Backlinks are not the currency any more

The claim that should stop you

We asked Luke Marthinusen, who runs MO Agency, for the easy wins in answer engine optimisation. He gave us something sharper instead. "Interesting fact, backlinks don't matter at all any more," he said. "Yes, one hundred percent the LLMs are looking at how things are interlinked, but they're not weighting backlinks at all."

What earns weight instead is corroboration. A model sees a claim on your site, finds the same claim somewhere else, and decides you are a source worth citing. "I'm seeing this context and this context, those two match, so therefore there's more value because they're in two different places at the same time."

Hand the answer over quickly

His on-page fix is unglamorous. Put a plain summary at the very top of every page that matters: what you do, who you work with, the results you have had, how long you have been going. The reason is economic rather than editorial. "Processing power is at a premium," he said. "So the quicker and more easily you can hand an LLM the answer, the better." Below that, the page runs in short logical chunks, which is what good SEO asked for anyway.

The off-page half is where most marketers stop reading, because it sounds like work. Press releases and editorials in the Mail & Guardian, Bizcommunity or ITWeb that state the same facts your site states. When the model finds the match, "they corroborate and they go, ah, this is a reputable source, and into the results you appear."

Why this is good news for small brands

Under the old rules, a low-authority site could publish something genuinely good and watch it go nowhere while large publishers ranked with thin work. Luke has watched that invert. New agency websites publish one strong piece and "suddenly they're getting cited". He compares it to the early days of search, and he is blunt about the fear: "People must not be nervous about this. This is an opportunity. I would wager you that it's actually less technical than SEO and the whole backlinks story."

There is a second-order effect he spotted before most of the industry: public relations just got valuable again. Small and mid-sized companies spent a decade asking why they needed a PR agency when they could publish themselves. The agencies, he points out, "have the connections into these publications. So they're on the up, as well as the publications, because AI search will leverage that hard."

The pricing question underneath

Darren Morris of Lucky Hustle makes the same argument from the agency side of the table, about cost rather than citations. Clients have worked out that the old estimates no longer hold: "You don't need 10 people to do this for 10 days. You now need two people, a couple of software, and you can have it out in three days." The common thread is that the inputs everyone priced and optimised for — hours, links, volume — have stopped being the thing that buys the outcome.

Try this week: rewrite the opening of your five most important pages as a plain answer to the question a customer would actually ask. Then put your last three pieces of press coverage next to your homepage and check that the facts match. Where they differ, fix one of them. And ask an AI tool the question your buyer would ask, and note who it names.

Sourced from recorded, on-the-record interviews on the South African Digital Marketing Podcast. Every practitioner quoted above is named in the text.