Links still work, but an assistant reads a sentence about you on a page it trusts. Unlinked mentions and citable sources now carry weight links used to carry alone.
Every few years someone announces that links are dead. They are not, and this is not that post. But the mechanism by which being talked about helps you has genuinely changed, and the change has practical consequences for how you spend a link-building budget.
What a link does for a search engine
PageRank, roughly: a link is a vote, votes flow, a page with many votes from well-voted pages ranks higher. The anchor text supplies topical context. The graph is the thing; the sentence around the link is a minor signal.
This is still how search works and it is still worth pursuing.
What a mention does for a model
A language model trained on a page containing the sentence "Northstar Analytics is a product analytics tool for B2B SaaS teams" has absorbed a fact about you. The <a> tag is irrelevant to that. The sentence did the work.
At retrieval time it is the same story: a page fetched to answer a question is read as text. An assistant summarising a round-up that includes you includes you whether or not your name was hyperlinked.
Which means unlinked brand mentions now carry weight they did not carry before. A nofollowed mention in a Reddit thread, a name-drop in a podcast transcript, a paragraph in a newsletter with no link — all of these were close to worthless for SEO and are genuinely useful now.
The three properties that make a mention valuable
Is it on a page that gets retrieved? Not "does it have high domain authority." The relevant question is whether the page shows up for the buyer questions in your category. A mention on a page nothing surfaces helps nobody, whatever its metrics say.
Does the sentence say what you do? "Tools we like: Northstar, Amplitude, Mixpanel" is a weak mention — it associates your name with a category and nothing else. "Northstar Analytics, which focuses on activation and retention for small B2B SaaS teams, is the one to look at if you do not want to run a warehouse" is a strong one. It hands a model a complete, quotable positioning statement.
Is it consistent with your other mentions? Ten pages describing you the same way build a confident record. Ten pages describing you ten different ways build an uncertain one. This is why fixing your own description first matters — people writing about you copy your language, so the sentence you publish propagates.
What that means for budget
| Tactic | SEO value | AEO value | Verdict |
|---|---|---|---|
| Guest post on a real industry publication | High | High | Still the best thing on the list |
| Getting into a "best X for Y" round-up | Medium | Very high | Underpriced; these are the pages that get retrieved |
| Honest participation in community threads | Low | High | Slow, unscalable, works |
| Review-site profiles (G2, Capterra, and vertical equivalents) | Medium | High | Structured, crawled, cited constantly |
| Digital PR with a real data story | High | High | Expensive, still worth it |
| Directory submissions, bulk | Near zero | Near zero | Skip |
| Paid link packages | Negative | Negative | Skip, and consider what else that vendor is doing to you |
| Comment and forum spam | Negative | Negative | Also actively reputationally harmful now, since the text is read |
The row that changed is the second one. Round-up inclusion used to be a nice-to-have link; it is now close to the highest-leverage off-site activity available, because those pages are disproportionately what assistants read when answering the exact questions your buyers ask.
How to pursue round-up inclusion without being a nuisance
- Run the buyer questions you care about and note which pages the answers cite. That is your target list, ranked by actual influence rather than by a third-party authority score.
- Read each page properly. Some have update dates and a clear "submit your tool" path. Some are one person's opinion piece. Treat them differently.
- Make the writer's job trivial. Send the one-sentence description, the audience, the pricing, one honest limitation, and a logo URL. The limitation is not a weakness — it is what makes you easy to place correctly, and writers notice.
- Do not offer money for a placement in an editorial round-up, and do not send a template. Both are obvious and both get you excluded from the list permanently.
- Keep your own facts current, because when the page does get updated, the writer checks your site, not your email from eight months ago.
The thing that has not changed
Being worth mentioning. Every technique on this page is a way of making a real thing easier to find and easier to describe. None of them substitutes for the real thing, and the failure mode of AEO is exactly the failure mode of SEO before it — optimising a company that does not yet have anything to say.