Do backlinks still matter, or have citations replaced them?

Both halves of this question have a different answer, which is why the debate never resolves.

For Google: yes, with the emphasis moved

Links remain a ranking signal. What changed is the ratio between quantity and context. A single contextual mention inside a genuinely relevant article now does more than a hundred directory profiles, and the hundred directory profiles now carry risk that they did not carry a decade ago.

Private blog networks are the clearest example of spend that has stopped buying anything. They carry penalty exposure on the Google side and contribute nothing at all on the AI side, which makes them the worst available use of an authority budget.

For AI: the unit changed from link to mention

This is the part that trips people up. A retrieval system reading an article about your industry does not need a hyperlink to register that your company was named in a positive context. The mention is the signal. The link is optional.

Which inverts a lot of established outreach practice:

Retrieved is not the same as authoritative

The distinction that decides where you spend. A very high authority domain that no retrieval system reaches for on your category's queries is worth less for AI visibility than a mid-tier industry publication that gets pulled repeatedly. Working out which sources are actually retrieved, per category, is most of the skill in citation building.

You find out the same way you find out anything here. Ask an answer engine your category's buying questions and read what it cites. Do it twenty times. The pattern is usually obvious within an hour and it differs sharply between industries.

What to do with an authority budget in 2026

1. Get included in comparison and best-of pages. These are quoted disproportionately because they read as pre-digested judgement.
2. Earn genuine editorial mentions. Contributed pieces, expert commentary, industry coverage. Slower, and durable in a way bought links are not.
3. Participate in community discussion honestly. Heavily weighted by several systems. Anything that reads as astroturf gets removed and damages you.
4. Syndicate real announcements. Coverage across several outlets creates the corroboration pattern that makes a model confident enough to state something as fact.
5. Stop paying for links on sites nobody reads. Including the ones with impressive-looking metrics.

The Malaysian complication

The local retrieval pool is small. Fewer credible publications, fewer established comparison sites, thinner community discussion in most local categories. That cuts both ways. Placements are harder to find, and each one counts for more than the equivalent would in a saturated market.

It also means the handful of sources that do get retrieved for your category are identifiable in an afternoon. That is a genuine advantage over operating in a market with a thousand of them.