The SEO industry has spent the better part of twenty years obsessing over backlinks. Entire businesses have been built around acquiring them, countless emails have been sent begging for them, and more than a few questionable tactics have emerged in pursuit of them.
For a long time, that obsession made complete sense. Backlinks were, and still are, among the strongest signals search engines use to determine authority and relevance.
What’s changed is that search engines and the AI models now sitting on top of them have started measuring authority in a way that looks suspiciously like common sense, and that all comes down to brand mentions.
- Backlinks aren't dead, but they're no longer the whole answer.
- Brand mentions have graduated from a nice side effect of good marketing into a signal worth actively pursuing.
- AI models are reading the web the way people do, working out who keeps coming up and what's being said about them.
- Authority in 2026 lives outside your own website, in conversations you didn't start, on pages you don't control, built by people who owe you nothing.
- The businesses winning right now aren't choosing between the two; they're doing both.
Why backlinks became the gold standard
Now let’s run it back and remember why links mattered so much in the first place. Google’s original ranking system, PageRank, treated a link from one site to another as a vote of trust, and the more votes you collected from reputable places, the higher you climbed.
That logic was measurable, and it built an entire industry around acquiring links, passing authority from strong domains to weaker ones, watching URL Rating climb, and fighting over the handful of links that moved competitive keywords. In many ways, SEO became a race to collect the internet’s most valuable votes.
Let’s not forget that links were also a big part of how Google found new pages, crawling from one page to the next, so they served double duty as both a ranking signal and a discovery mechanism. None of that has disappeared, and none of it is going to.
What are brand mentions, and why are they now so important?
A brand mention is exactly what it sounds like: someone, somewhere on the internet, talking about you. No link needed, and no permission required. They just… mention you.
A journalist naming you in a news article, a customer singing your praises in a Reddit thread, a write-up in an industry publication, a conversation on social media. All of it counts as a mention, and while mentions have always mattered, they carry more weight now than they ever have.
For years, we treated these as the leftovers of a successful campaign. They were definitely something nice to have, and they might’ve been worth reporting on, but most SEOs mentally filed them under “good for awareness, not much else”.
Looking back, I think it was a pretty weird assumption to begin with. If a friend recommends a hairdresser, you don’t ask them to hand you a business card before you’ll believe them. The recommendation counts, and search engines are finally figuring that out too.
What the data says about AI visibility
I’ve mentioned these numbers in a previous blog (Digital PR’s role in brand authority & ranking in AI – if you happen to be interested), but it’s worth revisiting because I don’t think it’s getting as much attention as it deserves.
Ahrefs analysed 75,000 brands to see which signals best predicted appearance in ChatGPT, AI Mode, and AI Overviews, and branded web mentions came out on top with a correlation of 0.664, while traditional backlinks sat well behind at 0.218.
Correlation is not causation, and Ahrefs said as much, but a gap that wide is not something you wave away, especially when the three strongest signals in the whole study were all brand-related rather than link-related.
AI models aren’t sitting there tallying your backlinks like the old algorithm was. They’re reading the internet. Conversations, recommendations, reviews, articles, forum threads, and they’re working out who keeps coming up, what people say about them, and when they’re probably the right answer.
The rise of entity authority
Underneath all of this is a move toward entity-based search, where Google understands your business not as a string of keywords or a pile of links, but as a recognised thing in the world, with relationships, a reputation, and associations attached.
The more I look at it, the more it resembles how a real person decides who to trust. You don’t judge a plumber by counting the websites that link to theirs; you notice that three neighbours mentioned them by name, that a review thread spoke well of them, and that they keep coming up in the right context.
Search engines are now running a pretty clumsy, but gradually improving version of that same human process, and I don’t know about you, but I’m getting pretty excited about it.
✨Gone are the days of treating authority like something you could order in bulk and have shipped to your domain by Friday ✨
Why backlinks still matter, and why chasing them alone is a mistake
This is where a fair few marketers have drawn exactly the wrong conclusion. They’ve clocked the AI headlines, written off backlinks, and pulled budget from the work that still drives traditional rankings. But for the blue-link search results that most businesses rely on for the bulk of their traffic, links are still very much doing the job, and probably will be for a long time yet.
The businesses that are showing up in both search results and AI citations are doing both at once, earning high-quality backlinks while generating a consistent flow of brand mentions across the places their audience, and increasingly the machines, are paying attention.
A link from a spammy directory that nobody has visited since 2011 was never doing much for you anyway. A mention in a publication your customers actually read? That’s worth more, link or no link.
Welcome to the era of off-page SEO
I’m not just saying that for effect, but because the centre of gravity has moved outward, away from your own website and toward everything being said about you elsewhere.
This is precisely why Digital PR has become more valuable nowadays, and why we built it into our SEO campaigns long before the AI search data caught up and made the argument for us. When a journalist agrees to feature your business, you’re earning a mention from a source people actually trust, an association with a topic, and a signal that both Google and the language models know what to do with. The outreach wins we used to measure purely in links were always doing more than that. We just have better ways of proving it now.
So, are backlinks or brand mentions more important?
Honestly, neither wins outright, and anyone handing you a clean answer probably hasn’t thought about it hard enough. In traditional search, backlinks are a little less dominant than they once were, but they remain foundational, and walking away from them is the kind of decision you’d regret fairly quickly.
In AI search, brand mentions are arguably the strongest authority signal you’ve got, because the machines are reading the web, and what the web says about you matters more than what you’ve managed to get linked to.
The real trap is treating it as a competition at all. Link building still matters, but the businesses winning in 2026 have started thinking about authority the way most people think about reputation, something that lives out in the world, in conversations you didn’t start, on pages you don’t control, written by people who owe you nothing.
If you want people talking about you in all the right places, you know where to find us 👋
