Is Your Link Building Strategy Optimised For AI Search?

Perhaps, not entirely, as do most companies right now. That gap is worth understanding clearly.

Your link building and content marketing investments are still building real value. But an Ahrefs study of 75,000 brands reveals a signal hierarchy that most strategies are not yet fully capturing.

The good news is that closing the gap does not mean starting over. It means extending what you are already doing with a sharper brief.

Key Takeaways

• Ahrefs' analysis of 75,000 brands found brand web mentions are the single strongest predictor of AI search visibility, more than 3x more predictive than generic backlinks.

• Links that use your brand name as the anchor text are the second strongest signal.

• Having a strong backlink profile and content structure continue to add to your brand’s potential of getting cited by AI.

What Does The Ahrefs Study Reveal?

The study set out to identify which search factors correspond with higher brand visibility in AI Overviews. Ahrefs analysed 75,000 brands and measured the correlation of various factors to AI visibility.

The top three driving signals are all off-site factors:

• Brand web mentions: The single strongest predictor by a wide margin, showing a direct, tight relationship with whether AI includes your brand in answers.

• Brand anchors: The second strongest predictor, demonstrating a strong link between branded anchor text and AI visibility.

• Brand search volume: A moderate predictor, showing that people actively searching for your brand name also supports AI visibility.

By comparison, generic backlinks — links that do not use your brand name as anchor text — was found to be a weak signal for showing up on AI. Paid search signals performed similarly low.

In plain terms: buying ad visibility or collecting generic backlinks is nowhere near as effective as earning genuine brand mentions.

Furthermore, brands in the top 25% for web mentions earn up to 10x more appearances in AI Overviews than the next group down.

Meanwhile, 26% of brands have zero AI Overview mentions, which means they’re practically invisible in AI-generated answers, regardless of their generic backlink count or content volume.

Do Link-Building And Content Creation Matter Less?

The opposite is true, and this is the point most commentary on this data misses.

Look at the second strongest signal in the Ahrefs study: brand anchors. The Ahrefs data does not diminish link building. It identifies which type of link building outcome matters most for AI search visibility, and that outcome is precisely what Red Queen Marketing’s link building service is built to generate.

Content creation is equally central to this picture. Brand mentions do not appear from nothing. They are earned when a brand produces something worth referencing, such as original research, a distinctive framework, a perspective that publications and platforms want to cite. 

The content is the upstream investment that makes the mention possible. Without it, there is nothing to mention, anchor, or link to.

What the Ahrefs data does challenge is a specific version of link building: the version that chases domain authority and traffic volume without paying attention to whether the placement generates a branded, contextual mention alongside it. That version of the brief leaves signal value on the table.

What Is The Difference Between A Generic Backlink And A Brand Anchor?

A generic backlink is a link from one page to another that often uses keyword-rich anchor text or a bare URL. Its value in traditional SEO comes from the authority it passes from the authoritative website to the brand website.

A brand anchor is different. It is a link that specifically uses your brand name as the anchor text, placed in a publication that already covers your category, in an article that positions your brand as a credible participant in the topic being discussed.

It produces two signals simultaneously: the link authority that traditional SEO captures, and the brand mention context that the Ahrefs data shows has a strong correlation with AI Overview visibility.

This is what I mean by co-citation: appearing in the same citation environments as the trusted voices in your category, in a way that AI can read as corroboration.

When a publication that already references your competitors also references you — by name, in context, with a link — it contributes to the kind of cross-source entity signal that the Reputation Ecosystem is built on and that the Ahrefs data now quantifies.

How To Earn Co-Citation To Improve Your AI Visibility

Start by revisiting your link building and content development strategies. Traditional link building asks: Which high-DR sites can we earn a placement on? A co-citation brief asks: Which publications do AI already cite when answering questions in our category? Can we earn a branded anchor mention in those environments?

In practice, this means improving two things to build on your current strategy:

1. Link evaluation criteria: These need to include AI citation frequency alongside Domain Rating and traffic. A placement in a niche publication that AI regularly pulls from for your category questions can outperform a higher-DR generalist placement that AI never surfaces.

   
   

2. Content briefs: The brief needs to be oriented toward producing assets that earn branded mentions — original data, named frameworks, category-defining arguments — rather than content optimised purely for keyword rankings.

The brands that will build compounding AI search visibility are not the ones abandoning link building or content marketing. They are the ones running both disciplines with a brief that accounts for what the Ahrefs data now confirms: a brand anchor mention in the right publication is worth more than a generic backlink in a high-DA site that AI does not cite.

If you want to better understand how your current strategy is performing, and know whether it is capturing the full signal value the Ahrefs data points to, book a free consultation.