For twenty years, the way to win at search was to collect links. A link was a vote, and whoever had the most relevant votes tended to win.

That game is not over, but it is no longer the only one. Search is turning into an answer engine. Ask Google now and an AI summary often replies before the ten blue links even load. Ask ChatGPT, Perplexity or Gemini and there are no blue links at all, just an answer that names a few sources and moves on.

When the result is a sentence instead of a list, the question changes. It stops being only “who links to you” and becomes “what does the web say about you”, because that is what the machine is reading before it decides who to name.

The difference is worth getting straight, because the two are not the same thing.

A backlink is a vote you can count. One site points at another, the link is clickable, and for two decades search engines have tallied those votes to work out who is worth trusting. Countable things are easy to build a ranking on.

A brand mention is softer, and in a way richer. It is your name coming up in context, in an article, a forum thread, a podcast transcript, a review, often with no link at all. It does not get clicked. It gets read. When a machine is trying to work out who you are and whether to recommend you, being talked about across a lot of trusted places is exactly the kind of thing it can use.

A link says “this site points here.” A mention says “people are talking about this.” As search shifts from counting links to composing answers, the second one starts to carry more weight.

That is the argument. Here is the first real evidence for it.

Ahrefs went looking across 75,000 brands in May 2025, measuring what a brand had going for it against how often it turned up in Google’s AI Overviews. Branded web mentions came out on top at 0.664. Referring domains managed 0.295, and raw backlink counts 0.218. The three strongest signals in the study were all off-site brand signals rather than links.

Take that with the caveat Ahrefs attached themselves, because most people quoting the number leave it off. Correlation is not causation, and on the Spearman scale even 0.664 is a moderate relationship rather than a law of physics. It does not prove mentions cause the visibility. What it does show is that the brands turning up in AI answers are the ones being talked about, and that the mention signal ran more than twice as strong as the referring-domain one across every brand they looked at.

How an AI answer actually gets built

To see why mentions matter more here, look at what an answer engine does.

It does not rank ten pages and hand you the list. It reads across a pile of sources, writes a summary, and names a few of them. To do that, it has to understand entities: which brands, people and products exist, what they are known for, and which ones the wider web treats as credible on a given topic. A brand that comes up again and again, in relevant and trusted places, becomes an entity the model is comfortable naming. One that only exists on its own website is easy to skip.

Two things follow. Being mentioned in credible context is its own signal, link or no link. And the places real people actually talk, communities, forums, discussion threads, are increasingly part of what these systems read, which is why you now see them cited in AI answers directly.

This is all still early, and anyone who tells you they have it perfectly figured out is guessing. But the direction is clear enough to plan around. Being talked about is becoming at least as valuable as being linked to.

None of this means links stopped mattering. That would be the wrong lesson to take.

Backlinks still do real work. They still help traditional rankings, they still send referral traffic, and a link from a trusted site is still a genuine vote worth having. The shift is not links out, mentions in. It is that mentions have joined links as something worth caring about, and in the AI-answer world they may be pulling ahead. You are not choosing one over the other. You are adding a second thing to the list, and it happens to be one most people are not paying attention to yet.

Why this quietly favours real relationships

Here is the part that changes how you spend your time.

You cannot buy a good reputation, and you cannot fake being talked about, at least not for long. Mentions come from real relationships. People bring up brands they actually know, have worked with, or were pointed to by someone they trust. A guest spot on a relevant podcast, a joint piece of research two sites publish, a genuine recommendation from a peer, a mention in a newsletter people read: these are the moments that put your name in front of a real audience in a trusted context, which is precisely the context an answer engine is reading.

So the thing that builds AI-era visibility turns out to be the same thing that has always built a good reputation. Doing real work with real people, and being worth talking about. Value for value and cross-promotion are not just link tactics. They are how you get mentioned by the right people, in the right places, on purpose.

What to actually do

You do not need a new playbook full of tricks. You need to point the old, real one at a slightly different target.

Be worth mentioning. The same work that earns links, original research, a genuinely useful tool, a clear point of view, also earns mentions, because people cite what they find useful. How to get backlinks worth having covers most of it, and all of it doubles as mention-building.

Show up where your people already talk. Be a real, useful presence in the communities and forums your audience uses, not a drive-by link-dropper. Those are increasingly the rooms the machines listen in on.

Earn co-mentions through partnerships. When you partner with a relevant site, a guest essay, a joint study, a mutual recommendation, you get named in their world and they in yours. That co-visibility is the most direct way to get talked about by people the web already trusts.

Skip the tricks. There will be a hundred “get cited by ChatGPT in five minutes” posts. Ignore them. These systems change monthly, and the only thing that keeps working is being a brand people genuinely talk about. If you want something more solid than a listicle, the Princeton-led paper that coined the term “generative engine optimization” is peer-reviewed, went to KDD in 2024, and found that content changes can shift visibility in generative answers by up to 40%. Real research on this exists. It is just quieter than the hacks.

Frequently asked questions

What is the difference between a brand mention and a backlink? A backlink is a clickable link from one site to another, which search engines can count. A brand mention is your name appearing in content, often with no link, in an article, forum, podcast or review. Links are counted, mentions are read, and AI answer engines increasingly rely on the second to work out who to name.

Do brand mentions help SEO? They help you build the kind of reputation search increasingly rewards. Ahrefs’ 75,000-brand study found branded web mentions to be the strongest correlate of appearing in AI Overviews, ahead of both referring domains and backlink counts, though the study is careful to say correlation is not proof of cause. Even without a link, being mentioned in relevant, trusted places helps engines understand who you are and treat you as credible, which matters more as results shift toward AI-generated answers. That is not a promise of a ranking, but the signal is real.

Do backlinks still matter with AI search? Yes. Backlinks still help traditional rankings, still send referral traffic, and a link from a trusted site is still a real vote. Mentions have joined them as something worth building. They have not replaced them.

How do I get brand mentions? Do work worth talking about, show up genuinely in the communities your audience uses, and earn co-mentions through partnerships and cross-promotion: guest spots, joint content, mutual recommendations. Mentions follow real relationships and real usefulness.

Will AI search kill backlinks? Unlikely, at least any time soon. It is more that AI search adds a second thing that matters, being talked about, alongside being linked to. The safe bet is to build both, and most people are still only building one.

The short version

A backlink is a vote. A brand mention is a reputation. For twenty years search mostly counted the votes. As it turns into an answer engine, it is starting to listen to your reputation too, to what the web says about you when you are not in the room.

You cannot fake that. It comes from real work and real relationships: being worth talking about, and being talked about by people the web already trusts. Which is the same thing value-for-value partnerships have always built.

The slow part is finding the right peers to build those relationships with, and it is what Engado is for. It surfaces relevant, verified businesses in your niche so you can find the partners worth being mentioned by, and start a real conversation. (The surfacing runs overnight on a batch job we named Gerald. Gerald asks for nothing and judges no one.) Do the work worth talking about. Then go and meet the people who will talk about it.