Remember when link building dominated every SEO conversation? It never truly went away, but its function has changed as Google rolled out stricter guidelines and shifted focus toward quality, relevance, and user intent. Now, with AI search transforming organic results, link building has evolved into a closely related – and increasingly critical – strategy: brand mentions. You can think of brand mentions as “citations,” but in the AI search world, citations refer to how brands are surfaced and referenced by LLMs. Brand mentions are the raw material that produces those citations. To keep things clear, this article uses brand mentions to describe the tactic itself. In addition to being a major – arguably the primary – driver of AI search citations, brand mentions are also becoming more influential in traditional SEO ranking systems. If you want to build lasting organic visibility for your own brand or your clients, brand mentions need to be a key focus in 2026. Here’s what that means in practice. How and why to make brand mentions a priority Brand mentions have shifted from a “nice bonus” to foundational infrastructure in an AI-first search ecosystem. Because LLMs evaluate more than just links, this is not a revival of the old backlink-heavy SEO playbooks. Instead, they assess mentions, surrounding context, and consistent co-occurrence between your brand and the topics where you seek visibility. Brand mentions help form your ranking moat. They accumulate over time, and their impact grows when competitors are not actively building the same signals. In terms of where they fit in your strategy, brand mentions should sit: Right…