign together.

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2026 has already been a landmark year for us. We’ve brought on significant international accounts worth over £1m in the first half of the year alone, and as we continue to grow, it’s vital we have the right people in place to deliver for our clients at the highest level. These appointments are a direct response to that momentum.

Here’s who’s joining the team.

Sam Hailstone – Director of Organic

Sam comes to us from Brave Bison, where he served as Director of Organic, and brings nearly two decades of experience from senior roles at YOOX NET-A-PORTER Group and OMD. He’s built high-performing teams and driven commercially impactful organic strategies for complex, global brands, and he has a sharp understanding of how organic search must evolve within a modern, integrated performance offering. He’s a natural fit for where we’re taking our organic capability.

Ollie Caswell – Head of Paid Social

Ollie joins us from iProspect, where he built a strong reputation as a leader in paid social. He has a proven track record of helping brands build awareness, acquire customers, and scale through paid social channels, and his breadth of experience across performance marketing and the wider digital landscape makes him a genuinely exciting addition to the senior team.

Naresh Subhash -Creative Director

Naresh brings 20 years of agency experience as a digital-first, social-led creative leader. An Art Director by craft, he’s led campaigns for global brands across both fast-paced agency and in-house environments, always working at the intersection of strong ideas, visual storytelling, and modern execution. He’s also already actively integrating AI tools into his creative workflow – which makes him a perfect fit for how we work at Found.

We’ve always believed that being a genuine strategic partner means constantly investing in the people and expertise that drive real commercial outcomes. The landscape we’re operating in is shifting fast. AI is now central to how brands get discovered, and how performance is delivered. These three hires are our answer to that.

As Natalie Patel, our Managing Director, puts it:

“This marks a real inflection point for Found. The growth we’ve delivered at the start of 2026 is something the entire team is hugely proud of, and these appointments are a clear signal of our ambition. We’re bringing in exceptional people who will help us continue to raise the bar – not just in how we deliver for clients, but in how we lead the industry.”

We’re proud to be The Everysearch Agency – helping brands get discovered across every searchable platform, from Google and Amazon to TikTok and ChatGPT. And with this calibre of talent joining the team, we’re set up for an outstanding year ahead.

Want to find out more about working with Found? Get in touch.

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Not an algorithm update, not a new SERP feature, but a full-blown platform shift. 

So let me break down what’s actually happened, and what you need to do about it.

What’s happened? 

AI Mode has passed one billion monthly users, with queries more than doubling every quarter. Gemini 2.5 Flash is now the default model powering Search globally. And the Search box itself has been fundamentally rebuilt – it now anticipates intent before you finish typing, accepts multimodal inputs (text, image, voice, combined), and flows into full back-and-forth AI conversations.

That billion-user figure isn’t a statistic to file away in a quarterly deck – it should drive action. It means AI-powered search is already mainstream and the question is no longer whether your customers are using AI Mode, because they absolutely are! The question is whether your brand is showing up in it.

What’s actually changed (and why it’s not business as usual)

For decades, Google Search operated on a simple transaction: a user types a query, Google serves ten blue links, the user clicks. Brands optimised for that moment. Rankings, click-through rates, meta descriptions. That was the game.

That game has changed.

Search is now conversational. A user can move seamlessly from an AI Overview straight into a multi-turn dialogue with AI Mode, with full context carried across the session. They don’t click through to your site to start the conversation. The conversation starts without you. And if your brand isn’t present in that opening AI answer, you’re invisible for everything that follows.

Search is also now agentic. Google is launching information agents that operate 24/7, scanning the web and real-time data to surface what a user needs at exactly the right moment. Your brand doesn’t just need to rank. It needs to be the answer an agent selects, validates and serves.

And search is now a transaction layer. Agentic booking is native to search, pulling together pricing and availability with direct links to complete a purchase. If your structured data isn’t tight and your availability isn’t live, you’re handing that conversion directly to a competitor.

The four things you need to act on now

I’ve been working in search for over a decade. I’ve seen Google updates that moved rankings; Panda, Penguin, the mobile-first index. This is different. This isn’t a change you adapt your existing strategy to. This is a rebuild and you need to build a new strategy in order to succeed. 

Here’s what your brand needs to prioritise:

1. Answer conversations, not just queries

Traditional SEO optimised for a single intent signal at a specific moment. AI Mode operates across a session. That means your content needs to be the kind that earns its place in an AI Overview and then holds up under follow-up questions. Think depth, authority, and specificity. If you’re writing thin content that answers one narrow query and stops, you’re building for a search paradigm that’s already behind you.

2. Prepare your brand for search agents

Google’s information agents don’t just crawl for keywords. They evaluate entities, authority signals, structured data and real-time relevance. Your brand needs clear, consistent entity definitions across your site and across the web. Who you are, what you do, what you stand for. If Google’s agents can’t confidently categorise your brand, they won’t confidently recommend it.

3. Get your data agent-ready

Agentic booking changes the commercial stakes entirely. An AI agent that can complete a transaction on a user’s behalf will select the option with the clearest, most reliable data. That means structured data done properly: schema markup, live pricing feeds, real-time availability. It means your technical foundations need to be solid, not on the to-do list. If your product or booking data isn’t machine-readable, you’re simply not in the running.

4. Stop betting everything on static content

One of the most striking announcements from Google I/O was that Search can now build custom dashboards and visual tools in real time, tailored to an individual user’s specific question. Think about what that means for the blog post you spent three weeks producing. A static piece of content is competing against a dynamically generated, personalised experience built on the fly for that exact user. That is not a fair fight on pure content alone.

The brands that will win this aren’t necessarily the ones with the most content. They’re the ones with the best data, the clearest entity authority, and the technical infrastructure that AI systems can actually use.

What this means for your investment in search

I know what some of you are thinking. We’ve heard “search is changing” a lot over the years. And yes, we’ve adapted each time. But here’s what I want to be direct about: the pace and scale of this shift is different and you need to take note now. 

Brands that are investing now in AI visibility, entity authority and structured data are building a compounding advantage. Every week that passes where your site isn’t optimised for how AI agents evaluate and serve content is a week your competitors who are investing in this can pull further ahead.

The good news? This isn’t starting from scratch. If you’ve built strong SEO foundations over the years, you have something to work with. But the work now is different. It’s about entity clarity, technical precision, content that earns AI citations, and commercial data infrastructure that agents can act on. This is exactly what we’re helping our clients navigate as an AI search agency. If you want to understand where your brand stands against the new AI search landscape, and what to prioritise, let’s talk.

The post Google just rebuilt search. Here’s what you need to do now. appeared first on Found.

This recognition is a testament to the expertise, dedication and consistently high standards our PPC team brings to every client engagement, and one we are immensely proud to receive.

The UK Digital Excellence Awards are widely regarded as one of the most credible and rigorous celebrations of digital excellence in the country. Accredited ‘Outstanding’ by the Independent Awards Standards Council, the awards are built on a transparent, two-step judging process overseen by an esteemed panel of industry leaders, ensuring that every winner earns their place on merit.

From technical performance and campaign strategy through to innovation and measurable business impact, the awards span the full breadth of the digital industry. Being named a winner means your work has been independently assessed and recognised as setting the standard for others to follow.

This year’s ceremony brought together the UK’s leading agencies, brands and digital professionals, and we are proud to stand among them.

The judges’ feedback reflected exactly the values we strive to uphold at Found:

“The judges thought…Found achieved exceptional commercial and client impact through sustained performance growth, strong retention and meaningful internal innovation. The development of proprietary tools and structured cross-team collaboration demonstrates a company that prioritises long-term value, capability building and measurable outcomes.” 

To have that level of work acknowledged by an independent panel of industry experts makes this win all the more meaningful.

Kimara Saldanha, Director of Paid Media at Found, said:

“Winning Standout PPC Agency of the Year is a proud moment for the whole team. We set high standards for ourselves, not just in how we manage campaigns, but in the results we deliver and the relationships we build with our clients. This award is a reflection of that commitment, and a recognition of the expertise and ambition that drives everything our paid media team does. We’re incredibly proud.”

This award reflects the dedication that defines our approach to paid media and the industry-leading results our teams consistently deliver. Awards like this are won by people, not agencies, and this one belongs firmly to the Found PPC team. Every campaign brief interrogated, every strategy refined, every optimisation made in pursuit of better client outcomes: their expertise and commitment set a benchmark not just within Found, but across the industry. We are incredibly proud of everything they have achieved.

Our focus remains focused on delivering exceptional performance for our clients and continuing to raise the bar in paid media. To find out more about Found’s PPC agency capabilities, get in touch with our team.

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Google has announced that Dynamic Search Ads (DSAs) will be automatically upgraded to AI Max for Search by the end of September, while Meta has unveiled “One Click CAPI” alongside AI-powered enhancements to the Meta Pixel. For brands investing serious budget into digital performance, these aren’t routine product updates. They mark another decisive step away from manual control, keyword-led targeting, and human-configured tracking, towards automation, keywordless technology, and AI-driven decision-making at scale.

Here’s what’s actually changing, why it matters, and what your teams need to be doing about it now.

Google: The end of DSAs, the rise of AI Max

Let’s be clear: this isn’t just another product sunset. DSAs have been a paid search staple for years. They worked by leveraging landing page content, based on URLs that advertisers manually selected, to identify new search terms and target queries outside of standard keyword bidding. Useful, but ultimately still tethered to the pages you pointed it at.

AI Max for Search goes considerably further. It introduces intent-based targeting powered by three core capabilities working in tandem. Search term matching uses AI to analyse your website content, existing ad assets and keywords, then matches your ad to the most relevant query. Final URL expansion identifies the best landing page to direct traffic to based on what the user is actually searching for. And text customisation dynamically generates ad copy, drawing on your existing ads, assets, landing page content and generative AI.

In short, Google is no longer simply reading your website to find queries. It’s interpreting user intent, choosing where to send people, and writing the ad…all in real time.

Why this should be on your radar

The shift to AI Max has real strategic implications for how brands manage, govern, and get the most from their paid search investment.

Data quality is now the foundation of everything. With AI making more of the targeting and creative decisions, the quality of signals you feed it becomes absolutely critical. Conversion tracking, consent mode, enhanced conversions are all more important than ever. They’re the raw material the algorithm learns from. Poor signals in means poor learnings out, and that means wasted budget.

There’s genuine scale opportunity here. The way users search is evolving rapidly, particularly in this AI era. Keywordless targeting can find new demand faster and expand reach well beyond traditional keyword strategies. But that same capability can introduce inefficiencies if left unchecked.

Control looks very different now. The old world of PPC was governed by keywords, bids, and segmentation. The new world requires a different toolkit: strong audience signals built from historical performance and first-party data, robust data infrastructure, quality ad assets, and well-managed exclusion strategies.

Those exclusion levers matter more than ever. Through AI Max, advertisers can deploy negative keywords to block irrelevant queries, brand exclusions to prevent ads appearing on your own or competitors’ terms, URL exclusions to stop the algorithm targeting irrelevant pages, and ad text guidelines to define messaging restrictions, tone of voice, and terms that cannot appear in your ads. The principle is straightforward: you set the boundaries, Google operates within them.

We’ve already put this to the test

With the search landscape evolving at pace, it’s important to stay ahead of the curve, but equally important to test new features in controlled environments. At Found, we’ve been doing exactly that. Through our work with Newmarket Holidays, we tested AI Max in a controlled A/B split, and the results speak for themselves: a +14.94% boost in ROAS. It’s a case study we’re proud to have published with Google, and it reinforces a point we keep coming back to, AI Max can unlock efficiency and growth, but it can also introduce waste if left unchecked. The responsibility doesn’t sit with AI to lead performance. It sits with us to guide it effectively.

Meta: one click CAPI and smarter pixel tracking

On the Meta side, this week brought the introduction of One Click CAPI,  a streamlined way to implement Meta’s Conversions API directly from Events Manager, removing much of the server configuration and technical complexity that has historically made CAPI adoption a barrier for many brands. Alongside this, Meta has added AI-powered enrichment to the Pixel, which automatically pulls in product and page-level information so Meta’s systems have richer signals to work with for campaign optimisation.

The underlying philosophy mirrors what’s happening at Google. Both platforms are moving towards matching users with the content and experiences they’re most likely to engage with, rather than relying purely on demographic or keyword-based targeting. Better data in means better decisions out,  and both platforms are now making the infrastructure to support that increasingly accessible.

For brands, the takeaway is the same across both channels: the quality of your data, your tracking setup, and your first-party data strategy are no longer just a media team concern. They’re a board-level priority.

The Found take

These updates reinforce a pattern we’ve been tracking for some time. The platforms are consolidating control around their AI systems, and the role of the advertiser is shifting from operator to strategist. That’s not a threat, it’s an opportunity, provided you have the right foundations in place.

Strong conversion data. Clean audience signals. Clear brand guardrails. And the strategic expertise to know when to let the algorithm run and when to rein it in.

That’s the new playbook. And at Found, it’s one we’re already executing. Want to talk about what these changes mean for your brand? Get in touch with our Paid Media team.

The post Two Major Paid Media Updates Just Dropped. Here’s What They Mean for Your Brand appeared first on Found.

Overview: Meta has refined the way its advertising system reads people’s interests and intentions. It can now better distinguish between straightforward “I’m ready to buy” buying intent and more complex or aspirational interest – even more effectively than before. This allows the system to better serve ads that match the user intent closer than ever. 

How much more effective is it? How does it achieve it? And what does this mean for advertisers and brands? Read below to find out. 

Have you ever heard the saying “we can do it well, we can do it cheap, and we can do it fast, but you can only pick two?” Well, that’s basically the problem Meta faced when it came to using AI to decide which ad to show a user. Only worse…

AI, with it still being a rapidly developing technology, can often only do one of these things well, rather than two.

Meta can build (and has built) highly advanced AI to find the perfect ad to show you, based on all kinds of data it has about your behaviour and intent. However, it certainly won’t be quick, as it takes time to explore all the pathways it has and process unfathomably large datasets. In this use case, anything over 1 second is already considered snail-paced. And as we know too well, AI is not cheap, especially when it’s working so hard. We only need to look at RAM prices, tech stocks, and the billions of pounds and dollars being thrown around AI companies to know that.

This three-pronged issue is what Meta has given the fancy name of the “inference trilemma”, which sounds oh so very Silicon Valley!

Andromeda + Adaptive Ranking Model

With the Andromeda update, Meta has already changed the game in terms of how ads are delivered to users. We now live in an age where Meta knows our target audiences better than we do. Meta’s AI systems know who you are, what you like and dislike, what your goals, ambitions, and fears are, and most importantly now, whether you’re genuinely in the market for that new motorcycle or if you’ve just been tyre kicking for the past 4 months.

Now that may sound like a giant leap for advertiser kind – and that’s because it is/was – but what I’m here to tell you about today is Meta’s new improvement upon this. Although the Andromeda update sounds amazing, Meta isn’t one for resting on its laurels, and recently, Meta has been speaking about implementing LLM-scale models into its ‘Ads Recommender’. They call this newly implemented improvement the Adaptive Ranking Model.

Or in simpler terms, using even more powerful AI to recommend ads to you even more effectively.

Let us save the technical details till last. First, let’s talk about what the result of Meta’s Adaptive Ranking Model actually means for us.

What does this mean for advertisers and brands?

Firstly, Meta has quoted a performance increase in conversions of +3% and an increase in click-through rate of +5%. Bear in mind that although this gain is very incremental, advertisers don’t really need to do anything different to experience this gain. If you think of this as an improvement upon the Andromeda update, as long as you are building your strategy around the changes we’ve seen recently, your campaigns should benefit from this. And although 3% extra conversions sounds like nothing, this can equate to much larger effects when applied to large-scale, large-budget accounts.

The second interesting result of Meta’s new Adaptive Ranking Model is that broad audiences should become more performant. We can add this update to the list of events that make Meta’s broad targeting more powerful (and less clumsy). The AI is now working even more effectively when trying to match your ads to ideal audiences.

Which brings us to the third and final takeaway of the new Adaptive Ranking Model: creative just got even more important (again). If you’re already tired of reading/listening to/watching content like this that borderline nags you to focus more on your creative or gives you the old “creative is the new targeting” cliche, then you won’t like what I’m about to say. This new LLM-scale model improvement means that Meta is even better at understanding which of your creatives suck and which rock.

There are some other things to consider, such as how auctions should now have slightly improved consistency as a result of the new Adaptive Ranking Model, meaning we advertisers will see fewer random performance swings, which is great! Also, this continues Meta’s direction away from manual optimisations and further leans into the agenda of Meta just wanting us to input ads and budget into the platform and let it handle the rest. However, the top three aforementioned impacts are the ones to pay the most attention to.

How does it actually work?

So, those are the impacts, but once you understand a bit more about how it works, it may change the way you plan your next strategy.

To start off, super simplified, before going more in depth, Meta’s new Adaptive Ranking Model essentially works by now having a more advanced AI available and ready to help with serving relevant ads. In the very recent past, what would happen every time you open Facebook or Instagram, or scroll through your feeds, Meta would simply use a fixed-complexity ranking system, which was good at tailoring ad recommendations quickly and cost-efficiently, but it was lacking the intelligence that the new ARM brings.

What happens now, as users scroll through their feeds, is that Andromeda will use ARM to decide if it’s easy to determine which ad should be shown. If it’s easy, Meta will use simpler AI models that are faster and cheaper. If it’s a more complex scenario, Meta will use their new LLM-scale AI models, which are slower and more costly.

This means that both simple and complex user intent scenarios are now well serviced in an efficient manner. Whether you have been buying motorcycle gear non-stop for the past 3 months, or just fantasising about buying that sportbike even though you haven’t got your licence yet, Meta will be able to better serve you the right ad to match your intent. It uses the right tool depending on the job.

If you want to get more technical, one thing that’s really cool about the new Adaptive Ranking Model is that it achieves LLM-level performance at a fraction of the compute time. When using tools like Claude or ChatGPT, the time it takes to answer queries is measured in seconds. With Meta, response times needed to be a fraction of a second; otherwise, users would be facing a significant negative change in their user experience (e.g., waiting for their feed to load or the app taking longer to open).

The tech wizards at Meta have been able to achieve “model complexity equivalent to the O(10 GFLOPs) per token used by top-tier LLMs” while operating at an “order of magnitude faster than standard LLM inference, maintaining O(100 ms) bounded latency.”

This is an incredible feat of technological prowess and one that benefits brands and advertisers, as long as the correct strategies are implemented to coincide with updates like these. For those of you interested in the technical nuances, like request-oriented sequence scaling or hardware-aware graph and kernel specialisation, I would encourage you to read Meta’s write-up.

We pride ourselves on geeking out about AI updates like these and even have marketing technology and innovation specialists to help us not just keep up with the rapidly evolving landscape, but stay ahead of it. At Found, we always tout the importance of taking advantage of these platform updates and are real champions of the importance of great and varied content in Paid Social. If your brand is looking for help with running fine-tuned campaigns for Paid Social, why not get in touch with us?

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The customer journey has never been static, but the pace of change today is something else entirely. New platforms, shifting consumer expectations, economic pressures, and the rise of AI-driven search are all reshaping how people discover, evaluate, and choose brands. What worked twelve months ago may already feel outdated. The challenge for businesses isn’t just keeping up,  it’s understanding how these forces connect and where the real opportunities lie. In this guide, we’ll go back to basics: what a customer journey actually is, how it’s evolving, and why getting a clear grip on yours is one of the most effective ways to drive sustainable growth.

What is a customer journey?

So let’s start with the foundations; simply, the customer journey is the complete path a person takes from first becoming aware of your brand to becoming a loyal, returning customer. It encompasses every interaction, touchpoint, and decision point along the way, whether that’s discovering you through a search engine, reading a review, visiting your website, making a purchase, or engaging with your customer support team.

A clear customer journey definition matters because it moves the focus from individual channels or campaigns to the full end-to-end experience. For businesses, understanding the consumer journey means you can identify where people engage, where they drop off, and where the biggest opportunities for growth lie. It’s the foundation of smarter, more connected digital strategy.

Stages of the customer journey

While of course no two customer journeys are identical, most follow a recognisable pattern. The customer journey stages below represent the key phases a consumer typically moves through, though it’s worth noting that in practice, people often loop back, skip ahead, or revisit earlier stages before converting. Let’s take a closer look at the typical stages. 

1. Awareness

This is where the consumer journey begins. The customer recognises a need, problem, or interest and starts looking for information. At this stage, they may not yet know your brand exists. Key actions include searching online, scrolling social media, reading articles, or seeing a paid ad. Touchpoints here are broad, think organic search, social platforms, display advertising, and word-of-mouth. The customer journey marketing challenge at this phase is simply getting noticed and making a strong first impression.

2. Consideration

Now the customer knows they have options and begins actively evaluating them. They’re comparing brands, reading reviews, exploring product pages, and digging into the detail. Common touchpoints include your website, comparison sites, email content, and retargeting ads. Behaviour at this stage is more deliberate and research-driven, users are weighing up features, pricing, credibility, and relevance. For B2B brands especially, the b2b customer journey at this stage often involves multiple stakeholders and longer evaluation cycles.

3. Decision

The customer has narrowed their choices and is close to committing. They might be revisiting a product page, reading final reviews, checking delivery options, or looking for a discount code. This is where trust signals, such as testimonials, guarantees, clear CTAs, and a smooth user experience, play a critical role. Any friction at this point can send a potential customer back to a competitor.

4. Purchase

The transaction takes place. Whether it’s an online checkout, a signed contract, or a booking confirmation, this stage is where all the preceding effort comes together. A seamless, intuitive purchase experience is essential. Things like page load speed, payment options, form simplicity, and post-purchase confirmation all shape how the customer feels about their decision. A positive purchase experience increases the likelihood of retention; a poor one can undo all the goodwill built during earlier stages.

5. Loyalty

The customer journey doesn’t end at the point of sale, it extends into the ongoing relationship. Post-purchase communication, customer support, loyalty programmes, personalised content, and follow-up offers all contribute to whether a one-time buyer becomes a repeat customer and, ultimately, an advocate. This is where lifetime value is built. Brands that invest in the loyalty phase of the consumer journey see stronger retention, more referrals, and higher overall returns on their marketing investment.

Advantages of mapping the customer journey

Once you understand the customer journey stages, the next step is mapping them — and the advantages of doing so are significant. Consumer journey mapping gives businesses a structured, visual way to identify what’s working, what isn’t, and where to focus efforts for the greatest impact.

Identify pain points and opportunities

A well-constructed customer journey map shines a light on the moments where customers struggle, disengage, or abandon the process entirely. Perhaps there’s a confusing checkout flow, a gap in information at the consideration stage, or a lack of follow-up after purchase. Identifying these friction points is the first step to fixing them and equally, mapping reveals untapped opportunities to add value or differentiate your brand.

Increase conversions

When you understand how customers move through their journey and where they hesitate, you can make targeted improvements that directly impact conversion rates. Whether that’s simplifying a landing page, refining your messaging at the decision stage, or introducing better retargeting at the consideration phase, journey mapping provides the insight needed to make changes that drive measurable results. This is closely tied to effective conversion rate optimisation (CRO).

Strengthen retention and brand loyalty

Mapping the full customer journey, including post-purchase stages, helps businesses build stronger, longer-lasting relationships. By understanding what customers need after they’ve bought, brands can create more meaningful follow-up experiences, loyalty programmes, and support structures that keep people coming back.

Align teams around the customer experience

One of the less obvious but equally valuable advantages of customer mapping is internal alignment. A customer journey map gives marketing, sales, product, and support teams a shared view of the customer experience. Everyone can see where they fit into the journey and how their work contributes to the bigger picture, reducing silos and improving collaboration.

Make smarter, data-driven decisions

Journey mapping turns assumptions into evidence. Rather than guessing where customers might be dropping off or what content they need, you have a clear, visual framework grounded in real behaviour and data. This makes it far easier to prioritise investment, allocate budget, and build campaigns that are genuinely aligned with how your audience behaves.

What is a customer journey map?

A customer journey map is a visual representation of the entire experience a customer has with your brand, from first contact through to ongoing loyalty. It lays out every stage, touchpoint, action, emotion, and potential pain point in a structured format, giving teams a clear, shared understanding of what the customer actually experiences.

Think of it as a user journey map for your business. Rather than looking at isolated metrics or individual campaign performance, a customer journey map connects the dots. It shows how a customer moves from seeing a social ad to visiting your site, from browsing a product page to making a purchase, and from receiving a follow-up email to becoming a long-term advocate. The value lies in seeing the full picture, and using it to make better, more customer-centric decisions across your marketing, sales, and service functions.

A strong customer journey model isn’t static. It evolves as customer behaviour changes, new channels emerge, and your business grows. The best maps are living documents, regularly updated with fresh data and insights to remain relevant and actionable.

How to create a customer journey map

Building an effective consumer journey map takes a combination of research, collaboration, and structured thinking. Below is a step-by-step process to help you create one that drives real value for your business.

Step 1: Define your objectives

Before you start mapping, get clear on what you want to achieve. Are you trying to improve conversions at a specific stage? Reduce churn? Better understand a particular customer segment? Tying your map to a specific business goal ensures it stays focused and actionable, rather than becoming a nice-looking document that gathers dust.

Step 2: Research your audience

A journey map is only as good as the data behind it. Gather both quantitative and qualitative insights about your customers, from analytics and CRM data to surveys, interviews, and customer support logs. Understand who your customers are, what motivates them, what frustrates them, and how they interact with your brand across different channels. This is where thorough market research becomes invaluable.

Step 3: Build customer personas

Using your research, create detailed personas that represent your key customer segments. Each persona should capture demographics, goals, challenges, preferred channels, and typical buying behaviour. For B2B brands, a b2b customer journey map may require personas for multiple decision-makers within a single buying unit, each with different priorities and information needs.

Step 4: Map the customer journey stages

Lay out the core stages your customers move through, typically Awareness, Consideration, Decision, Purchase, and Loyalty. For each stage, document what the customer is doing, thinking, and feeling. This is where the customer journey phases come to life: you’re moving from a theoretical framework to a practical, detailed picture of your customer’s real experience.

Step 5: Identify touchpoints and channels

For each stage, list every touchpoint where the customer interacts with your brand, both online and offline. This might include organic search, paid ads, social media, your website, email, live chat, phone calls, in-store visits, or third-party review sites. A retail customer journey map, for example, might include in-store browsing alongside digital comparison shopping. The goal is to capture the full ecosystem of interactions, not just the ones you directly control.

Step 6: Pinpoint pain points and moments of truth

With the stages and touchpoints mapped, identify where things go wrong – or where they go particularly well. Pain points might include slow page load times, unclear messaging, a lack of information at the consideration stage, or poor post-purchase communication. Moments of truth are the make-or-break interactions that shape a customer’s perception of your brand. Flagging both gives you a clear roadmap for improvement.

Step 7: Map emotions and customer sentiment

Layer in the emotional experience at each stage. Where does the customer feel confident and excited? Where do they feel confused, frustrated, or anxious? Understanding emotional context helps you design experiences that are not just functional but genuinely engaging, and it’s a key differentiator in competitive markets.

Step 8: Prioritise actions and improvements

A customer journey map should lead to action. Based on what you’ve uncovered, prioritise the changes that will have the greatest impact on your business goals. This might mean redesigning a landing page, improving email sequencing, streamlining checkout, or investing in better post-purchase support. Tie each action to a measurable outcome so you can track progress over time.

Step 9: Share, test, and iterate

A journey map isn’t a one-off exercise, it’s a living tool. Share it across teams so everyone understands the customer experience and their role within it. Test your improvements, measure the results, and update the map regularly to reflect new data, changing customer behaviour, and evolving business priorities.

Conclusion

Understanding and mapping the customer journey is one of the most effective ways to improve how your brand connects with its audience at every stage, from first discovery to long-term loyalty. At Found, customer journey mapping sits at the heart of how we build and execute digital marketing campaigns. By combining deep audience insight with data-driven strategy, we help brands identify the touchpoints that matter most, remove friction, and create experiences that convert and retain.

Whether you’re looking to build your first customer journey map or refine an existing one, our team can help. Explore our digital strategy services or get in touch to find out how Found can put the customer journey at the centre of your growth strategy.

The post What Is a Customer Journey? Definition, Mapping, and Advantages appeared first on Found.

Of course, the host of experts went on to take us through the exciting new product rollouts, however, what made this event different for me was distilled in a quote from Sarah-Jane Lowes from Droga5. She said, ‘you can’t ask an LLM to be ‘more random”. In a world (and industry) that is inundated with daily, sometimes even hourly AI updates, cheat sheets and courses, this short sentence said the most. Our favourite tools, like ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude are great at solving issues, creating docs and decks based on context and inputs, but what they can’t do is create novelty; something that only true and inspired creative, that is produced by humans, can do. If you ask an LLM for a ‘fun’ or ‘creative’ idea for a new ad, there’s a high chance the person on the desk next to you will get a similar answer. Ask any of them for a number between 1 and 10 and it’ll probably be 7 (ask for another and it’ll probably be 3). We are, and should always be, the ‘difference makers’.

Enough with the philosophy, onto the facts and opportunities. People are spending 95% of their time on social media watching short form video, a figure that only reinforces the importance of including video content in your creative mix. Compounding this is the growth of Reels. According to Meta, it needed only 5 years post-launch to become the biggest video format, surpassing TikTok and YouTube in forecasted revenue. If you and your assets are static, you’re left with only a 5% window to grab a user’s attention, as Oliver Sewell, Director of the Northern Europe Small & Medium Business Group at Meta, explained. Every advertiser now needs these in their arsenal regardless of objective; Partnership Ads, Catalog Product Video and performant Reels.

So, what’s actually new and what we’re doing about it?

Partnership Ads: the creator angle is now impossible to ignore

Arguably the most mature and well-evidenced part of the summit was the Partnership Ads section, and the data Meta brought to support the creator-to-paid content pipeline was compelling. Using recommended creator content from the Partnership Ads Hub, rather than brand-owned assets, drove an 18% lower cost per conversion across an 8-test meta-analysis spanning NA, EMEA and APAC. That’s not a marginal difference; that’s a structural argument for building creator content into your paid strategy and not just treating it as a ‘nice to have’.

The Creator Marketplace update makes this more actionable than it’s ever been. Brands and agencies can now surface verified demographic, audience and engagement data for creators directly in-platform, and filter for those who have Partnership Ads experience and brand collaboration history. Creators can also upload content with ‘pre-permissions’ for brands to use, removing a lot of the admin that often slows things down when it comes to utilising content creators in campaigns. For agencies managing influencer spend on behalf of clients, removing the due diligence friction here is genuinely useful, and the TheFork case study demonstrated just how significant the impact can be. By layering creator-led Partnership Ads on top of usual ads, TheFork achieved an 82% lower cost per incremental conversion for total bookings, 59% lower for in-app restaurant bookings, and 76% lower when running organic search traffic alongside. Remarkable numbers, and a hospitality use case that resonates well with our client portfolio.

Catalog Product Video: relevance at SKU level

Further reinforcing the video-first message was the push around Catalog Product Video, which takes the logic of dynamic product ads and extends it into video format. The idea is simple: rather than serving a static product image, Meta uses automation and product ranking signals to deliver video creative matched to the most relevant SKU for each individual. Ad sets using Catalog Product Video saw 20% more conversions per dollar in Meta’s own analysis, with an additional 4% uplift when video was built following Reels creative best practices.

For ecommerce, hospitality and retail clients in particular, this offers a chance to show off a product or offering and for B2B advertisers, it’s a chance to educate. The scale, personalisation and discovery benefits are well established in dynamic ads; this is simply the video-native iteration of a proven social format. 

Creative workflows: scaling without the chaos

One of the more practically useful updates shown was the evolution of creative workflows inside Ads Manager. Currently in testing, the new tooling allows you to upload multiple images and videos into a single ad unit, with format transformations handled automatically to reach more placements. On the surface, this might sound incremental. In practice, for teams managing large creative libraries across multiple clients, it’s a meaningful step toward removing the manual bottleneck between briefing and going live. Less time reformatting assets means more time thinking about why those assets should work in the first place.

Advantage+ Creative: from static to video, automatically

The headline product update for creative teams was the expansion of Advantage+ Creative’s video generation capabilities that’s now in beta. The feature does two distinct things: it can generate animated video from a single static image, and it can stitch multiple images into a dynamic, multi-scene video with text overlays. No video production budget required.

The performance data presented was hard to ignore. When more than 90% of campaign assets used the beta version of video generation, Meta observed a 10% higher CTR and 7.7% higher CVR compared to those that didn’t. For clients who have historically depended on static assets due to production constraints, this opens a genuine conversation about format diversification at pace.

Creative Insights: knowing when your creative is tired

The final update worth highlighting was account-level Creative Insights (still in testing); a dashboard that tracks creative fatigue over time and benchmarks your active themes against top-performing industry examples. It categorises your spend by theme (Human Connection, Product Experience, Social Proof, and so on) and surfaces where you’re under-indexed versus what the platform’s data suggests performs best in your vertical.

This is the feature that could become one of the most valuable in Ads Manager. Many 3rd party tools do similar things, but a native tool of this kind will be a game-changer. Creative fatigue is one of the most common performance drags we diagnose, and the ability to visualise it – with a timeline showing when new creatives were introduced relative to fatigue curves – gives both teams and clients a much cleaner conversation around refresh cadence.

The thread running through all of it

What made this summit feel super coherent and pointed, was the consistent underlying message: Meta is building tools to reduce the distance between creative concept and live, optimised, video-native ad delivery. The bet is that if the technical barriers are lower, better human creative thinking can fill the space. Sarah-Jane Lowes’ LLM comment wasn’t an aside, it was the thesis. The platforms are getting smarter at execution, but the brief is still on us. If you’d like to discuss any of the latest updates further, just get in touch with our Paid Social team.

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What is Ecommerce PPC management?

Ecommerce PPC marketing is the practice of running paid advertisements across search, shopping, and social platforms to drive traffic and sales for online retailers. Advertisers pay each time a user clicks an ad, hence pay-per-click. Ecommerce PPC management refers to the ongoing process of planning, building, optimising, and reporting on those campaigns. Done well, it delivers immediate visibility, highly measurable returns, and the ability to scale spend in line with performance. Costs vary significantly by sector, competition, and platform, but the defining principle is the same: every pound spent should be working as hard as possible.

What a PPC agency does and why your ecommerce business needs one

Managing PPC in ecommerce effectively is a full-time discipline. A specialist PPC agency brings the expertise, tooling, and platform access that most in-house teams can’t replicate alone. From campaign architecture and feed optimisation to bid strategy and creative testing, agencies handle the complexity so your team doesn’t have to. More importantly, they bring cross-client insight, an understanding of what’s working across sectors and platforms, that accelerates performance. For ecommerce businesses looking to scale, the right agency partner doesn’t just manage budgets; they drive the strategy that makes those budgets go further.

Understanding ROAS in ecommerce PPC advertising

Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) is the primary performance metric for ecommerce PPC strategy. It tells you how much revenue you’re generating for every pound spent on advertising. The formula is straightforward:

 Understanding your break-even ROAS, the point at which ad spend is covered by profit, not just revenue, is essential before setting campaign targets.

Key platforms for Ecommerce PPC

A strong PPC management for ecommerce strategy rarely relies on a single platform. The right mix depends on your products, audience, and margins, but these are the platforms worth understanding:

Found’s Everysearch approach: We don’t limit paid activity to Google. Our Everysearch framework ensures your brand is visible and performing across every platform where your customers are searching and discovering, from traditional search to emerging channels.

Best practices for Ecommerce PPC management

Effective ecommerce PPC isn’t just about having the budget. It’s about deploying it intelligently. Here are the tactics that consistently separate strong-performing campaigns from average ones.

1. Structure campaigns around buying intent

The way you structure campaigns determines how efficiently budget flows to the right audiences. Separate campaigns by product category, margin tier, and audience temperature, distinguishing between brand searches, generic category terms, and competitor terms. This gives you cleaner data, tighter control over bids, and the ability to allocate spend where it’s most profitable. Shopping campaigns should mirror your product hierarchy, making it easy to pause or scale individual product groups based on performance.

2. Optimise your product feed relentlessly

For Performance Max campaigns, your product feed is your creative. Title structure, attribute completeness, pricing accuracy, and image quality all directly influence ad eligibility and click-through rates. Ensure product titles lead with the most searchable attributes, brand, product type, key spec. Use supplemental feeds to A/B test titles and descriptions. A well-optimised feed can improve impression share and ROAS without touching bids or budgets.

3. Write ad copy that converts, not just clicks

High click-through rates mean nothing if the traffic doesn’t convert. Effective ecommerce ad copy leads with the customer’s need, highlights a specific benefit or offer, and sets accurate expectations for the landing page. Test multiple headlines and descriptions within Responsive Search Ads (RSAs) to let Google identify the highest-performing combinations, but always review asset-level reporting to ensure winning combinations are genuinely resonant, not just statistically lucky.

4. Use audience layering and smart segmentation

Modern PPC platforms offer sophisticated audience capabilities that go far beyond keyword targeting. Layer in first-party data, past purchasers, cart abandoners, email subscribers, to adjust bids, tailor messaging, or exclude audiences who are unlikely to convert. Customer Match lists, remarketing audiences, and in-market segments can all significantly improve efficiency. For ecommerce, segmenting by lifetime value is particularly powerful: bid more aggressively for audiences likely to become repeat buyers.

5. Align landing ages with ad intent

The page a user lands on after clicking an ad has an enormous impact on conversion rate, yet it’s frequently overlooked in PPC audits. Every ad group or campaign should direct traffic to a page that matches the specific intent of the query. Sending generic category traffic to a homepage wastes spend. Sending product-specific ad traffic to a category page introduces unnecessary friction. Match ad message to landing page headline, and ensure pages load fast, work on mobile, and have clear calls to action.

6. Leverage ad extensions and assets

Ad extensions, now referred to as assets within Google Ads, expand your ad real estate and provide additional pathways to conversion at no extra cost per click. For ecommerce, sitelinks to bestselling categories, callouts highlighting free delivery or returns policies, promotion extensions for live offers, and seller ratings all add meaningful context. Structured snippets can showcase product ranges or service attributes. Full asset coverage consistently improves click-through rate and quality score.

8. Test, measure, and iterate continuously

The best-performing ecommerce PPC accounts are built on a culture of structured testing. Run controlled experiments on bid strategies, audience segments, creative, and landing pages, changing one variable at a time and giving tests enough data to be statistically meaningful. Use campaign-level experiments within Google Ads rather than manual A/B switching, which can distort results. Review performance weekly at a tactical level, and monthly at a strategic level, adjusting targets as your business and the competitive landscape evolve.

Want to get more from your ecommerce PPC budget?

Found paid media agency works with ecommerce brands to build PPC strategies that drive measurable revenue growth, across every platform that matters. Talk to our PPC team. 

The post Ecommerce PPC Management Tactics for Maximum ROAS appeared first on Found.

Today, search engines and AI-powered discovery tools don’t just look at what you link to. They look at what people say about you, where they say it, and how consistently your brand appears across the web. Brand mentions sit at the heart of this shift. Whether you’re optimising for traditional search or building visibility in AI SEO environments, understanding how brand mentions work, and how to earn more of them, is no longer optional. It’s essential.

Why brand mentions matter in modern SEO & GEO

For years, SEO was built on a fairly simple premise: get links, focus on keywords, rank higher. Backlinks remain important, but search has evolved well beyond a link-counting exercise. Google’s algorithms have grown far more sophisticated, incorporating entity-based understanding, E-E-A-T signals (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness), and an increasingly holistic view of a brand’s digital footprint.

Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO services) takes this further still. As AI models like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google’s AI Overviews increasingly mediate search results, the signals they rely on to determine which brands to surface are broader than those used by traditional search engines. These models are trained on vast amounts of web content, and brands that appear consistently, credibly, and positively across that content are the ones that get cited, recommended, and featured.

Brand mentions, both linked and unlinked, act as trust and relevance signals that feed into both traditional search algorithms and LLM training data. The more your brand is talked about by authoritative voices in your industry, the more search engines and AI tools understand who you are, what you do, and why you should be recommended.

What are brand mentions?

A brand mention is any instance of your brand name, or a closely associated term, appearing online. That’s it. Simple in definition, but highly significant in impact.

Mentions fall into two broad categories:

Linked mentions: where your brand name appears alongside a hyperlink pointing back to your website. This is the traditional backlink model, and these still carry direct SEO value through link equity.

Unlinked brand mentions: where your brand is referenced by name but without a clickable link to your site. An unlinked brand mention might appear in a news article, a review, a social post, or a forum thread. Historically undervalued, these are increasingly recognised as meaningful authority signals, particularly for AI models that process text, not just link graphs.

The distinction from backlinks is important. Backlinks are a structural signal,  a hyperlink in the HTML. A brand mention is a semantic signal, it tells search engines and LLMs what people are saying about you and in what context. Both contribute to brand authority and relevance, but they work in different ways and should be pursued through complementary strategies.

Types of brand mentions that matter

1. Editorial and PR mentions

Coverage in reputable publications, industry trade press, and news outlets remains the gold standard. An editorial mention from a high-authority domain signals to both Google and AI models that your brand is considered credible and newsworthy. This is where a strong Digital PR strategy pays dividends, securing genuine coverage rather than paid placements or low-quality press releases.

2. Reviews and ratings

Customer reviews on platforms like Google Business Profile, Trustpilot, G2, and Capterra generate consistent, first-person brand mentions at scale. Beyond their direct influence on purchase decisions, reviews contribute to the web’s broader picture of your brand. Positive sentiment, recurring themes, and high volumes all add up.

3. Social and community mentions

Mentions on LinkedIn, X (formerly Twitter), Reddit, and niche forums matter too. These may carry less domain authority than editorial coverage, but they demonstrate real-world brand engagement and help establish relevance in specific communities. Reddit, in particular, has become a significant source of training data for LLMs, presence there can meaningfully influence AI-generated responses.

4. Listings, directories, and citations

Local and industry directories, awards listings, and trade body citations provide structured, consistent mentions of your brand name, location, and services. These are particularly valuable for local SEO and help establish NAP (Name, Address, Phone) consistency across the web.

5. Owned-channel mentions (internal linking and brand consistency)

Don’t overlook your own estate. Consistent brand naming, internal linking, and content that reinforces your brand’s key messages all help search engines and AI models build a coherent entity graph around your business. Fragmented messaging, inconsistent brand names, conflicting descriptions, creates noise that undermines your visibility.

How search engines and LLMs process brand mentions

How Google Processes Brand Mentions

Google has moved well beyond treating the web as a network of links. Through its Knowledge Graph and entity-based understanding, it seeks to identify and understand real-world entities, brands, people, places, products, and map the relationships between them. Brand mentions help Google connect your brand to specific topics, sectors, and authority signals.

Consistent mentions across high-quality, topically relevant sources reinforce what Google calls E-E-A-T. If authoritative sources in your space regularly reference your brand in connection with a particular topic, Google learns to associate your brand with expertise in that area. Unlinked mentions are processed semantically, Google can identify your brand name in context and use that signal to understand your relevance and reputation, even without a link.

Practical upshot: a brand that earns regular editorial coverage, strong reviews, and consistent directory citations will build authority signals that directly influence organic rankings, featured snippets, and Knowledge Panel prominence.

How LLMs process brand mentions

Large language models, the technology behind ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and others, are trained on enormous datasets drawn from the open web. The brands, concepts, and relationships that appear most frequently and most credibly in that training data are the ones that get surfaced in AI-generated responses.

Unlike Google’s algorithm, LLMs don’t crawl the web in real time (at least not by default). They work from what they’ve learned. This means that brands with a rich, credible, widely distributed presence in web content, articles, reviews, forum posts, case studies, thought leadership, are naturally more likely to be cited or recommended when an LLM generates a response about a relevant topic.

Positive sentiment matters here too. LLMs pick up on how brands are discussed, not just the fact that they are discussed. Consistent, positive framing across multiple sources builds the kind of brand reputation that translates into AI visibility, making modern SEO, GEO services, and digital PR strategies deeply intertwined.

Why brand mentions matter more in the age of LLMs

Backlinks have long been the primary authority signal for search engines, and they haven’t lost their relevance entirely. But AI models don’t navigate the web using a link graph. They process language, and they weigh trust signals differently as a result.

An LLM generating a response about the best digital marketing agencies in London isn’t running a PageRank calculation. It’s drawing on patterns in its training data: which brands appear most often, in which contexts, and with what sentiment. Backlinks are invisible to that process. Brand mentions, editorial coverage, expert endorsements, consistent community presence, are not.

This is why modern SEO, GEO, and digital PR strategies need to work together. Building a brand that earns consistent, positive coverage across trusted sources creates a connected content ecosystem that influences visibility across both traditional search and AI-driven discovery. The brands that win in this environment aren’t just optimising their on-page signals, they’re actively managing their presence across the entire web.

How to find, track, and analyse brand mentions

You can’t manage what you can’t measure. Here’s a practical approach to getting on top of your brand mention landscape.

Tools and methods for tracking mentions

A combination of tools works best here:

Google Alerts: Free and simple. Set up alerts for your brand name, key variations, and common misspellings to receive email notifications whenever you’re mentioned online.

Mention / Brand24: Dedicated brand monitoring platforms that track mentions across news, social media, blogs, and forums in near real time, with sentiment analysis built in.

Ahrefs / SEMrush: Beyond their core SEO functionality, both tools offer brand mention tracking that helps identify unlinked mentions, prime candidates for link reclamation outreach.

Meltwater / Cision: Enterprise-level media monitoring tools favoured by PR teams, offering deeper editorial coverage tracking and journalist relationship management.

Manual search: Don’t underestimate this. Regular searches for “[your brand name]” in Google, Reddit, and industry forums can surface mentions that automated tools miss.

Measuring sentiment, authority, and consistency

Volume is just the start. To understand the quality of your brand mention profile, focus on:

Domain authority: Are mentions coming from high-quality, topically relevant sources? A mention in a respected industry publication carries far more weight than one in a low-traffic blog.

Sentiment: Are mentions positive, negative, or neutral? Tools like Brand24 and Mention offer sentiment scoring. Negative coverage needs to be understood and, where possible, addressed.

Consistency: Are you being mentioned regularly, or in isolated bursts? Consistent presence across trusted sources builds a more durable authority signal than occasional spikes.

Topic association: What topics appear alongside your brand name? This tells you how search engines and LLMs are contextualising your brand, and whether it aligns with how you want to be perceived.

Using insights to inform content, PR, and brand strategy

Brand mention analysis should feed directly back into your wider digital strategy:

• Identify unlinked brand mentions and reach out to site owners to convert them into backlinks, this is one of the highest-ROI link-building tactics available.
• Use sentiment analysis to identify recurring negative themes and address them through content, product improvements, or proactive PR
• Map topic associations to identify gaps in your authority, topics you want to own but aren’t yet being mentioned in connection with, and target them with content and outreach.
• Track competitor mention volumes and sources to benchmark your share of voice and identify media relationships worth pursuing.

Found works with ambitious brands to build connected content ecosystems that drive visibility across traditional search and AI-driven discovery. From Digital PR to AI SEO and GEO – we’ve got the full picture covered. Get in touch with our team today.

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