Red Isle WebSay a bakery in Charlottetown lands on a local blog's list of the best cinnamon buns on the Island, and the writer never adds a link back to the bakery's website, just the name and the town.
For years that unlinked mention did the bakery almost no good for SEO, which just means how likely a site is to show up when someone searches Google, because search engines were built around counting links between websites.
Backlinks, which are links to your site from other websites, still help a little, but being mentioned across the web, with or without a link, tracks about three times more closely with showing up in Google's AI Overviews, the AI-written answer at the top of many searches. That comes from an Ahrefs study of 75,000 brands, where web mentions scored 0.664 and backlinks scored 0.218.
What is the difference between a backlink and a mention?
A backlink is a clickable link from another website to yours, the kind SEO has long chased, and a mention is your business name appearing in text somewhere else online, in an article, a review, a directory listing or a community Facebook post, whether or not it links anywhere. Ahrefs also looked at links that use the brand name as the clickable words, and those came in between the two at 0.527, so links are not useless.
How much more do mentions matter than backlinks?
Ahrefs checked which things about a brand line up with how often it appears in AI Overviews, using a score where 1 is a perfect match and 0 is no connection at all. Mentions came out at 0.664 and the number of backlinks at 0.218, roughly a third as strong. Brands in the top quarter for web mentions averaged 169 appearances in AI Overviews, brands in the next quarter down averaged 14, and the bottom half averaged three or fewer.
Ahrefs is careful to say correlation is not causation, so a business with a lot of mentions may simply be a bigger, better-known one that AI would cite anyway. The study also covered AI Overviews only, not ChatGPT, and it was published in May 2025. It looked at larger sites too, with a domain rating above 40 on Ahrefs' own scale of 0 to 100 and a top keyword searched at least 800 times per month, so a bakery in Summerside is not what it measured.
Where would mentions come from for a business like mine?
For a small Island business they come from the local paper's roundup of the best patios in Summerside, a tourism guide that lists you as a stop on a day trip, a wedding blog that names your venue, a customer's Facebook post that tags you, or another local business pointing people your way. The study counted mentions with or without a link, so none of those needs one.
But nobody is writing about my business
Usually it is because nobody has asked, which says little about whether the business deserves a write-up. A customer who names you in a Facebook post or a review counts as a mention under Ahrefs' definition, which is the brand name appearing anywhere across the web, and so does a listing in a town directory. Spelling your business name and details the same way everywhere makes each of those easier to tie back to you, which is what the post on matching business info covers.
The good news
Nothing here calls for a marketing budget or a publicist, because the work is making your name show up the same way everywhere it already appears and asking a happy customer to mention you in a review or a post. Links still count a little and mentions seem to count more, and both come from being a business people talk about. That is a smaller job than folks expect.
Every site I build here at Red Isle Web carries your business name, description and details the same way throughout, for Island businesses, at a one-time price with no monthly fee. Have a look at my work. Or send me a note and I will search for where your business name currently shows up online and list the places that spell it differently.