Backlinks and GEO: Do Links Still Matter in AI Search?
Ahrefs looked at 75,000 brands and found something uncomfortable for link builders: plain web mentions of a brand tracked AI citation rates about three times more closely than backlinks did. If your entire off-page strategy is still a link count, you are optimising for one half of a search landscape that now has two. This post covers what actually connects backlinks and GEO — generative engine optimization — and the order you should work in. What is GEO (Generative Engine Optimization)? Generative Engine Optimization is the practice of structuring your content, brand entity and technical setup so AI systems like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google AI Overviews cite you inside their answers. Traditional SEO competes for a position in a list of links . GEO competes for a mention inside the answer that replaces the list. The term comes from a 2023 Princeton-led research paper that built GEO-bench, a benchmark of roughly 10,000 queries, and tested nine content tactics against a generat...