Ahrefs studied 75,000 brands. Backlinks came fifth. Here is what actually gets you into the AI answer.

The short version

You have been sold a story for fifteen years. Get links, get rankings. It worked. It still works for the blue links. But the blue links are not where the decision is being made any more.

When somebody opens ChatGPT and types "best accountant in Newcastle", there is no list of ten. There is a paragraph with two or three names in it. You are named or you do not exist. And the thing that decides whether your name is in that paragraph is not your backlink profile.

Ahrefs went and measured it. They studied 75,000 brands across ChatGPT, Google AI Mode and AI Overviews and ranked the factors that correlate with a brand actually getting mentioned. Backlinks came in at 0.218. Branded web mentions came in at 0.664. That is roughly three times stronger. Backlinks did not just lose. They got beaten by things most SEOs do not even track.

What a brand mention actually is (and what it is not)

Quick definition, because half the confusion in this topic is people using the same word for four different things.

A backlink is a clickable href on someone else's page pointing at yours. Measurable, buyable, and the thing your SEO invoice is based on.

A brand mention is your business name appearing in text somewhere on the web. It might be linked. It very often is not. A Reddit comment saying "we used KillerEdge and they were sound" is a brand mention. So is a line in a roundup article, a YouTube video description, a podcast transcript, or a forum reply.

A citation in the AI sense is when a model names or sources you inside an answer. That is the outcome you are chasing. Mentions are the input. Citations are the output.

And a local citation, confusingly, is the old local SEO term for your name, address and phone number on a directory. Still useful. Different thing. Do not let anyone blur these to sell you a package.

That last row is the uncomfortable one. You cannot shortcut being worth talking about. You can only make it easier for people who already like you to say your name in public.

What the Ahrefs numbers actually say

Here is the table nobody in your industry has bothered to read properly. These are correlation figures against AI brand visibility from the 75,000 brand study.

Look at that third column. Every single signal at the top is something other people say about you somewhere else. Not one of them is a thing you can write on your own homepage. That is the whole lesson and most agencies will not tell you because it is hard to invoice.

Ahrefs also found that the brands earning the most web mentions pick up as much as 10 times more mentions in AI Overviews than the next quartile down. It is not a gentle curve. It is a cliff.

The honest caveat, because we do not do dishonest here: Ahrefs themselves say correlation is not causation. Starting a YouTube channel tomorrow does not fire a signal into ChatGPT. What the data shows is that brands the machines talk about are brands the web already talks about, in a lot of different places. That is still the most useful map anyone has published. Just do not let a guru sell it to you as a button.

The bit that breaks most people's brains: the mention does not need a link

This is the part I have to repeat three times before it lands.

Ahrefs ran a separate study on their own brand and found that when AI assistants mentioned Ahrefs, they linked to Ahrefs only about 28 percent of the time. Nearly three quarters of the mentions carried no link at all.

Think about what that means for how you have been working. Your entire link building process is built around one outcome: the anchor text and the href. If the href is optional, and the mention is the thing that moves the needle, then you have been optimising for the garnish and ignoring the meal.

A journalist writing "we asked David Sessford of The KillerEdge" with no link at all is worth more to your AI visibility than a paid guest post on a site nobody reads. That flips the economics of your whole off-site budget. We walk through exactly how to rebuild that budget inside the Dojo, because it is the single change that saves people the most money in their first month.

So are backlinks dead? No. Stop it.

Every time a study like this comes out, half the industry declares links dead and the other half declares the study rubbish. Both are being lazy.

Here is the accurate version. Links are now a threshold, not a lever.

• Below the threshold: you have almost no links, nobody credible has ever pointed at you, and the retrieval systems do not consider you a real business. Links fix this. You need them.
• Above the threshold: you are a known, indexed, reasonably trusted domain. More links do very little for whether an AI names you. Mentions, context and clarity do the rest.

And links still absolutely matter for classic organic rankings, which still send you traffic and still feed the pages the AI systems retrieve from. Anyone telling you to cancel your link building entirely is selling a different product.

The move is not "stop building links". The move is "stop buying links as your only off-site activity".

What to do instead, in order

This is the sequence I would run for any business starting from scratch. Do it in this order. Skipping to step five because it sounds fun is how people waste six months.

1. Fix your entity first (one week)

One name, one description, one address, said identically everywhere. If you are "KillerEdge" on one profile, "The Killer Edge" on another and "Killeredge Marketing Ltd" on Companies House, the machine sees three weak entities instead of one strong one. Nothing else you do will compound until this is nailed down. We covered the full method in the entity SEO guide.

2. Answer-first every page that matters (one week)

Under each question heading, put a clean 40 to 60 word answer. No warm up. No "in today's fast paced world". The models lift the first clean block that answers the query. If your answer is buried in paragraph nine, the clearer competitor gets quoted and you get nothing. This is free and almost nobody does it.

3. Get mentioned where the models already look (ongoing, forever)

This is the actual work. Not links. Mentions. In rough order of value for a small business:

• Reddit and forums. Reddit is one of the most heavily cited domains in AI answers. Be useful in the threads where your customers already ask questions. Answer properly, disclose who you are, do not drop links like a bot. One genuinely helpful answer that gets upvoted outlives a hundred spammed comments.
• Listicles and roundups. "Best X in Y" pages are what the models quote when someone asks for a recommendation. Getting into somebody else's list beats writing your own 400th blog post. Find the roundups that already rank for your money query and get on them.
• YouTube. The strongest single correlation in the whole study. You do not need a studio. You need your brand name spoken and written in titles, descriptions and transcripts, on your channel or somebody else's.
• Podcasts and expert quotes. Journalists need sources. Being quoted is a mention. Mentions are the currency.
• Directories that humans actually use. Not the 1998 link farm sort. The industry ones with real editorial standards.

This is the bit agencies charge $2k a month for and then send you a spreadsheet of 12 links from sites nobody has read. It is not complicated work. It is consistent work, in the right order, and it is exactly what the Dojo hands you as a repeatable checklist.

4. Add the boring schema (one afternoon)

Organization, LocalBusiness, FAQPage. It is the label on the tin. It tells the machine what you are without it having to guess. Most of your rivals cannot be bothered, which is precisely why you should.

5. Measure it, for free

Do not buy an AI visibility dashboard in month one. Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools already give you most of what you need, and we showed you how in the free AI visibility tracking guide. Buy the fancy tool when you have something worth measuring.

Timeline and cost, honestly

Nobody can promise you a citation on a date. Anybody who does is lying to you. What I can give you is the realistic shape of the work.

Those agency figures are ranges I see quoted in this market, not a survey. Treat them as a sense check on what you are being charged, not gospel.

Who this suits and who it does not

Do this if: you sell something people ask an assistant about before they buy. Local services, B2B software, professional services, anything with a "best" or "who should I use" query attached to it. You have a real business with real customers who could plausibly talk about you.

Do not bother yet if: your site is brand new with no content and no customers. You are below the threshold. Go and get some links, some content and some actual clients first, then come back. Or if you sell purely on price through a marketplace where nobody searches your brand, your money is better spent elsewhere.

The alternatives, and why most of them are worse

You have four realistic options for off-site work right now. Here is the honest scoreboard.

Notice the two low-risk rows are the two that cannot be automated. That is not a coincidence. Anything a script can do at volume gets commoditised and then penalised. Anything that requires a human being to think stays valuable.

If you only have time for one, take community presence. It is free, it compounds, and it is the one your competitors are too proud to do.

The mistakes I keep seeing

• Buying "AI citations" as a service. If someone offers to place you in AI answers for a fee, ask them exactly what they are doing. If the answer is spun listicles or manipulated roundups, walk away. Google explicitly updated its spam policies on 15 May 2026 to state that attempting to manipulate generative AI responses in Search is spam. Same enforcement, same demotions.
• Chasing volume of mentions instead of quality. Fifty mentions on scraped junk sites is noise. Three on places a human editor actually runs is signal.
• Writing 3,000 words when 50 would do. The answer block gets you quoted. The rest is for humans who scroll. Both matter, but in that order.
• Assuming your homepage counts. It does not. The machine trusts everyone except you. Your own claims about yourself are the least weighted thing on the internet.
• Panicking and cancelling everything. Your organic rankings still feed the retrieval layer. Do not burn the house down.

The risks, stated plainly

Two things could make this advice age badly, and you deserve to hear them.

First, correlation studies describe a snapshot. Retrieval systems change fast. The 0.664 figure is a measurement of how the world looked when Ahrefs measured it, not a law of physics.

Second, the enforcement climate is tightening. Google ran its June 2026 spam update from 24 June to 26 June 2026, globally and across all languages, and has been steadily formalising policies on scaled content abuse, expired domain abuse and site reputation abuse. Every one of those exists because somebody industrialised a tactic that used to work. Anything you can buy in bulk is on borrowed time. Earned mentions are not, because they are expensive to fake at scale.

Where this goes for the rest of 2026

My read, and it is a read, not a fact. Three things get more true from here.

Off-site becomes the whole game. On-page is table stakes now. Everyone can write a clean answer block. Not everyone can get a real publication to mention them.

PR and SEO stop being separate departments. The person doing your outreach and the person doing your content are doing the same job, they just have not been told yet.

The gap between businesses that are talked about and businesses that only talk about themselves gets brutal. Because there is no page two in an AI answer. There is a name, or there is silence.

Pick which one you are. Then go and earn the mention.

Do it yourself, or do not

Everything above is doable on your own. It is a checklist, not black magic. It just takes order, patience, and knowing which steps to skip.

If you want the full system, the templates, the mention tracker and the exact outreach angles that get a small business quoted, that is what the Dojo is. Join The Dojo. $67/mo.

If you would rather somebody just did it, look at Done For You, or the SEO service if you want the foundations handled first. And if you want to poke around the free tools before spending anything, they live in The Armory.