AT&T Is the Most-Mentioned Brand Online, With 197.6 Million Web Mentions

Search the web for a big brand name and the pages never end: product listings, news stories, reviews, forum threads, coupon sites. Every one of those pages is a mention, and the total is a rough measure of how much space a brand takes up in the public conversation, the thing PR teams call share of voice.

That total matters because it is where people, journalists and AI answers learn about a brand. A brand mentioned on millions of pages is easy to find and easy to cite. A brand mentioned on a few thousand has to win attention story by story, and it should measure itself against competitors of its own size rather than against the giants.

The giants are very large. AT&T is named on 197.6 million web pages, ahead of Mastercard, Microsoft, Samsung and Toyota. The ten most-mentioned brands take 55.7% of all mentions of the 254 brands ranked, while the median brand has about 807K, less than 1% of AT&T's total.

On September 23, 2026 we counted the web pages that mention each of 300 well-known US brands by its exact name. Some brand names are also everyday words or phrases, such as At Home, Discover, Best Buy, Target and Ring, and their counts are dominated by pages that have nothing to do with the company, so we ranked the other 254 brands. For every brand we also scored the tone of its 1,000 most recent mentions.

A web mention is a page that contains the brand's name. Share of total is a brand's mentions divided by the combined mentions of all 254 ranked brands. A recent mention is negative when the text around the brand name scores more negative than positive or neutral. The median brand is the one in the middle: half of brands have more mentions, half have fewer.

AT&T's 197.6 million mentions are 11% of the total for all 254 ranked brands. Mastercard follows with 175.6 million, then Microsoft, Samsung and Toyota. The leaders are brands people deal with every day, through a phone bill, a payment card, a computer or a car, and brands that other websites name constantly, in checkout pages, product specs and how-to guides.

Publishers rank high too. The New York Times, Car and Driver, ESPN and CNN are all in the top 15, because other sites quote, cite and credit them. Payment brands benefit the same way: Mastercard and American Express appear on countless checkout and card comparison pages.

The next tier holds retailers, insurers, banks and review platforms, each with roughly 11 million to 27 million mentions. Walmart leads it at 26.7 million, and State Farm closes the top 30 at 11.3 million.

Online attention is concentrated at the very top. The ten most-mentioned brands account for 55.7% of all mentions of the 254 brands ranked, and the four brands with 100 million or more mentions hold 33.5% on their own. Only 31 brands reach 10 million mentions.

Below that, coverage falls off fast. 141 of the 254 brands have fewer than 1 million mentions, and 63 have fewer than 100,000. The median brand has about 807K mentions, so a brand with 1 million is already in the top half even though it has less than 1% of AT&T's coverage.

Big brands are not criticized more than smaller ones. The 20 most-mentioned brands average 29% negative recent mentions, against 32% for the rest. Toyota, fifth by volume, has 3.5% negative recent mentions, one of the lowest shares of any brand. Volume and tone move separately, so a brand needs to track both: a spike in mentions can be good news or bad.

Measure share of voice against your real competitors, not the whole market. The median brand has about 807K mentions and the top ten take more than half of everything, so a mid-sized brand will never close the gap on AT&T or Mastercard and does not need to. What matters is whether you are gaining on the brands your customers compare you with.

Track the exact brand phrase, and watch for everyday-word problems. If your name is also a common word, raw mention counts will mislead you; count mentions that appear next to your product category or domain instead.

Finally, report volume and tone together every month, so a rise in mentions is never mistaken for good news on its own. Our media monitoring service tracks brand mentions, share of voice and tone against a set of named competitors.

Embed this research

Cite this study