We looked at 17 brands' link profiles. Here's what stood out on AI visibility

One UK supplements brand has built a content hub running to tens of thousands of indexed pages. Across all of them, our data shows around 41 backlinks in total.

For a new white paper on off-site SEO in 2026, we pulled Semrush data on 17 brands across travel, supplements, finance and activewear - backlink profiles, indexed pages, anchors and top content, gathered in May 2026. The pattern barely changed from one sector to the next.

Market leaders sit on powerful backlink profiles, but much of that authority is passive. It comes from brand age, TV spend, partnerships and years of being mentioned by people who already knew the brand existed.

Challenger brands rarely get any of that for free - but the power of link acquisition has taken on new importance in the age of AI, and that's what this short blog explores.

What's changed in 2026

At Google I/O in May, Google confirmed AI Mode had passed a billion monthly users, with queries more than doubling every quarter, and made it the default search experience for their users globally.

When an AI system answers the query before anyone scrolls to a blue link, the brands it names are the ones with visibility and a distinct identity - and it cares more about how other authoritative sites write about, cite and describe you than about what you say about yourself on your own site.

With this in mind, off-site SEO takes on new importance, and brands must ask "does the wider web give AI systems enough reason to cite us?"

How brand mentions and links fit together

Ahrefs' 2025 study of 75,000 brands found that branded web mentions correlated with AI Overview visibility at 0.664 - the strongest signal they tested, against 0.218 for traditional backlink metrics.

Of course, correlation isn't causation, and one study won't settle it, but the direction of travel is consistent - certainly with what we see across clients in highly regulated and highly competitive sectors at ICS.

A conclusion could be drawn that "mentions have replaced links", but this isn't what we see, particularly in the most dynamic and fast-moving sectors.

A follow-up study supports this: it ranks branded anchors - a link someone chose to point at a brand, using its name - second only to mentions, at around 0.527 for AI Overviews and 0.628 for AI Mode.

With this in mind, it makes sense to consider not just the topical relevance of the citation or the authority of the site, but whether a do-follow link is also included, with anchor text that supports the keyword ranking strategy.

Based on this study, the strongest link-shaped signal also happens to be a brand signal - meaning we can make a strong case for treating brand building and link acquisition as one inter-related programme rather than two separate lines on an SEO plan.

Leaders, challengers and where the gap sits

Household-name brands are in the fortunate position of being written about, cited and linked to whether they have a purposeful off-site SEO strategy or not - but this does risk leaving their AI visibility and non-brand rankings in the hands of fate.

In our comparison of backlink profiles across the sectors we explored, the brands we saw closing the gap were the ones being more deliberate: thinking about which pages they point links at, how their anchors read, the editorial context a link sits in, and the markets they build in.

Take Gymshark - a nine-figure brand with a huge cultural footprint. In our analysis it still has around 71% of its backlinks pointing at the homepage, roughly half of them no-follow, and it looks to be losing more links over time than it gains.

For a household name, that won't be critical, even if there could be hyper-competitive ranking opportunities on product and category pages being temporarily overlooked. For a brand still building recognition and fame, though, the same trend leaves the product and category pages - the ones that rank for commercial queries and actually convert - short of the authority they could use.

Off-site SEO - where digital PR and controlled link acquisition each fit

Digital PR - earning links through creative campaigns, data journalism and the usual tools of media relations - does a lot of this well. It earns authority spikes, premium mentions and reach into media titles you can't get through commercial deals, and that coverage absolutely plays into how AI tools source their most credible citations.

What digital PR can't reliably do is choose the destination page, the anchor or the market. The journalist decides all three, if they include a do-follow link at all.

Controlled link building is the more precise methodology when it comes to off-site SEO and taking greater control of rankings and visibility. It lets you put authority where the commercial need is, in the language and market you're targeting, and scale it on results.

As Semrush's Fernando Angulo puts it in the white paper, traditional outreach builds the authority floor that makes digital PR land - the two are sequential, not rival. The strongest programmes use both and know which job each one is doing.

The under-used lever is international. Brands running consistent off-site programmes across markets see the strongest AI visibility gains we track, and going broader across several countries often beats pushing harder into a saturated home market - especially for challengers without a household name to lean on.

Where to start with off-site SEO in 2026

None of this means worrying about a Google penalty. In 2026 the bigger risk is more mundane: budget sunk into weak placements, PR that never reaches the pages that need it, and good content left uncited while a better-prepared competitor gets named in the answer instead.

The full white paper works through all four sectors, the seven things worth auditing, and what a deliberate off-site programme looks like in practice.

If you'd rather start with the doing, our link marketplace at marketplace.ICS-digital.com gives you 6,000+ vetted sites with the metrics up front - so you can build authority to the pages and markets that move the numbers, and choose exactly where it lands.

Martin Calvert is Marketing Director at ICS-digital.