AI Mentions Are the New Backlinks—Here’s How to Get Them

AI mentions are the new backlinks

For two decades, being recommended online mostly meant ranking on Google, and ranking meant earning links from credible sites. That logic hasn't disappeared, but a second layer has formed on top of it. More buyers now open ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini and ask the question directly: who is good at this? The brands named in the answer win the moment, and they are rarely the ones who simply bought the most ads.

In our experience, the brands that get named tend to share a few traits. None of them are tricks.

Be present where the models read

Language models learn from text across the open web: documentation, reputable publications, community discussion, and your own site. A brand that shows up clearly and consistently across those sources is far more likely to be part of the answer than one that lives only inside a closed app or a single landing page.

Be legible, not just visible

Models reward clarity. Plain descriptions of what you do, who you do it for, and the outcome you create are easier to extract and repeat than clever taglines. Structured data and well-organised content help here, and the same discipline that makes your data useful internally makes it readable to a model externally.

Earn credible third-party mentions

Just as backlinks once signalled trust to search engines, references from sources a model already trusts signal trust to the model. A genuine case study, a named customer result, an honest mention in a respected publication: these compound.

None of this happens in a week, and there is no button that guarantees it. But the direction is clear. Being easy to find, easy to understand, and credibly referenced is becoming as valuable in AI answers as it ever was in search.