“Sure, AI optimization, whatever. It’s still just going out and getting links, isn’t it?” I’ve been hearing that line in marketing meetings a lot lately.
The reasoning is comfortable. The pages that win at search are the pages the AI picks up, so keep grinding out backlinks and you’ll be fine. I sort of assumed the same thing.
But somebody went and checked, and the numbers don’t back the assumption up at all.
They checked at scale, too — 75,000 brands. So let’s look at what turned up, and at what a marketer is supposed to do about it on Monday.
”AI Optimization Is Just Link Building, Right?”
The people who threw real data at that question are Ahrefs, the SEO toolmaker, in their analysis of AI brand visibility.
The size is what makes it worth your time. They took 75,000 brands and measured how likely each one was to get named across the big AI surfaces — ChatGPT, Google AI Mode, and AI Overviews.
Then they lined that up against what each brand had going on outside its own website, signal by signal, to see which ones moved together.
“AI visibility” here is basically how often the AI’s answer says your name out loud. Which, for you, means the question isn’t where you rank — it’s whether the model brings you up at all. And the thing Ahrefs was testing is whether that gets bought with backlinks, or with something else entirely.
What Won Wasn’t Links. It Was Being Talked About.
So here’s what they found, and it goes straight at the received wisdom.
Start with backlinks, the number SEO people have treated as a lifeline. Against AI visibility, it barely moved: a correlation of 0.10 to 0.218. (“Correlation” is just the strength of the “when one goes up, does the other go up too?” relationship — 0 is nothing, 1 is lockstep.)
What did move, and by a lot, was brand mentions across the web.
- Brand mentions on the web: correlated 0.664 — the strongest signal in the study
- Backlink count: correlated 0.10 to 0.218 — barely a wobble
That’s roughly three times the strength. Same brands, same models, one signal doing the work and the other mostly along for the ride.
A “brand mention” is just somebody else’s page saying your company’s name — no link required. It’s the spread of the talk about you, not the plumbing pointing at you.
Why The Talk Beats The Links
Here’s the part I find genuinely interesting: this doesn’t look like a quirk of one study.
A separate outfit, OppAlerts, ran more than 100,000 prompts across 145 industries in March 2026, and found backlinks explained only a few percent of which brands got recommended. Two independent looks, pointing the same way.
And the mechanics sort of click once you sit with them. A search engine picks which page to put on top. An AI picks which brand to say out loud.
The first is a page-by-page contest. The second is a contest over whether the model recognizes you as a real, coherent thing at all — so it reaches for the brands that get described the same way in a lot of different places. Those are the ones it feels safe naming.
For anyone who built their career stacking one link at a time, the board change is a bit disorienting (a little like finding out the points you spent five years hoarding don’t spend in the new store).
Two caveats worth holding, though. This is correlation, not proof — nobody showed that racking up mentions causes the AI to name you. And OppAlerts sells AI-visibility tooling, so that second data point has a house to win. The effect swings by industry too. Maybe I’m reading more into the convergence than it can carry; I still think two studies with different methods landing in the same place is worth more than either one alone.
Conclusion: Widen The Surface People Talk On, Then Count Your AI Mentions
So here’s what I think this hands you.
The real find is that the fight for AI visibility has moved off the link report and onto how wide the surface is that people talk about you on. Link building doesn’t become a waste. But on its own, it walks past most of what the AI is actually reading.
If you want a first move, it’s getting other people to say your name. Bylines in trade press, original data worth quoting, reviews, customer stories — digital PR, in the old sense, widening the ground where your brand comes up. It isn’t flashy. But it’s the foundation under the AI’s decision that you’re a brand worth naming.
The second thing, and don’t skip it, is counting. Say you double your mentions. Whether that turned into the AI actually saying your name is invisible from a backlink report. Track how often you show up in AI answers as its own gauge, apart from your links, or the move and the effect never connect.
Step off the table of how many links you got this quarter, and look at how much of the world is talking. The prime real estate of this era is sitting over there — and, I suspect, still oddly quiet.
Sources
- Ahrefs, “Top Brand Visibility Factors in ChatGPT, AI Mode, and AI Overviews (75k Brands Studied)”, ahrefs.com (75,000 brands analyzed; brand mentions correlated 0.664 vs backlinks 0.10 to 0.218)
- OppAlerts, “LLM Ranking Factors”, March 2026, oppalerts.com (145 industries, 100,000-plus prompts; backlinks explained only a few percent; study by an AI-visibility vendor)
