TL;DR:
- The Shift: Traditional SEO relied on hyperlinks as “votes” of confidence. AI relies on textual mentions (citations).
- The Reality: An AI model doesn’t need a clickable link to know you are an authority; it just needs to see your name associated with the topic.
- The Strategy: Stop “begging for links” and start optimizing for Brand Co-occurrence (getting your name mentioned alongside your keywords).
- The Pivot: Move your budget from “Link Building” to “Digital PR.”
- The Metric: Stop tracking Domain Authority (DA). Start tracking “Share of Model.”
If you’ve been in digital marketing for more than five minutes, you know the drill. You create a piece of content, and then you spend three weeks emailing strangers, begging them to link to it.
“Please give me a do-follow link.” “I’ll link to you if you link to me.”
It was a digital barter economy, trading hyperlinks like Pokémon cards because Google told us that Links = Authority.
But here is the thing: Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT and Gemini don’t browse the web the way Google did in 2010.
They don’t just count the blue underlined text. They read the entire page. They understand context. And in the world of Generative Engine Optimization (GEO), a Citation is vastly more powerful than a Backlink.
The Death of the “Link Juice” Obsession
In the old days, if the New York Times mentioned your business but didn’t hyperlink to your website, SEO pros would cry. “It’s a useless mention!” they’d scream.
In 2025, that unlinked mention is gold.
Why? Because the AI model ingested that article. It learned a semantic connection: [Your Brand] exists in the context of [Your Topic] according to [Trusted Source].
The AI doesn’t need to “click” to pass authority. It just needs to see the association. This is called Co-occurrence.
How Co-occurrence Works (The Non-Geek Version)
Imagine an AI is trying to learn about “Enterprise Marketing Automation.”
If it reads 1,000 articles and sees “HubSpot” mentioned 500 times in those articles, it learns a fact: HubSpot is a leader in Marketing Automation.
It doesn’t matter if those mentions were clickable links or just plain text. The frequency and the context created the authority.
If you are a consultant, you want your name to statistically appear next to your expertise.
- NOT: “Shannon Thorndyke” (floating in a void).
- BUT: “Shannon Thorndyke, an expert in MarTech Strategy…”
So, What Do We Do Now?
We have to stop building links and start building Reputation.
1. Shift to Digital PR. Stop guest posting on low-quality “link farms.” Start getting interviewed on podcasts, quoted in industry newsletters, and featured in niche publications. The goal is to get people talking about you, not just linking to you.
2. Own Your Entity. Make sure the internet knows exactly what you are. If you are a “Fractional CMO,” use that phrase consistently everywhere—your LinkedIn, your bio, your podcast intros. You are training the robot to associate “Your Name” with “Fractional CMO.”
3. The “Billboard Effect.” Think of an AI citation like a billboard on a highway. You can’t click a billboard. But if you see it enough times, you trust the brand. When an AI summarizes a topic and says, “According to [Your Company]…”, that is a branding win that is worth ten times more than a generic click from a random search result.
The Bottom Line
The days of gaming the system with spammy links are over. The machines are too smart for that now.
They are looking for real-world signals of authority. They want to know who the actual experts are, not just who hired the best SEO agency.
So, go out and do work worth talking about. If the humans talk about it, the robots will listen.