Exploring influential spreaders and predicting missing links in complex networks is essential for understanding and effectively controlling network dynamics. This paper presents a Graph Convolutional Network (GCN)-based link prediction method to estimate the probability of future link formation. We incorporate node features that capture local and global topological connectivity structures and feed these into the GCN model, where convolutional layers aggregate neighboring information and transform node features. This approach enables the model to capture structural patterns by integrating local and global information from neighboring nodes. In the final layer, the GCN model computes a prediction score representing the likelihood of an edge’s existence, using insights gained during training. Finally, considering the predicted links, we update the network structure and introduce a novel centrality method called Emerging Spreader Centrality (ESC) to identify emerging spreaders within this augmented network. We conduct two separate experiments to evaluate the performance of the GCN-based link prediction and the ESC method, comparing their effectiveness with various state-of-the-art methods. Results demonstrate that our approach not only effectively predicts future links but also identifies emerging spreaders in the augmented networks.