How to Track Brand Mentions Across the Web via API in 2026

Knowing where your brand shows up in search results is a monitoring problem. Someone searches "best crm software" and you want to know if your name is on the page, at what position, and in what context. That answer changes week to week, so it is not something you check once.

The manual version is tedious. You run the search, scroll through every result, and read each title and snippet looking for your name. Then you do it again next week to see if anything moved. It works for one query, but it does not scale to the dozens of terms buyers actually type.

Trackee turns that into one API call. You send a brand and a query, and it runs the search and returns just the pages that mention the brand, with position, title, url, and snippet. This tutorial walks through the POST /v1/mentions endpoint end to end.

What you need

You need three things to make your first call:

• A free Trackee account. The free plan has enough credits to test every example here.
• An access key from your dashboard.
• The x-access-key header on every request.

That is the whole setup. No SDK, no OAuth dance, no waiting on approval.

Step 1: Get your API key

Sign in to your Trackee dashboard and open the API keys section. Create a key and copy it somewhere safe, since the full value is only shown once.

Every request to the Mentions endpoint sends that key in the x-access-key header. Keep it on your server and out of client-side code, the same way you would treat any other secret.

Step 2: Find mentions

Here is a full request. Swap YOUR_API_KEY for the key you just created.

curl -X POST https://api.trackee.dev/v1/mentions \
  -H "x-access-key: YOUR_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{ "brand": "Salesforce", "query": "best crm software" }'

The response comes back like this:

{
  "success": true,
  "credits": { "charged": 2, "remaining": 4996 },
  "data": {
    "brand": "Salesforce",
    "query": "best crm software",
    "total_mentions": 35,
    "mentions": [
      {
        "position": 2,
        "title": "Best CRM Software: Everything To Consider",
        "url": "https://www.salesforce.com/crm/best-crm/",
        "domain": "www.salesforce.com",
        "snippet": "Salesforce is consistently named the #1 CRM..."
      }
    ]
  }
}

Here is what each field means.

success tells you the call went through. credits.charged is how many credits this query cost, and credits.remaining is your balance after it. Each Mentions query costs 2 credits, so you always know exactly what you are spending.

Inside data you get the brand and query echoed back, which is handy when you are firing off many calls and logging the responses.

total_mentions is the count of search results that reference the brand for this query. In the example, 35 pages across the results mention Salesforce for "best crm software". That number alone is a useful signal about how much of the page a brand owns.

mentions is the array of those results. Each entry has:

• position is the rank of that result on the search page. Lower is better.
• title is the page title as it appears in the results.
• url is the exact link.
• domain is the host, so you can quickly see whether it is the brand's own site or a third party writing about them.
• snippet is the short text preview, which is where the mention usually lives.

Notice the first result in the example is on www.salesforce.com. That is the brand ranking on its own domain. Other results in a full response would be review sites, listicles, and competitors that name Salesforce in passing.

Search a topic, not just your name

The brand field is the thing you are looking for. The query field is what you search. They do not have to match, and that is the whole point.

If you only ever searched your own brand name, you would just confirm that you rank for yourself. The interesting question is where you show up for the topics your buyers actually type. Pass a topic as the query and your brand as the target:

curl -X POST https://api.trackee.dev/v1/mentions \
  -H "x-access-key: YOUR_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{ "brand": "Notion", "query": "project management for small teams" }'

Now total_mentions tells you how present Notion is for a buying query it does not own by name. Run this across your list of target topics and you get a map of where you appear and where you are invisible. The gaps are your content roadmap.

Location and device

Search results change by where the searcher is and what they are holding. A query from a phone in London does not return the same page as a desktop in New York. You can pin both.

Add location and device to the request body. device accepts "desktop" or "mobile".

curl -X POST https://api.trackee.dev/v1/mentions \
  -H "x-access-key: YOUR_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "brand": "Salesforce",
    "query": "best crm software",
    "location": "United Kingdom",
    "device": "mobile"
  }'

This matters when your audience skews to one region or mostly searches on phones. Checking mentions with default settings can hide the reality your customers actually see. Run the same query across a few locations and you often find your visibility is uneven in ways you would never catch by hand.

Mentions vs rank tracking

These two endpoints answer different questions, and it is worth being clear on which you want.

Rank tracking follows one domain for one keyword and tells you its position over time. You point it at your site and a keyword, and it reports where you sit and how that moves. It is the right tool when you care about your own placement and want to watch it trend.

Mentions is wider. It does not care about a single domain. It scans the whole results page for a query and returns every result that references the brand, wherever it lives. That includes review sites, roundups, forums, and competitors who name you. You get the full picture of who is talking about the brand for that search, not just your own line on the chart.

Use both together. Track your own positions with the Rank Tracking API, then use Mentions to see the rest of the page and who else is showing up for the same terms.

What's next

You now have everything you need to pull brand mentions for any query, filter by location and device, and compare against your own rankings.

A few good next steps:

• Read the full Brand Mentions API page for the complete list of parameters and response fields.
• Browse the API reference for the other endpoints, including rank tracking and keyword data.
• Start on the free plan and upgrade only when your query volume grows.

Pick your five most important buying queries, run them through the endpoint, and see where your brand already shows up. That first pass usually surprises people.