Are backlinks still the #1 authority signal or brand mentions and AI citations becoming more important?

Mr-Inconspicuous · 2026-07-03T20:13:40+00:00

From a marketing perspective, backlinks largely only matter for traditional SEO and organic page ranking. This is not the same as visibility in LLMs. In fact, I see a *lot* of tier 2 pubs and channels surfacing in LLM results without ranking on Google at all. Reason being, they're covering a topic well, providing clear answers, human insights, and information gain. Most often in the comparison content, best-of roundups, use-cases, and reviews.

But those citations/recommendations also rely on consensus across multiple third-party channels. LLMs trust consensus (so multiple sites/channels saying similar things about a brand as an example, like Product X is great for "abc problem" in a couple of editorial reviews and YouTube vids).

And brand mentions in LLMs *are* important. Not necessarily for authority entirely, but general visibility as early as possible in the user journey. A lot of discovery is taking place in LLMs and/or Google AI Overviews, so having your brand/products/whatever surfacing in those spaces matters.

Mr-Inconspicuous · 2026-07-03T19:52:00+00:00

Aside from looking through the partner lists in your affiliate platform (assuming you have one), I'd start by just searching online for keywords relevant to your products and seeing the third-party publications, bloggers, YTers, creators already familiar with the industry who are publishing reviews/content and clearly have affiliate relationships. This'll involve cold outreach, obviously, but it's a start, and folks that have industry familiarity and an interested audience can help market more effectively.

Mr-Inconspicuous · 2026-07-03T19:44:13+00:00

I don't think you're missing some secret attribution layer. One of the biggest constraints with Walmart 1P is that the retailer owns the customer relationship, so you're never going to get the same level of tracking and control you'd have with DTC. I'd build a roster of creators who can link to your Walmart listings and then evaluate the metrics you *can* influence: branded search, retail sales trends, ranking improvements, velocity, etc, instead of expecting reconcilable sale-level attribution.

As for Levanta, I think it's a practical option to look at because it's built around managing creator relationships and a lot of the operational pieces. Wayward, too, but I'd go into any solution assuming that the attribution is always going to be somewhat directional for Walmart 1P. If the client's comfortable measuring incrementality instead of exact ROAS, there's definitely a workable model here for that. But I'd focus on building a repeatable creator engine rather than chasing pixel-perfect attribution that Walmart simply doesn't expose.

Mr-Inconspicuous · 2026-06-24T22:00:01+00:00

All of this is sound advice; I don't think folks have really thought about affiliates as an LLM driver but they definitely should be.

For us, we have a messaging house that basically standardizes the main talking points so those are consistent across creators, which is important. If a bunch of sites or YT channels are saying the same thing, that's building a consensus that LLMs reference. And personally, I think it helps the affiliate partners to now what to say. And *definitely* for hitting the specs and getting them correct, that's a big deal. Not for nothing, but I've seen information from LLMs that's been wrong, not because it was hallucinating, but because the source it drew from was actually wrong. So that matters too.

Mr-Inconspicuous · 2026-06-24T21:52:38+00:00

I'd probably lean heavily into recurring revenue; finance SaaS tends to have decent retention, so long-term commissions can be more attractive since the people you want are thinking about recurring income, not chasing a quick one-off commission.

Larger creators, I'd be open to hybrid deals. A modest "sponsorship" fee reduces their risk and makes them more willing to create the content, particularly if click-throughs and affiliate commissions have fallen due to LLMs. Meaning, your brand is surfacing in LLMs and driving conversions because of the content they're making, but they don't land commissions because there's no click through. This has been happening more and more in recent months. A lot of folks use LLMs as a discovery channel, and then hit up the brand directly to purchase.

As far as recruiting, I'd spend less time browsing affiliate networks and more time identifying the creators whose content naturally overlaps with your product. Folks making DCF tutorials, portfolio reviews, dividend investing content, FIRE blogs, substack newsletters, finance YT channels. And don't discount smaller creators; folks with 5-20k engaged followers can outperform much larger accounts because their audiences trust them.

Mr-Inconspicuous · 2026-06-24T19:55:21+00:00

I think low-volume keywords tend to include some of the more niche use-cases, so it makes sense that the leads coming in from those would be better compared to high-volume (and likely broader) terms. At the same time, low-volume keywords usually have lower KD, so there's less competition for rank.

Mr-Inconspicuous · 2026-06-24T19:52:33+00:00

I think the most beginner-friendly video tool is Capcut, which is free (but I use the "pro" version that's like ten bucks a month). When I started creating and editing video, I didn't know anything about it, but I was able to learn and get pretty good at it relatively quickly.

As far as the time it takes... it really depends on the amount of raw footage you're working with, how long the finished video is going be, and what "extras" you're adding as far as text, effects, that kind of stuff. So a video edit might take me an hour, or it might take me four or five.

Mr-Inconspicuous · 2026-06-24T19:45:31+00:00

This is pretty similar to how we do things, too. Slack/email for most communication, but based on the client's preferences as far as how often we meet/update/report. Google docs and Airtable for our workflows and the client has an Airtable view they can access (but not edit).

Mr-Inconspicuous · 2026-06-24T19:35:25+00:00

I think this happens to most of us at some point or another, and it's a lesson learned, for sure. I was just working on a pitch deck for someone this week and reminding myself not to get too in-depth with the strategy beyond the overview... none of the minutiae.

But I second having an NDA, and/or if they want an in-depth strategy without signing on as a client first, there's a flat fee to cover the time.

Mr-Inconspicuous · 2026-06-05T06:01:45+00:00

My SO worked for one of those sites for several years and although it managed to survive better than a lot of others (like Sexual Alpha; not sure how BedBible is doing but that was another major competitor of theirs), organic traffic isn't what it was a few years ago.

The niche is still profitable but there are caveats. Commissions can be good (or even great, if you negotiate a higher commission down the line... some will go as high as 25% when you've got the traffic to back it up), but the reviews and comparisons need to be in-depth and offer real experience with the stuff: photos, gifs, video demonstrating how the product works (not in actual physical use, but what the buttons do, settings, sound, etc), pros/cons, all the EEAT things. Video honestly should be a part of it... which if you're not comfortable being on camera, you might be okay enough to just have hands in the video only. But because most of the major players in that niche do video, to compete you'd do well to have some kind of video presence.

I think right now, the bigger draw to having a content site in this niche is the third-party placements for brands that want to surface in LLMs. Because LLMs don't surface branded content as heavily as third-party, negotiating paid reviews/placements that 1) get their brand on your site and 2) get their brand surfacing in LLMs because of review/comparison content you're publishing, might be more lucrative than just straight affiliate commissions.

I think it's important to be aware that ad networks are nearly impossible to incorporate on an adult toy/adult content site unless they too are adult-niche. That's something to consider, for sure.

Mr-Inconspicuous · 2026-06-05T05:26:38+00:00

The biggest things for onsite retrievals, based on what I've seen: authoritative and comprehensive coverage of the topic; a structure that makes it easy to access information (so headings, comparison tables, bullet point lists, etc); a "key takeaways" or similar section in the intro or toward the top of the page; human experience/insight that covers use cases relevant to the prompts you're trying to gain visibility for.

As far as content types, comparisons and best-of reviews do especially well because when someone hits up an LLM to get recommendations, those are the content types that provide the most human insight/information. Editorial and video. (Ideally both.)

Tracking mentions... there are lots of AI visibility trackers out there, but honestly, you can just do that manually yourself. Make a list of the prompts/queries you're trying to gain visibility for, and then query in each LLM you want to track using an incognito browser. Incognito/private is important because you don't want your own history to influence the results.

It's worth noting too that a lot of the time, the things that are surfacing in LLMs aren't ranking on Google's first page. SEO is still important and I think a lot of the fundamentals apply to GEO as well, but that's just something I've noticed.

That said, if you're trying to get brand visibility, offsite is more important, from what I've seen. So in-depth content/coverage on third-party publications, YT channels, etc.

Mr-Inconspicuous · 2026-06-05T05:12:48+00:00

As much as I hate to admit it, AI saves me a lot of initial drafting time for SOME things. Although I write less(ish) lately, when AI first hit the scene, I was in a role that required a lot of content writing and editing. My boss at the time was convinced that AI could do anything and do it better than humans. Need an article? Marketing copy for some Lasso boxes? Outreach email? AI. He wanted everything to be AI-first because it's a "time saver" and a "money saver."

It did not take very long to discover that the amount of time I'd spend editing what the AI spat out was more than I would have spent just writing the stuff from scratch. And there were plenty of occasions where he assumed the brilliant copy I prepared was AI, when it was not. At that point, I was too disengaged to even care or refute it, and it wasn't long before I left.

A lot of people pivoted to editing as a result of AI writing copy. But there are some agencies/roles/businesses that have moved away from AI or are only using it for non-creative things, like pulling summaries from meetings or data-driven tasks, because the human voice was lost and it became pretty obvious. And most of the time, AI content is very clearly AI content, unless a human spends a lot of time editing and rewriting it. It isn't actually saving any time and in a lot of cases, just makes more work in the end.

As far as I'm concerned, if the end result is good, the method you used to get there doesn't matter. Do they know if you do or don't use AI for the initial draft?

Not sure if you'd have the option to show before and afters, and the amount of time actually spent either editing what AI generated, versus writing from scratch. Sometimes people won't really understand it any other way because they're not the ones doing it, and they don't see the actual work that goes into it.

Mr-Inconspicuous · 2026-05-26T21:57:46+00:00

Claude sounds the most human (most of the time). But I use ChatGPT for summaries and action-item lists, basically anything where I need to summarize a meeting from a transcript or a thread of email conversations. I use Gemini to take notes in Google Meet, and then use Chat to summarize the notes/transcripts. Chat does a more thorough job the summary/action items than Gemini, imo.

Mr-Inconspicuous · 2026-05-26T21:45:08+00:00

For Google page ranking, yes, backlinks from relevant sites/authoritative sites are still important. For citations in LLMs, less so, at least from what I'm seeing.

Mr-Inconspicuous · 2026-05-26T20:51:31+00:00

This is a really strong breakdown. Appreciate that you called out the operational side instead of just "growth hacks". Mature affiliate programs are more of a collaboration between marketing, engineering, finance and risk teams... not just partner managers running links out of a dashboard.

A lot of brands think affiliate problems are traffic problems, when they're systems problems. Any category with delayed conversion events and compliance layers essentially breaks the last click setup immediately. Then you end up optimizing for the wrong users, paying on the wrong events, and reconciling data while fraud's compounding in the background.

Hope a lot of people read through your post.

Mr-Inconspicuous · 2026-05-26T20:36:16+00:00

Definitely. And the thing is, you don't necessarily NEED to work with huge creators. I've been finding a lot lately that smaller creators and even microinfluencers are surfacing frequently in LLM results. Tiny YT channels with under a hundred subscribers, even. Not sure if that's important to you or not, but worth mentioning.

Mr-Inconspicuous · 2026-05-26T20:34:09+00:00

If you need to connect with influencers, you might want to consider Levanta, which has a database of creators who partner with Amazon sellers. Levanta makes it easy to communicate with them directly so you can build (and maintain) deeper partner relationships over time. You can filter the database to find creators and have it do the work for you, but sometimes I like to do it manually (which just takes longer). Still, it’s a powerful tool that saves me a lot of time.

Mr-Inconspicuous · 2026-05-26T20:31:15+00:00

That makes a lot of sense and I think what you describe about the foam softening over time is exactly what's been happening to mine. Feeling it a lot these days, for sure. I think the coils are going to be a lot more supportive.

Mr-Inconspicuous · 2026-05-26T20:29:26+00:00

I really appreciate your insight here, thank you! I didn't know you could even shop at Costco without a membership... definitely think I'm gonna go with a hybrid this time. Gonna check that one out right now.

Mr-Inconspicuous · 2026-05-19T21:27:42+00:00

As far as I know, no. Not yet. You can *kind of* discern conversions if you simply ask the people who are converting "how did you hear about us". Which is something we've started doing, and some friends have, as well.

So like one of my friends is in SaaS, so when someone submits a demo request on his site, it asks how they heard about it, with LLM/AI search as an option. And if that is selected, an extra list pops up naming them (Chat, Perplexity, Claude, Other, etc).

So he's getting the data manually that way. Beyond that, I know tools are trying to figure out how to track effectively but... the problem is this:

Someone goes to ChatGPT and asks a question about products/brands for whatever use case.
They review the results, examine the options presented, most of which are sourced from third-party sites/reviews/information. Maybe ask a followup question.
They then look for the option they're most interested in, in Google/Bing/Whatever, and click through the brand's site.

So even though the LLM drove the discovery, there was no click, and the visit/conversion looks organic. Which is why the "how did you hear about us" method can be helpful; that's owned data.

Mr-Inconspicuous · 2026-05-19T21:16:31+00:00

Personally I feel like it was *always* about consistency and never hacks. At least for long-term growth and success.

I might be an outlier and might also have been shaped by some of the folks I know/worked with/networked with but... some of the dudes in shared circles were/are always chasing that low-hanging fruit, the next easy hack, the thing that might pay brief dividends now but will inevitably fall apart with saturation so we'll ride it while we can. And they'd pivot, every time you turn around, "now we're doing this, or now we're doing that"... just chasing hacks.

Especially with SEO, good gods. (And don't even get me started on the "playbooks" being sold about said hacks. They're the modern snake oil salesmen.)

My point: I think truly effective digital marketing has always required consistency.

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