Ah, backlinks - they were THE thing in SEO for years, no matter how shady the tactics or poor the linking site. Well, there’s a next-generation version in the AI search age, and they’re the key to showing up on ChatGPT, AI Overviews, and the like. You’ll hear them referred to as “brand mentions” and sometimes “brand citations.”
Whatever you call them, gaming the system isn’t the way to get them. They rely on your brand being THE expert in a subject area and demonstrating that expertise in a way the LLMs can’t help notice.
To signal your expertise, you’ll need to help your brand show up as a trusted source across the broader information ecosystem through authority signals like repeated references, contextual alignment, and corroboration across platforms. That’s great for more than AI search; it’s great for SEO in general.
In this post, I’ll cover:
Let’s dig in.
In an LLM-driven world, authority is pattern recognition, not a score.
Models learn which brands to surface by observing:
Links still matter, but they’re no longer the sole proxy. Mentions without links, expert quotes, forum discussions, citations in long-form explainers, and repeated association with a topic cluster all contribute to authority modeling, which builds over time and in context.
One of the biggest mistakes brands make in AI-era SEO is overproducing content before earning external validation.
You can publish endlessly, but if LLMs don’t see:
…your content has limited surface area in AI-generated results.
Authority signals give models confidence that your content is worth synthesizing, quoting, or citing.
Authority is built outside your owned channels. High-impact environments include:
These environments shape the training and retrieval layers that influence AI outputs.
Passive authority is earned by producing POVs and content so good that outside entities reference them.
That means producing assets that others need to cite, such as:
LLMs disproportionately favor sources that simplify, clarify, or quantify ideas, especially when those ideas are hard to find elsewhere.
Active authority-building is relationship-driven, not transactional. Effective strategies include:
The goal is to keep your brand’s name in third-party conversations. Authority compounds when the same names appear again and again in relevant contexts.
Authority-building reaches an inflection point at a certain scale. It’s time to consider PR or external amplification when:
PR won’t produce anything new for you from whole cloth, but it can dramatically accelerate signals once you’re ready to be cited.
Authority is no longer declared by your site structure or backlink count alone. It’s inferred from how often your brand shows up, in the right places, saying useful things consistently.
Brands that invest now in becoming sources, not just publishers, will benefit disproportionately as LLM-driven discovery matures through 2026 and beyond.