I have spent 20 years in e-commerce marketing and audited more than 1,300 online stores. For most of that time, the advice I gave small business owners about search came down to three steps. Publish useful pages, earn links to them, and wait.
That advice is getting outdated. What replaces it is work a small business can actually do, which was rarely true of the old version.
In December 2025, Ahrefs published a correlation study across 75,000 brands, looking at which signals lined up with a brand appearing in ChatGPT, Google’s AI Mode, and AI Overviews. The results do not match what two decades of search advice would have you expect.
Branded web mentions, meaning how often people talk about a brand across the internet whether or not they link to it, correlated at between 0.66 and 0.71. Mentions on YouTube were strongest of the lot at roughly 0.737.
Then the metrics we have all been chasing. Domain Rating, the authority score our whole industry has organized itself around, ranged from 0.266 to 0.326. Backlinks, the currency of search since I started, showed what the authors call very weak correlations. Total pages on a site came in near 0.194, which is a polite way of saying that publishing more did close to nothing.
What the Study Does Not Say
Ahrefs says plainly that correlation is not causation. Spotting a pattern between a search metric and an AI mention does not mean improving the metric will improve your visibility. Nobody has proven direction here. It is entirely possible that being a well-known business causes both the mentions and the AI citations, in which case the mentions are a symptom rather than a lever.
I still think the finding is worth acting on, for a reason that has nothing to do with AI. Being talked about by other people was already valuable before any of this. It brought referrals, it brought customers who arrived half-sold, and it did not depend on a search algorithm being kind to you. If the AI systems now reward it too, that is a second return on something you should have been doing regardless.
Why This Flips a Small Business To-Do List
Think about what a link actually costs a small business to earn. You need a page worth linking to, then you need to persuade a stranger with a website to point at it, and that stranger has every reason to ignore you. It is slow work, and the industry that sprang up to shortcut it is one Google likes to punish.
Now think about what a mention costs. Someone says your business name on their podcast. A supplier writes you into their customer newsletter. A local journalist quotes you because you answered the phone when nobody else did. You turn up in a “best plumbers in Melbourne” roundup that a blogger threw together on a slow week.
None of that requires a page on your site. Some of it requires nothing more than being reachable and having something specific to say.
Small Business Currents has made a version of this case before: that public relations reaches well past media placements into community, ambassadors, and thought leadership. That older argument now has a search payoff attached to it.
The gap between those two jobs is where small businesses have an advantage they haven’t had in search for a long time. You cannot outpublish a competitor with a content team. You can be more interviewable, more quotable, and more present in your own industry’s conversation than a company 10 times your size, because that work does not scale with budget the way publishing does.
The YouTube Detail Worth Knowing
YouTube being the strongest signal has been repeated everywhere since the study came out, usually as “get mentioned on YouTube.” That advice is close to useless without the caveat attached to it.
Ahrefs counted a YouTube mention only when the brand name appeared in the video title. A mention in the transcript, or said out loud on camera, did not count.
So being a guest on somebody’s channel may not register at all. If the episode goes out as “Episode 47” or “How to fix your bathroom taps”, the mention is invisible to the thing the study measured. Your business name has to be in the title.
That changes what you ask for. When you agree to an interview, ask how the episode will be titled, and offer one that includes your business name and the specific topic you were brought on to discuss. Most hosts will take a suggested title, because writing titles is the part of publishing everyone hates.
The authors also note that YouTube data is heavily baked into both the input and the output of AI assistants, which is worth holding onto. Part of what the correlation is picking up may be that these systems were trained on a lot of YouTube.
What Not To Abandon
Google’s own documentation on AI features and your website says there are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, and no special optimizations necessary. The same index and the same crawling still sit underneath all of it.
Read that alongside the study rather than against it. Your site still has to exist, be crawlable, and answer the question a customer actually has. What has changed is the ranking of jobs after that, not whether the site matters. For online stores, I have written elsewhere about beating Google’s AI in Shopify SEO, and none of it involves abandoning the fundamentals.
The blog post nobody reads was never good advice. It’s always just been advice that felt like progress, because you could tick it off on a Friday without talking to anyone.
Where To Start on a Thursday Afternoon
Pick three publications, podcasts or newsletters your customers already read. The biggest ones are usually the wrong target. You want the ones a customer would mention to you unprompted. If you are not sure which those are, start by working out where your story actually fits.
Write down one thing you know that they have not covered, specific enough that it could only come from someone who does your job. “We are passionate about customer service” is not it. “Seven of the last 10 emergency callouts we did were the same failed part, and here is how to spot it” is.
Then email it to them. Three rough sentences that actually get sent will do more than a polished pitch sitting in your drafts, and the note does not need to mention your website at all.
Josh Uebergang runs Digital Darts, a Google Partner agency that has worked on e-commerce stores since 2015 and handles Shopify SEO and Google Ads for online retailers. He wrote Google Shopping for Shopify: The Definitive Guide, has managed hundreds of millions of dollars in ad spend, and is based in Australia. On X, he is @digital_darts.
