"Link building is dead," they said. They were dead wrong.

Dan Petrovic just explained why on Marketing Speak—and it's not what you think.

Traditional link building? Evolving. Content seeding with brand associations? Essential. Digital PR for AI visibility? Critical.

Here's why: Models need to be TRAINED on your brand associations. Even without backlinks, content seeding influences:

• Model training data

• Grounding citations

• Brand mention frequency

• Selection rate when models choose what to recommend

Dan's been in SEO since before Google existed. His 2013 prediction that we'd "chat to Google by 2023"? Spot on.

Now he's building tools (AI Rank, Tree Walker, semantic compression) that reveal:

✓ Where models lack confidence in your brand

✓ What competing brands do they associate with your entities

✓ Which geographic/contextual biases are blocking visibility

If you're a CMO, brand manager, or SEO professional and you're not thinking about how AI models perceive your brand, you're about to get disrupted.

The show notes, including the transcript and checklist to this episode, are at marketingspeak.com/529.