If you are buying links to be quoted by an AI, buy something else
Ahrefs looked at about 75,000 brands. Web mentions correlate with being cited in an AI answer at 0.664. Backlinks correlate at 0.218 — roughly three times weaker, because a language model does not walk a link graph the way a crawler does. It reads text, and what it can quote is a sentence with your name in it.
The rest of what the studies say
- Brand searches, ~0.334. The strongest single predictor after mentions. A brand people look up by name is a brand an answer engine has reason to name back.
- YouTube mentions, 0.737. The highest correlation in that dataset, higher than anything a link marketplace sells.
- Reddit, ~3.9×.In SE Ranking’s study of 129,000 domains, those with heavy Reddit brand mentions averaged about seven ChatGPT citations against 1.8 for those with little.
- No domain owns the answer. Even the most-cited domain on any platform rarely passes 5% of citations. There is no list of fifty sites to buy your way onto.
Why we are the ones telling you
Because a marketplace whose whole claim is that it measures what it sells cannot choose which measurements to mention. We publish the nights our own reader could not reach a page, and we publish this.
And because there is somewhere honest to point. A link is still the right instrument for ranking in ordinary search, which is still most of the traffic most sites get — and where the goal is being quoted, publishers here also sell a plain mention: your brand named in the text, with or without a link, read off the live page every night exactly as a link is and refunded on the same terms if it disappears.
What we do not claim
Correlation over a large sample is not a mechanism. Nobody outside those companies knows how a given model picks its sources, the models change without notice, and a study of 75,000 brands cannot tell you what will happen to yours. What it can tell you is which lever has been moving with the outcome — and that buying a link and expecting a citation is a bet on the weaker of the two.
We also do not sell you a dashboard for it. Tools that track your brand across the answer engines cost $29 to $499 a month and do that job properly; we measure the pages, which is a different job, and we would rather say so than add a tab.
Figures as published by Ahrefs (about 75,000 brands, December 2025) and SE Ranking (about 129,000 domains). We did not run these studies and do not reproduce their data; the numbers are theirs, cited so you can check them.