A recent Ahrefs podcast provides data showing that brand mentions on third-party websites help improve visibility in artificial intelligence search engines.
It was found that brand mentions are closely correlated with higher positions in artificial intelligence search engines, indicating that you and I have firmly entered a new era of off-page SEO.
- Citations and data for AI training
- Post on reputable websites
- Thematicity of brand mentions
- Tests show that brand mentions are of great importance
- Ahrefs Brand Radar tool
- Citations are new backlinks
Citations and data for AI training
Tim Sulo, marketing director at Ahrefs, stated that external activity that increases the number of mentions on other sites ultimately improves visibility in search results with artificial intelligence, both based on training data and based on real search results (the advantages of external SEO apply to both cases). The only difference is that the training data does not get into the LLM immediately.
Tim recommends identifying where your industry is mentioned:
“You just need to see where your competitors are mentioned, where you are mentioned where your industry is mentioned.
And you need to get mentions there, because if an artificial intelligence chatbot searches, finds these pages, and creates its response based on what it sees on those pages, that’s one thing.
But if artificial intelligence vendors decide to retrain their entire model based on a more recent snapshot of the website, they will use basically the same pages.”
Tim warned that artificial intelligence companies do not use new web data for learning and that it takes several months between large language models receiving fresh learning data from the Internet.
Post on reputable websites
Although Tim did not mention specific tactics for getting brand mentions, in my opinion, the strategies for building backlinks should not change much to build brand mentions.
Tim emphasized the importance of appearing on reputable websites:
“Yes, In fact, you don’t need to use different tactics for these things. You do the same thing, you appear on reputable websites, but yes, let’s continue.”
The only thing I would add is that “credibility” in this situation means that the site is mentioned in search results using artificial intelligence. But you also need to think about whether the site is just a source of a certain type of information (relevance).
The subject of brand mentions
Another topic discussed was the subject matter of brand mentions, that is, the context in which the brand is discussed. Ryan Lowe, director of content marketing at Ahrefs, said that the context of mentioning a brand is important, and I agree with him. It’s not always possible to control the narrative, but good old PR comes to the rescue here, where you can include quotes, etc. to create the right context.
Lowe explains it this way:
“This goes very well into what I think is probably the most useful single tactic you can use, which is to create off-site mentions.
Much of how LLMs understand what your brand is, when it should be recommended, and in what context it should be talked about is based on where you appear in its training data and where you appear online.
What topics are you usually mentioned with?
What other brands are you mentioned with?
I think Patrick Stokes calls this the era of off-page SEO. In a way, the content on your own website is notit is valuable, like the content about you on other pages on the Internet.”
Lowe also noted that these external mentions don’t have to be in the form of classic links to be useful for ranking in AI search.
Tests show that brand mentions are of great importance
Continuing, Lowe emphasized that their data shows that brand mentions are important for ranking. He pointed to the correlation coefficient of “0.67”, which is a measure of the strength of the relationship between two variables.
Scale of correlation coefficients:
- 1.0 = perfect positive correlation (the two things are related).
- 0.0 = no correlation.
- -1.0 = perfect negative correlation (for example, the distance decreases with every minute of driving, which is a negative correlation).
Thus, a correlation coefficient of 0.67 means that there is a fairly strong relationship between the observed phenomena.
Here Lowe said the following:
“And we really checked this by doing a little research.
We looked at the factors that correlate with the number of brand mentions in AI responses, tested many different things, and found that the strongest correlation, a very strong correlation, almost 0.67, was with brand mentions on the Internet.
So if your brand is mentioned in many different places on the internet, it correlates very strongly with the fact that your brand is also mentioned in many AI responses.”
Later in the podcast, he recommends identifying industry domains that are frequently cited in AI search results for your topics, and making sure that you are mentioned on these websites.
Lowe also recommends seeking mentions on user-generated content sites such as Reddit and Quora. He further recommends seeking mentions on review sites and in transcriptions of YouTube videos, as YouTube videos are often cited in AI search results.
Ahrefs Brand Radar Tool
In conclusion, they talked about their tool called Brand Radar (if you haven’t tried it yet, I highly recommend it), which is useful for identifying domains often mentioned in artificial intelligence search engines.
Lowe’s quote:
“And, of course, we have there is a tool that does just that. It helps you find the domains that are mentioned most often….If you enter the niche you are interested in, you will see not only the top domains that are most often mentioned in all the thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of conversations that we have indexed. You will also see the individual pages that are mentioned most often.
Obviously, if you can place your brand on these pages, your visibility in AI search will immediately increase dramatically.”
Citations are new backlinks
Tim Sulo called citations new backlinks for the era of artificial intelligence in search and recommended the Brand Radar tool to identify places where you can get mentions.
In my opinion, mentioning a brand anywhere that is relevant to your users or customers can be useful for ranking both in regular search and in AI. Therefore, in 2026, more emphasis will need to be placed on link building and PR.
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