For twenty years, SEO has been a game of links. You earned them, you built them, you optimised for them, and Google rewarded you. That world is not ending. It is expanding. Links still matter, and they still work. But something else now sits alongside them: whether your brand gets mentioned at all, with or without a hyperlink attached.
If you are running a business between £1M and £10M in revenue, this shift is worth paying attention to. It changes what "being visible online" actually means, and it changes where your marketing budget earns its keep.
The Mechanics Have Broadened
Traditional SEO treated the web as a citation graph. A link from site A to site B was a vote. More votes from better sites, higher rankings. That still holds. A good backlink from a respected publication is still one of the most valuable assets a website can earn.
What has changed is that links are no longer the only signal in town.
Large language models do not just count links. When ChatGPT, Gemini, or Perplexity answer a question, they are drawing on patterns in the text they were trained on and, increasingly, on live retrieval from the web. What they are looking for is context: who gets talked about, in what setting, by whom, and in relation to what.
A brand that is discussed on a respected industry site, quoted in a trade publication, or referenced in a podcast transcript is being taught to the model. If that mention also includes a link, even better. The link adds a second layer of signal on top of the first. But the mention itself now carries weight it did not carry a few years ago.
Why Mentions and Links Now Work Together
Google has been moving in this direction for a while. Its own patents describe "implied links" and entity recognition. The idea is straightforward: if enough credible sources talk about a company, the search engine can infer authority. Add a hyperlink to that mention and you get both signals at once.
LLMs extend the same logic. They associate your brand with a category, a location, or a specialism based on how often you appear in the right contexts, alongside the right topics. Linked citations often carry more weight in retrieval, because the model can follow the source. Unlinked mentions still contribute to the pattern.
The practical point is that mentions and backlinks are not rival tactics. They are the same activity seen from different angles. A brand mentioned in the Financial Times with a link is doing two jobs. A brand mentioned on the same page without a link is still doing one of them.
What This Means in Practice
Think of it like reputation in a small town. If the right people mention your name in the right rooms, you become known. If they also point at your front door, better still.
For a business owner, the practical implication is that your marketing needs to earn conversations, not just clicks. That means:
- Getting quoted. Trade press, industry publications, and journalist requests through services like Response Source or Qwoted are among the highest-leverage activities available. Many of these placements come with a link. All of them come with a mention.
- Being present where your category is discussed. Podcasts, panels, industry reports, and expert roundups. These are the places LLMs are learning from and where high-authority backlinks often follow.
- Publishing work worth citing. Original data, sharp opinion, useful frameworks. If your content only rearranges what everyone else has said, no one will mention you, and no one will link to you either.
This is also why guest posting has quietly returned, delivering both the backlink and the brand mention in one placement.
Brand Perception Follows the Same Logic
Byron Sharp's work on mental availability argues that brands grow by being thought of, in the right buying situations, by more people. LLMs are effectively formalising that principle in code. If your brand is not associated with your category in the model's mind, you will not appear when someone asks it for a recommendation.
Where to Put Your Effort
Stop treating PR, content, and SEO as separate departments with separate KPIs. They are the same activity now. Every credible mention, linked or not, is a deposit into a compound account. It helps a human remember you, it helps Google trust you, and it helps an LLM recommend you.
The businesses that will win the next few years are the ones being talked about, and linked to, by people worth listening to, in places worth being seen.
Get mentioned. Get linked. The rest follows.
