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Off-page is more than link building. What else counts outside your website, how thin the evidence is for signals without a link and why the balance shifts in AI search.
David Hahn · August 16, 2026 · 6 min read
The short version
Search optimisation splits roughly in two. On-page concerns everything on your own website, meaning content, structure, load time and internal linking. Off-page concerns everything that happens outside.
Ahrefs defines it as anything you do outside your website to improve its rankings, adding one important caveat: you have full control over on-page SEO, but not over off-page. (Source: Ahrefs, 2026)
That shapes this article. Link building is the part of off-page you can steer most directly, and it has its own page here. How it works and which methods exist is covered in the link building overview.
This piece is about the rest. About what else counts outside your domain when no link is involved.
This is the most discussed point, and the evidence contradicts itself. Presenting it as settled oversimplifies.
What argues for an effect. Google holds a patent defining the notion of an implied link, described as a reference to a target resource, such as a citation, included in a source without being an express link. Gary Illyes spoke at a conference in 2017 about high-quality content being widely cited, explicitly meaning more than links.
What argues against. A granted patent proves no use in live ranking. And John Mueller contradicted it plainly in 2021. From his point of view Google does not use unlinked mentions at all for PageRank or for understanding a site's link graph. They are too confusing as a clear signal, partly because tone and sarcasm are hard to separate by machine.
What Mueller concedes in the same breath is the path that actually holds. Mentions can make people aware of a brand, who then search for it. That is an indirect effect through demand, not a direct one through the algorithm.
Summarised honestly: an unlinked mention is not a confirmed ranking factor. It works through awareness. That is less than many claim and more than nothing.
The most interesting data sits here, and the picture differs from classic search.
Ahrefs studied 75,000 brands for which factors correlate with visibility in AI answers. The result inverts the familiar order:
Two caveats belong here, and Ahrefs names them itself. Correlation is not causation, and the authors write explicitly that improving these metrics will not automatically lift AI visibility. Ahrefs also does not define brand mentions sharply. Whether unlinked mentions were measured separately does not emerge from the publication.
So what is established: mention frequency correlates more strongly with AI visibility than backlink count. What is not established: that the unlinked mention is the cause.
A second finding supports the direction. Semrush analysed 126 million AI search prompts and found that with Gemini the overlap between brands named and domains cited sits at only around 30 percent in places. (Source: Semrush, 2026) Being named and being linked come apart in AI answers.
What follows for practice is covered in our piece on visibility in AI systems.
For the remaining off-page building blocks the evidence is clearer than most guides suggest.
Reviews work, but locally. Google writes in its Business Profile help that local results are based mainly on relevance, distance and prominence, naming the number of reviews explicitly under prominence. More reviews and better ratings can help local ranking. That statement covers the local map results. For organic results no such confirmation exists.
Social signals are not a ranking factor. This was denied outright. Matt Cutts said in 2014 that Google gives no special treatment to Facebook or Twitter pages and treats them like any other page. Likes, followers and posts do not count. What social media delivers is reach that leads to mentions and references.
Directories are weakly evidenced for classic search but gain weight in AI search. An analysis of 6.8 million AI citations found 42 percent came from directories and listings. (Source: Yext, 2025) That argues for well-kept entries, not for mass submission.
The evidence suggests a manageable order.
Three things. Off-page is more than link building, even though links remain the best-evidenced part. For signals without a link the evidence is thin and partly contradictory, and presenting it otherwise sells guesswork as knowledge. And in AI search the weight shifts measurably towards mentions, without the cause being settled.
All measures outside your own website intended to improve its visibility in search engines. That includes backlinks, brand mentions, reviews and presence in relevant directories.
On-page concerns everything on your own website, meaning content, structure and technology. Off-page concerns everything outside. You control on-page fully, off-page only indirectly.
That is not confirmed. Google holds a patent defining implied links, but John Mueller contradicted the idea explicitly in 2021. Only the indirect effect is established, that mentions create awareness and people then search for the brand.
No. Google has denied that likes, followers or posts on social networks influence rankings. Such pages are treated like any other page.
In local search yes, where Google names the number of reviews as part of prominence. For organic results that confirmation does not exist.
Brand mentions correlate more strongly with visibility there than backlinks do. Being named and being linked also come apart in AI answers; in one system studied the two overlapped only around 30 percent in places.
No. Link building is the largest and best-evidenced part of it, but off-page also covers mentions without links, reviews and presence in directories and media.
About the author
Managing Director, GetMentioned
David has been building link acquisition and digital PR processes since 2016, first as an agency under SEO Galaxy, today as a platform with GetMentioned. He has scaled his own projects from zero to seven-figure monthly traffic and delivered thousands of campaigns for clients. Here he writes about what works in practice, and about what only costs budget.
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