You've turned down mentions on Wikipedia, forums and magazines because "the link is nofollow anyway, and it doesn't count for SEO." That rule applies to Google circa 2005, not to ChatGPT or Perplexity: AIs don't count links, they read sentences, and a sentence that cites you is worth the same with or without a link. Every mention discarded for this reason is a signal handed for free to the competitor who accepted it. Understanding which sources really matter to AIs lets you recover the ground you've lost and stop ceding visibility to those who simply did less filtering.
In the SEO world a nofollow link is worth little. In the AI world it’s worth as much as a dofollow — in fact, sometimes it carries more weight because it signals an unpaid mention.
Let me explain right away, because this is the kind of reasoning that makes anyone running communications for an SME discard dozens of opportunities every year. That mention on Wikipedia with rel=”nofollow”, that editorial comment on an industry blog, that citation in a farming forum: to your SEO manager they’re scraps. To ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude and Gemini they’re text indistinguishable from any other mention of your brand.
In this series on Digital PR for AI visibility, in my earlier articles I showed you how models build a brand’s authority by reading the citations scattered across the web. Here I’ll explain why the nofollow attribute — born for a technical reason at Google in 2005 — makes almost no sense when the reader is a language model.
What Google sees and what an AI model sees when it finds a link
Let’s take a step back. Nofollow is an HTML attribute (rel=”nofollow”) that tells search engines: “don’t pass ranking authority through this link”. Google has respected it for twenty years. It was created to manage spam in blog comments, then became mandatory for sponsored and UGC links.
But that’s beside the point. When a language model encounters a web page during training or retrieval, it doesn’t run the PageRank algorithm. It reads the text. It tokenizes the words. It builds vector representations. The link’s HTML attribute is metadata that, in most document ingestion pipelines, is stripped out before the content ever reaches the model.
Translated: the sentence “Terre di Sabina is a farm that revives ancient grains in Lazio” has the exact same semantic value for Claude whether the link on the company name is dofollow, nofollow, UGC, sponsored, or not linked at all. The model sees words. The model ties those words to an entity. The entity grows stronger.
This principle connects directly to what I explained in backlinks as citation proxy: for AI engines the mention matters, not the equity. And even more so in implicit reference weight, where I showed you how a mention without a link can carry as much weight as a dofollow backlink.
Why in some cases nofollow carries more weight than dofollow
Here comes the paradox. When a model learns co-occurrence patterns from the web, the context in which a mention appears matters. A nofollow mention in an editorial comment on an agricultural trade outlet is typically an unpaid editorial citation. A dofollow mention on a partner page is often a commercial relationship.
It’s not a magic factor and I’m not saying nofollow is “better” across the board. I’m telling you that the hierarchy of value in the AI world is not the one from the SEO world. In the SEO world the scale is: editorial dofollow > partner dofollow > nofollow > UGC. In the AI world the scale revolves around: rich semantic context > co-occurrence with trustworthy entities > position on the page > frequency. The link attribute vanishes from the equation.
It follows from this — and here’s the business point — that if you discarded a citation opportunity because “it’s nofollow anyway”, you’re leaving on the table a signal that ChatGPT and Perplexity will use to decide whether to name you when a user asks “best producers of ancient grains in Italy”.
“I’m not interested, it’s nofollow”: citation opportunities on Wikipedia discarded because the SEO consultant said they’re useless.
The A/B comparison between two organic farms that stuck with me
Let me tell you about an observational case I followed over the past few months. Two organic farms of similar size, both with organic certification, both with a Slow Food presidium on a variety of ancient grain. I’ll call them Farm A and Farm B for confidentiality reasons.
Farm A has an “SEO-orthodox” web mention profile: 34 backlinks, all dofollow, coming from industry blogs, food guides, local press reviews. The SEO consultant did clean work: every link was negotiated, every anchor text is curated.
Farm B has a mixed profile: 18 dofollow, 22 nofollow (comments on organic farming outlets, citations in specialized artisan baking forums, an Italian Wikipedia entry), 9 UGC mentions on Reddit and homebaking communities. Total: about 50 signals, of which fewer than half pass equity to Google.
I tested both across four AI engines with queries like “Italian farms that produce ancient grains”, “Slow Food presidia cereals Lazio”, “ancient grain flours from organic farming”. An indicative test, a sample of 12 queries repeated on ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Gemini: Farm B was cited in 58% of results, Farm A in 25%. Four out of ten Perplexity answers linked directly to the UGC forum and the Reddit thread as a source.
It’s not a scientific study — I’ll say that upfront. It’s an observation on a small sample, repeated on different days. But the pattern was consistent and confirms the inference: the volume of diversified textual mentions beats the volume of clean dofollow links when the reader is an AI model.
Map the vertical communities in your industry where your brand can be named without coming across as self-referential.
Why I’m telling you an example from the Rieti area
I made this observation starting from a farm near Rieti that grows solarina and “miracle wheat” on the terraces of the Sabina region, with a Slow Food presidium and a biodiversity-certified supply chain. A territory — the one between Rieti and the Reatina plain — where agricultural SMEs are often invisible to generalist searches because local press reviews don’t give dofollow backlinks, and because baking and regenerative agriculture communities live on Reddit, forums and comments.
If that farmer had reasoned purely in SEO logic, he would have ignored 80% of his mention opportunities. Reasoning in AI logic, every conversation on a sourdough forum where someone names his flour is a signal that helps him surface in ChatGPT’s answers when a consumer searches for “Italian flours from organic ancient grains”.
The mistakes I see most often
Over the past six months I’ve seen these patterns recur among Italian SME clients, especially in food & agriculture and food-and-wine tourism:
- “I’m not interested, it’s nofollow”: citation opportunities on Wikipedia discarded because the SEO consultant said they’re useless. Wikipedia is one of the sources most drawn upon by Perplexity and Claude.
- Editorial comments ignored: trade outlets that offer mentions in comments, sponsored nofollow editorials, company profiles. SEO says to avoid them, the AI reads them just the same.
- Forums and communities treated as “low tier”: reverse engineering of Perplexity’s answers shows that Reddit, Quora and vertical forums are cited as much as — if not more than — mainstream media.
- UGC removed from the plan: reviews, discussion threads, indexed Facebook groups. All text, all readable by a model.
What to do concretely in the next 30 days
You don’t have to redo your link building plan. You have to add a textual mentions plan to it. Three actions:
- Reopen the file of discarded opportunities from the last 12 months from your SEO consultant. Filter by the reason “nofollow”. Reassess each entry with the question: “would this mention, read by ChatGPT, strengthen the recognition of my brand as an entity in my industry?”. If yes, recover it.
- Map the vertical communities in your industry where your brand can be named without coming across as self-referential. For a farm: Reddit r/Breadit, artisan baking Facebook groups, GialloZafferano forums, Slow Food communities. The goal: to be named naturally, not to self-promote.
- Check your presence on Wikidata. If your company has a Wikipedia page or could have one based on documentable notability, that’s a signal that multiplies recognition across all AI models. I go deeper into this in Google Knowledge Graph entry.
This is a first step, honestly: a serious audit of your brand’s mentions requires professional monitoring tools like Ahrefs, BrandMentions or AI search tracking tools. What I’ve described is the entry level for flipping the reasoning around and stopping the loss of valid signals.
The point to keep firmly in mind
The underlying reasoning — which recurs throughout all the articles in this series on Digital PR for AI — is this: visibility in AI answers is built on signals that the traditional SEO world considers second-rate. Textual mentions, co-occurrences, semantic context, citations without links. When you stop evaluating opportunities with the yardstick of link juice and start evaluating them with the yardstick of “does this mention strengthen my brand as an entity?”, your Digital PR plan changes shape.
In the next articles in the series I’ll show you how to build a PR plan designed directly for AI: the difference between brand mention and brand citation, how to measure your share of voice in ChatGPT and Perplexity answers, and how to choose the media that really matter for your industry when the reader is a model.
