Backlinks

What backlinks are

A backlink is a link that points to one of your pages from another website. If a trade publication, a customer’s blog or a directory links to your site, that link is a backlink to the page it points at. The number and kind of such links has long been treated as a signal in conventional search, and building them has been one of the main jobs in SEO.

The term matters on this site for a specific reason. The citation article reports a comparison that changes how much weight a business might put on links when the goal is to be named in an AI answer. It found that brand mentions correlated roughly three times more strongly with AI visibility than backlinks did, at 0.664 against 0.218.

This page defines the term, sets out what the site’s pages say about links and mentions, and explains what a small business can do about both. It makes no claim beyond what those pages already state, and it promises no result.

Why have backlinks long mattered in Search?

The site’s pages describe ranking as something that has long weighed relevance and authority together, and the definition above calls backlinks a long-standing signal in conventional search. Link building is the lever most SEO strategy has pulled.

The site does not attempt to explain the mechanics of how any search engine weighs a link, and this page does not either. The point that matters here is narrower. Links were the outside signal that most SEO effort aimed at, and the citation research suggests that, for AI answers, a different outside signal sits beside them.

The search engine optimisation page covers the ranking work that links belong to. The sensible reading of the evidence below is not that this work stops mattering. It is that it is no longer the only outside signal worth attention.

What did the Research find about brand mentions?

The citation article describes a peer-reviewed study of nine content techniques, and then reports a separate related signal. Brand mentions correlate roughly three times more strongly with AI visibility than backlinks do, measured at 0.664 for mentions against 0.218 for backlinks.

The article adds two points that matter for a business reading it.

• A mention counts even where no link is attached. Earning a mention of a business’s name across other sites and publications appears to carry meaningful weight with AI systems.
• It is a different lever. The article describes it as one that traditional link-building metrics do not fully capture, and as a different lever from the one most SEO strategy has historically pulled.

The AI citation page states the limit on the figure plainly: it is a correlation. The branded search page repeats it, saying it does not claim that earning mentions causes citations. A correlation shows two things moving together. It does not show which one moves the other, or whether something else moves both.

Is a mention Different from a link?

Yes, and the difference is the whole point of the comparison. This table sets out how the site’s pages describe the two.

The last row is worth pausing on. The branded search page says earning a mention of a name across other sites and publications is not something a business controls in the way it controls its own pages. That is true of links as well, since another site decides whether to link.

One article can hold both, one or neither. A feature that names your business without linking to you is a mention without a backlink. A directory entry that links to your site without describing you is a backlink without much of a mention. The citation research suggests the first kind deserves more attention than it usually gets.

Why do Independent Sources carry more weight?

The brand article gives the reason. It says independent reviews, forums and articles tend to be given more weight than a company’s own pages, because a company website is read as promotional. What other people say about a business is read differently from what the business says about itself.

This ties directly to E-E-A-T. The AI Overviews article describes a track record a model can find corroborated elsewhere as one of the three things that get a page selected as a source. The E-E-A-T page puts it as authority not being only what a site says about itself.

It also explains why strong facts on your own site, important as they are, do not settle the matter. The brand article’s order of work is to fix your own facts first, then the places that repeat them, then the independent sources that carry the most weight. A business that appears consistently across several reputable sources has a stronger identity than one that appears mainly on its own website.

Why is the list no longer the Whole story?

Link building is a way of climbing a list of results. The citation article reports that the list has become a less reliable guide to who is named in an answer. The overlap between a page’s position in conventional rankings and whether it is cited by an AI system fell from around 75% in mid-2025 to between 17% and 38% by early 2026. Ranking first is no longer a reliable predictor of being cited.

The SEO against GEO review makes the same broad point in its own terms. A rank still matters, because it puts a page into the pool assistants draw from and because most traffic still arrives through ordinary search. But rank alone is no longer a reliable proxy for being quoted.

So the picture is not that links stopped counting. It is that the thing links were mostly used to win, a high position in a list, now explains less of who gets named. The citation article says this opens room for content that never ranked first, and that GEO techniques sit on top of conventional SEO and do not replace it.

Does this mean backlinks no longer matter?

The site does not say that, and this page does not either. The citation article says none of this is an argument for abandoning conventional SEO practice. The search engine’s own guide, as the SEO against GEO review reports it, says optimising for generative AI search is still SEO.

What the evidence supports is a change of weighting and not a change of discipline. An organisation that has already invested in solid, well-structured content is closer to benefiting than one starting from nothing, as the citation article puts it. What the research adds is a second outside signal, mentions of the business’s name, that deserves its own attention and is not captured by counting links.

That is the measured position, and it fits the review’s wider conclusion. Ranking still matters, rank alone no longer predicts a mention, and the sensible plan is to keep the foundations and add the habits that make a business easy to recognise and easy to describe correctly.

How do you earn Accurate mentions?

The brand article’s advice is to earn accurate mentions on independent sites through three routes:

• Real coverage.
• Genuine reviews from real customers.
• Contributions to your industry’s own publications.

It states that this cannot be shortcut, and that attempts to fake it tend to create conflicting signals.

The same article adds the supporting work that makes those mentions count. Make every listing of the business say the same thing, because a former name or an abbreviation can make two records look like two businesses. Where an assistant cites a page or you can trace a wrong claim to one, ask the owner of that page to correct it. The aim is that the mentions you earn describe one consistent business.

What does not work?

The two pages that deal with this agree. The SEO against GEO review reports the search engine’s own guide saying that manufactured brand mentions are not as useful as they might seem. The brand article says attempts to fake independent coverage tend to create exactly the conflicting signals a business is trying to remove.

This matters because the 0.664 figure could be misread as a recipe. It is not one. A correlation between mentions and visibility does not mean that producing mentions, by any means, will produce visibility, and the guide the review reports says that manufactured mentions are not as useful as they might seem.

The brand article’s list of things not to do points the same way. It warns against stuffing pages with your name, against publishing thin pages whose only purpose is to be quoted, and against publishing claims you cannot support. The sources that work are the ones a human would also find useful.

How do you check mentions and links?

By asking, as you would for any other AI visibility question. The SEO against GEO review advises a fixed set of real customer questions run on a regular schedule, recording whether you are named, whether you are linked and what is said. The trend over months is the signal, because a single run proves little.

The brand article adds a distinction worth keeping in the log. Record whether your name appears in the text of the answer and whether your page is given as the source. The second is an AI citation, and an assistant can do one without the other. A business can be mentioned without being linked, and the reverse.

This is also where the two ideas in this page meet. If you are named and not linked, the mention is working and the link is missing. If you are linked and not named, the reverse is true. Either is information about where the outside evidence is thin. An AI audit covers how a business is described and which of its pages are best placed to be quoted.

What does this mean for a Small Business?

It is mostly steady work and not a sprint. The citation article’s own reading is that the techniques that move AI visibility are additions to existing content and not a requirement to produce far more of it.

For mentions, the practical work is steady and unglamorous. Keep your own facts clear and consistent. Make sure your listings agree. Do work that customers have reason to review and that your industry has reason to cover. The statistics density page covers the content-side habit the same research found most effective, and the content strategy page covers where the effort goes.

None of it is a sprint. The branded search page says recognition is built over time. A business that does this steadily is easier to recognise and easier for an assistant to describe correctly, which is the realistic goal.

What to do first

Write down the five or six questions a customer would actually ask about a business like yours, and run them in a clean session. Note which businesses are named, whether yours is among them, whether your page is given as the source, and what is said. That is the baseline for both mentions and links.

Then fix the sources you control. Make the facts on your own site plain and make every listing say the same thing. After that, look at where independent sources already mention you and whether what they say is accurate, and ask for corrections where it is not. Only then look at earning new mentions, through real coverage, genuine customer reviews and contributions to your industry’s own publications.

Run the same questions next month. The change will be modest and measurable, which is the right size for a first step. The figures and their limits are in what gets content cited in AI answers, and the check is described in full in does your brand show up when people ask AI about you.