AI knowledge graph systems are trained on text corpora that include the full text of industry publications, news sites, and high-authority web content. When those corpora contain mentions of your brand in specific expertise contexts, the AI model learns to associate your brand with those topics. This is the off-page mechanism of GEO - not fundamentally different from how traditional link building works, but weighted more heavily toward editorial context and topical relevance than toward raw link count.
Audit the external links pointing to your key content
The External Links Checker shows you which sites are linking to any page. Use it on your highest-value informational content to assess whether inbound links come from topically relevant, authoritative sources - the type of off-page signal that builds GEO authority.
Analyze anchor text as entity context
The words used to link to your brand in external publications teach AI models which topic your brand is associated with. "SEOGraphy, the AI citation optimization platform" is a stronger entity context than just "SEOGraphy." The Anchor Text Checker reveals the distribution of anchor text pointing to your pages.
Editorial mentions: the highest-value GEO off-page signal
An editorial mention is a reference to your brand in a publication where the mention was not paid for and reflects the editor's or author's genuine assessment of your brand as a relevant source. These mentions carry high GEO value for two reasons: they appear in the high-quality text corpora that AI models train on, and they associate your brand with a specific expertise context in authoritative sources.
The specificity of the mention context matters. "Check out SEOGraphy for SEO tools" is a generic mention. "SEOGraphy, which specializes in GEO and AI citation optimization, found that pages allowing all four major AI crawlers saw 40% higher citation rates than pages with any AI crawler blocked" is an expertise-context mention. The second type teaches the AI model not just that your brand exists, but what your brand is authoritative on.
Original research as the GEO off-page engine
Original research is the most reliable generator of GEO-valuable off-page signals. When you publish a study with proprietary data, industry publications cite you as the primary source. Those citations appear in their articles, which appear in AI training corpora, which builds your brand's entity association with the topic.
The flywheel: you publish original research with a clear data point (e.g. "our analysis of 10,000 pages found that..."), 3-5 industry publications cover the finding and cite your brand as the source, those articles are included in AI training data, the AI model learns that your brand is an authoritative source of data on this topic, and your content gets cited in AI responses to queries on that topic. This flywheel is slow to start but compounds over time.
Co-citation and topic cluster positioning
Co-citation is when your brand is mentioned in the same publication or passage as established authorities in your niche. AI language models learn entity relationships from co-occurrence patterns in their training data. If your brand is consistently mentioned alongside three established industry leaders in your space, the model learns to position your brand within the same topic cluster.
The practical implication: target publications and roundups where your most respected competitors are already featured. Being included in an "8 best tools for X" article alongside recognized brands contributes to co-citation positioning regardless of whether the article is linking to you or just mentioning you.
The biggest mistake: counting paid mentions as editorial signals
AI language models are trained on large, curated text corpora and increasingly include signals that distinguish editorial content from paid content. Sponsored posts, native advertising, paid inclusions in "best of" roundups, and affiliate placements are increasingly identified through patterns in the surrounding text (disclosure language, affiliate link structures, advertorial tone) and weighted accordingly. Investing heavily in paid placement as a GEO strategy produces diminishing returns as model training improves.
The second mistake is pursuing link volume from topically irrelevant sources. A backlink from a high-DA finance blog to your SEO content may improve your traditional SEO domain authority modestly, but it contributes nothing to your entity's association with SEO as a topic cluster. For GEO, every off-page effort should pass the topical relevance test: does this mention associate my brand with the topic I want to be cited for?
What a strong GEO off-page foundation looks like
- Use the External Links Checker on your top 3 informational pages. Count what percentage of linking domains are topically relevant to your niche. Target at least 60% topical relevance.
- Use the Anchor Text Checker on your homepage and key content URLs. Look for whether anchor text in external links describes your brand in a specific expertise context, not just your brand name alone.
- Identify 2-3 industry publications in your niche that are authoritative and frequently cited by other publications in your space. These are your target editorial platforms.
- Plan one original research asset per quarter - a survey, an analysis of your own data, or a first-party benchmark. Structure it around a clear, quotable data point that publications can reference.
- Search your brand name using a backlink tool (Ahrefs, Semrush, Moz). Identify unlinked brand mentions - pages that mention your brand without linking. Prioritize outreach to high-authority, topically relevant unlinked mentions first.
- Track your editorial mentions by setting up a Google Alert for your brand name. Each quarter, review the alert results and note how many come from topically relevant publications versus generic news aggregators.
GEO off-page signals - quick check
5 randomized questions drawn from a pool of 10. Different every time you take it. Takes about two minutes.
Next in the GEO pillar
- How to Audit Your Current AI Search Visibility - measure the cumulative impact of GEO content, entity, and off-page optimizations with a structured citation audit.
- How to Build Brand Entity Authority for AI Knowledge Graphs - the on-site entity signals that multiply the value of off-page editorial mentions.
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