Your brand mentions are your links

Casie says: “Brand mentions are the new links.

Considering what we’re seeing with AI overviews, Reddit, and Quora, forums are back. Fortunately or unfortunately, it’s where you’re going to have to spend your time.

AI overviews are pulling from these various places. I can’t tell you how many searches we’re seeing Reddit pulled up for. Lily Ray recently assessed people who lost traffic and are now ranking number 2. Guess who they’re behind? Reddit.

I used to talk about this a lot. One of my first presentations was about how you generate brand mentions. Whether it’s a link or not, having that brand authority is so important to what you’re doing.

I’m not saying that you have to go and spam on forums because one of the things that’s really interesting about Reddit is you can’t do that. It’s not like the olden days. They have moderators, and they’re actually pretty good. You have to build up a profile and be involved in the community.

The Quoras of the world are still there too, and sites like Capterra and G2 own the results if you’re any sort of technology or software.

As brands, websites, and SEOs, we have to decide how important this is to us. Do you want to pay to play? Do you want to optimize your listing? You’re almost having to optimize these third-party sites the same way that you do your own. For a while, we had forgotten about that.

It’s not just about links. Now, your brand mentions are your links because they’re on Reddit, they’re on Quora, and they’re in the AI overviews. That’s a huge part of search right now.”

Are AI overviews the main reason why you’re advocating more brand mentions now?

“It’s twofold.

The AI overviews are taking content from these forums, which is part of why it’s important. You can also think about things like ChatGPT. We have people who come to our site now and say that they learned about us through ChatGPT.

Like the AI overviews, they’re pulling from these various places. If I’m looking for the best website visitor ID software, AI tools are looking at Capterra, forums, and various places to see what people think the best website visitor ID tool is. Therefore, you need people in these places saying that they’re your customer and they use your brand.

It’s not just about the AI overviews themselves; it’s about getting people to talk about you, so you are recommended in these places.”

Are AI overviews likely to change their sources over the coming year or two?

“I hope it does. I hope the AI overviews are refined, honestly, and that Reddit becomes less of a presence. We’ve all seen the examples of just how poor some of these answers are.

We have a lot of bees, and I was looking for how to remove bees from my backyard, but all I was getting were Reddit posts. I don’t care what the 30 people on Reddit have to say; I needed a bee expert. It wasn’t giving me good answers. I was seeing, ‘In my opinion…’, but I don’t want opinions. I need to hear from an expert.

We can see Google experimenting with this and adjusting, so I think these sources are going to evolve, and what they are serving is going to evolve.

However, that doesn’t mean we can’t make sure that we’re in these authoritative places. It’s not just about Reddit or any one forum. Who are the people talking about your industry? Where are the lists? Are there lists where people are describing the best software or product, and how do you make sure you’re there?

It goes back to building your brand.”

How do you optimize brand mentions for these opportunities? Do you create your own forum account or encourage people to post on your behalf?

“It’s a combination. First, you should always focus on your reviews. Reviews are more important than we think, and they’re in these places. We use an NPS tool within our platform to ask people to submit their ratings. You can fill out a review which then goes to these various sites.

We also ask our customers, if they’ve had a good experience with our customer support, would they mind leaving a review on G2?

There are also different communities. We work with a lot of folks in the e-commerce space, and we just started a relationship with an e-commerce community that has its own forum. We can’t do anything there, but I was talking with the person who runs it and he said, ‘A lot of people are talking about you guys, and a really strong SaaS thought leader is recommending you in the forum.’ Even if you’re going outside of SEO, that’s a huge deal from a brand perspective.

If we go back to just SEO, you want to think about how you get into those spaces. However, you don’t want to just fill out all of the messages you can on all of the links that talk about a keyword.

You want to think about what your target keywords are. You can put that into Semrush, put in ‘reddit.com’, search for particular keywords, and see which threads are ranking. Then, you’re a bit more focused. You don’t want to go after everything. Figure out what’s ranking, just like you would at any other time, and focus there.

If you have different communities in your niche, you want people talking about you. It’s always better when it’s not you telling everyone you’re awesome; it’s somebody else saying that for you.

The evolution of AI overviews might make it necessary to analyse your existing review strategy and where you’re trying to get customers to leave reviews. You might be trying to get people to leave reviews on Facebook, TrustPilot, or your Google Business Profile, but these sources might not be picked up by AI. You may have to completely review that.

Again, if you look for the best website visitor identification software, you’ll see forums and places like Capterra, but there are also other sites. Just like we always had with featured snippets, the AI overview will pull from a blog that wrote, ‘These are the 25 best tools’, and you see that in the table. You need to figure out where these places are. It’s not just one place in particular.”

Are links still much more important than brand mentions?

“They go hand in hand, and it depends on your link strategy.

For a very long time, I have not been on the link train; I’ve been on the brand train. If you can get people excited and talking about you, and you can get them linking to you in a natural way, that’s really powerful.

Don’t get me wrong, I do still want links from good sources. They work together. However, this is making brand mentions even more important than they have been.”

How do you measure the value of those brand mentions?

“We use a couple of tools. We use Semrush and we use Mentionlytics to see who’s talking about us, what’s going up, and what’s going down.

It’s always going to ebb and flow. If you have events or you put out a report, you’re going to see that. Generally, you want your mentions to be going up as you’re doing these things, to get people in your market talking about you.

It also comes down to your efforts. Going back to the link side of things, we do a lot of co-marketing with our partners, and that translates to links. If you’re doing an event or a content share, like launching an eBook together, you’re linking to your partners or they’re linking back to you.”

Is it important for SEO to work more closely together with channels on this?

“Absolutely. I’ve always loved the idea of digital PR. I actually went to school for PR, and I thought that’s what I was going to do, but I fell into SEO, which I ended up loving. Part of the reason I loved it so much is because there is so much overlap.

If you’re putting content out there, you want it to rank for search, but you also want it to interest your customers. You want it to be valuable to them, and you want them to share it. Maybe you want that content to be picked up by the New York Times or TechCrunch. There’s that digital PR element to it.

For me, that’s always been the biggest play with links. When I first started in SEO, you would submit to somewhere that would just give you a thousand links. Now, you really have to work for those. You have to show something of value.

That digital PR side is really important, as are partnerships and events. I just did an analysis of one of our competitors and, while they don’t do anything amazing from an SEO perspective, they do have a huge event and partnership channel. All of these people are talking about them and they’re getting links from these big events, which has really helped them.

They don’t have any crazy content or anything that they’re doing with optimization on their website, but these other channels are boosting it up.”

How can you future-proof your activities to try and ensure that what you’re doing will still be valuable next year?

“It’s the same with everything we do when it comes to SEO. At the end of the day, these are best practices.

You might be spending less time doing link outreach and more time participating in these places but, even if these places are not going to be as prominent in search in the future, are your customers going to be there? Are there going to be people there who are asking about your product or a product in your market that caused other people to recommend you, or that you’ve engaged with?

I do think it’s valuable. It goes back to not being a spammer. You don’t want to be the person who’s spamming these places. Make sure you’re doing it in a legitimate way.”

If an SEO is struggling for time, what should they stop doing right now so they can spend more time doing what you suggest in 2025?

“If you are spending a lot of time trying to build links and doing outreach, think about where that outreach is. Can you spend time in some of these places, building relationships with influencers and making sure that your brand and your name are there?

Make sure you’re not using a ‘throw it against the wall’ strategy. Take the time to find where the most important keywords and the most important threads are, and spend your time there. I’m not saying you should stop doing anything necessarily, but be strategic about how you’re going about it.”

Casie Gillette is Senior Director of Demand Generation at Customers.ai, and you can find her over at Customers.ai.