Citation signals

Do backlinks still matter for AI search?

By Arnav Mukherjee, founder of TofuBofu · July 6, 2026

A founder I was talking to last week had spent two years and a real budget building backlinks. Good ones, editorial placements, the kind an SEO agency is proud of. His Google rankings were solid. Then he ran an AI visibility scan and found ChatGPT recommending three competitors and not him. His first question was the honest one: "So was all that link building a waste?"

No. But it was not the lever he thought it was. Backlinks still matter for AI search, just far less than they matter for Google, and far less than something most founders under-invest in: plain brand mentions. Here is what the data actually shows, and how to reweight your effort because of it.

What the 75,000-brand study found

Ahrefs looked at 75,000 brands and measured how strongly different factors correlated with a brand showing up in AI Overviews. The three strongest signals were all off-site, and all about being named rather than being linked: brand web mentions at 0.664, brand anchors at 0.527, and brand search volume at 0.392. Backlinks came in well behind at 0.218. A follow-up study extended the analysis to ChatGPT and Google AI Mode and found branded mentions still leading, correlating in the 0.66 to 0.71 range.

Correlation is not causation, and nobody outside the labs knows the exact recipe. But the direction is consistent and it is large. Mentions correlate roughly three times more strongly than backlinks. Ahrefs also found that the brands earning the most web mentions showed up in AI Overviews up to ten times more often than the next group down. That is not a rounding error. It is a different game.

Why AI values a mention over a link

A backlink is a web-graph signal. Google's ranking system was built to read links as votes, so for twenty years links were the currency. A large language model does not work that way. It learns from language: articles, forum threads, transcripts, reviews, documentation. In that world the unit of trust is not a hyperlink, it is a sentence where a credible third party names you in context.

That is why an unlinked mention can outperform a link. "We moved our helpdesk to [your company] and cut ticket time by half," written in a Reddit thread with no link at all, is exactly the kind of specific, contextual, third-party statement an engine can lift and repeat. A link in a resource-page footer, with your brand name nowhere in the surrounding text, gives the model almost nothing to work with. The link helps Google. The sentence helps everyone.

So backlinks are not dead, they are demoted

This is the part people overcorrect on. Backlinks still do real work. Google AI Overviews is built on Google's own index and ranking, which links still influence, so a strong link profile can carry you into AI Overviews even though mentions correlate more strongly. And in practice a good editorial link almost always arrives wrapped in a brand mention, so quality link building produces both at once. The mistake is not building links. The mistake is treating links as the whole strategy when the data says they are now a minority of it.

The cleanest way to think about it is proportion. A B2B services firm in 2022 might reasonably have spent 70 percent of its off-site effort on links and 30 percent on mentions and PR. In 2026, given how AI answers are formed, closer to 30 percent links and 70 percent mentions fits what the engines actually reward. Same total effort, reallocated.

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