For twenty years, the game was backlinks. Get enough sites to link to you and Google moved you up. That game is fading. The new one runs on mentions.
Here's the shift. AI doesn't count links the way Google did. It reads the web for who gets talked about. When ChatGPT decides which agency or product to name, it's weighing how often and how confidently your name shows up across the internet, not how many sites technically link to you.
A mention without a link now does the work a backlink used to do. Your brand named in a Reddit thread, a roundup, a podcast, a "best of" list. AI reads all of it and builds a picture of who matters in your category.
I'll prove the direction with our own numbers. We started publishing best-of and comparison content, the kind that names real options in our space. Within days, those pages were ranking on page one for the questions buyers actually ask, like "which marketing partners specialize in $500K to $10M Shopify stores." And AI started citing them. We didn't buy a single link. We just made ourselves easy to mention.
That's the move. Get mentioned where the AI is already reading.
A few ways to do it:
Publish your own roundups and comparisons. Name real options, include yourself honestly, and the AI cites your page when someone asks.
Get into the third-party roundups AI already quotes. Those "best agencies" and "best products" lists are the exact sources the models pull from.
Show up in the conversations. Reddit, forums, podcasts. Community content is where a lot of AI answers come from.
Backlinks aren't worthless. But chasing them is fighting the last war. Spend that energy getting your name into the places AI reads, said the same way every time.
Mentions are the new currency. Start earning them.
Want to see where you're already getting mentioned and where you're invisible? That's part of what we audit.
