Generative engine optimization · Original data
How to improve your brand visibility in AI search
Ahrefs pulled data on 75,000 brands this year and crunched what actually predicts showing up in AI answers. The backlink, the thing the entire SEO industry has spent twenty years chasing, barely nudged the numbers. Unlinked brand mentions did.
The gap isn't subtle. Backlinks correlated with AI citation at 0.218. Plain web mentions of your brand name, no link attached, correlated at 0.664, and YouTube mentions specifically hit 0.737, the strongest single signal in the entire study. Ahrefs is right to note that correlation isn't causation here. Businesses that get talked about everywhere tend to actually be decent businesses, so some of this is AI models picking up on quality indirectly. But the gap's size is tough to dismiss. If you've spent this year grinding out links and watched your ChatGPT visibility flatline, here's your explanation.
For a solo spa or wellness studio, this isn't some theoretical SEO argument. It changes what Tuesday afternoon looks like.
What "mention" actually means here
Nobody's demanding Forbes coverage. A mention, in this study, is anywhere your business name appears in text an AI can read, link or no link. A local blogger drops you into a "best spots in town" list. A Reddit thread where someone names you and skips the hyperlink. Your business sitting in a directory that never sends you traffic. All of that counts as a mention. None registers as a traditional backlink, and all of it apparently matters more.
We saw this ourselves back in June, running a reverse-citation audit on 100-plus wellness queries against Perplexity across San Diego. We weren't tracking backlinks at all. We were watching which third-party sites Perplexity actually pulled answers from. Fourteen domains kept surfacing: booking platforms, niche directories, local press, review hubs. Almost none of those sites linked to the studios they mentioned. They just named them, in text, on pages AI models had crawled. That's the same pattern Ahrefs found across 75,000 brands, just visible up close in one metro.
The businesses not getting named tell the other half. In a separate check across 50 wellness businesses, med spas came back completely invisible, zero out of ten cited by ChatGPT or Perplexity. Every one of those ten had a website. Most had respectable backlink profiles by conventional SEO standards. What none had was presence anywhere else: no real directory listings, no press, nobody online saying their name. The link profile didn't rescue them, because the link profile was never what the AI model was reading.
Why this happens, as best anyone understands it
AI models don't crawl your homepage and judge your trustworthiness the way search algorithms weigh your backlink graph. They're trained on and retrieve from a wide slice of the web, and what sticks is whatever appears repeatedly across enough independent sources to read as established fact rather than isolated claim. A business named on a directory, then a local roundup, then a review site starts looking like something the model already "knows," the same way it knows a city's population or a restaurant's specialty. A backlink is confidence between two websites. A mention is closer to a fact repeated until it's treated as true.
What to actually do with this
Stop treating every outreach email as link-or-bust. If a local blog, niche directory, or wellness roundup wants to include you without linking, take it anyway. It's doing more for your AI visibility than a nofollow link from some random guest post ever would.
Go hunt down places your business could reasonably appear but doesn't, and skip the backlink-farm directories nobody visits. Target the ones that surface when people search for what you do: booking platforms in your category, local press covering small businesses, niche review sites specific to your service. Getting listed there, even linkless, is exactly the kind of mention the data says counts. A ten-minute search for "[your service] directory [your city]" typically reveals three or four you're missing.
And if you're deciding where to spend an afternoon this month, a guest spot on a local podcast that names your business will likely shape how ChatGPT talks about you more than another week chasing backlinks from SEO outreach templates. That's not how anyone learned this game ten years ago. It's how it's playing out now.
How to check where you already stand
Before hunting new mentions, find out which ones you already have. Search your business name in quotes, alone, and see what surfaces beyond your own site and Google Business Profile. Old event listings, a mention in a neighborhood Facebook group someone screenshotted into a blog, a line in a visiting writer's "spots we loved" roundup from two years back, all of it counts, and most owners have more scattered around than they realize. It also tends to overlap with review count, since reviews are just public name-drops in a different format, and directories pulling reviews often surface the mention alongside.
None of this means backlinks are dead. They still drive regular search rankings, and regular search still sends people your way. It means the AI visibility game and the classic SEO game have quietly split apart, and most small business owners are still only playing one of them.