May 12, 2026
A client recently asked Remon Hendriksen to artificially boost their Domain Rating. They knew it was against his advice. They wanted him to try anyway. He refused.
My co-hosts Martijn Hoving and Diantha van Surksum captured that refusal on SEO Cast, recorded at the April 2026 edition of BrightonSEO. It is the cleanest summary of where authority-building sits in 2026.
Domain Rating is a vendor metric on a third-party tool. It can be pumped, faked, and gamed. And while SaaS teams pour budget into chasing it for AI search visibility, Ahrefs’s 75,000-brand study found that branded web mentions correlate roughly 3x more strongly with AI Overview visibility than backlinks do.
Most SaaS marketing leads are still asking how to get more backlinks for AI Overviews. The real question is whether your brand reads as a single entity across the web, so that any AI recognizes you as one thing.
That question has a tactical name. Remon calls it entity stacking.
Who is Remon Hendriksen, and why does this matter for AI search?
Remon runs a four-person Dutch SEO agency with a stated specialism in link building. He came up through a football hobby site, spent 7.5 years in-house at an online education company, and went solo when freelance work for friends crossed the two-day-a-week threshold.
He still sells link building. He also runs digital PR, brand-mention work, and entity stacking. The mix is what makes the conversation interesting.
The interview ran in Dutch. The lessons translate directly.
The story worth paying attention to is the choice an operator who sells link building for a living made about what to add alongside that service line, and why.
Why is Domain Rating still seducing SaaS marketing budgets?
The DR-pumping request is not unusual. Buyers ask for it constantly because a third-party number is easy to point at in a board deck. The problem is that the number is also easy to manufacture.
Remon described an Ahrefs failure mode that any SEO operator will recognize. A site ranks for a junk long-tail (Remon's Dutch example was a celebrity-net-worth keyword nobody else had bothered to write about). Ahrefs assigns search volume to the keyword. The site ranks first by default. The tool credits the site with traffic. The actual analytics show none of it. The metric is artificially inflated. The reality has not moved.
The economics are punishing the buy-anyway move. Editorial.Link's 2026 survey of 518 SEO professionals found the average acceptable price for a single quality backlink to be $508.95.
That number is a useful gut-check. Below it, you are buying volume, not authority. At or above it, you are buying one or two real placements per cycle, which is exactly Remon's stated minimum.
He turns clients away under €500 a month. His advice to them is uncomfortably plain: spend it on ads, or fix the website until the budget can buy real authority. Below the floor, he says, you are throwing money in the canal.
What does a "good" link signal in 2026?
The thing the survey number is trying to measure is hard to fake. Remon listed his criteria the way an operator does: speaking from years of seeing what survives a Google update and what does not.
Topical relevance comes first. Selling football supplements? You want a placement on a football site, not a cycling site.
The site has to be alive. Real social signals. Real organic traffic. Its own backlink profile that was not propped up by other link sellers. The harder a link is to get, the more it tends to be worth.
Then the line that matters most for AI search:
That sentence is consensus within Ahrefs's data, but it is non-consensus within most SaaS marketing budgets. Tim Soulo, Ahrefs's CMO, positioned citations as the new backlinks for the AI search era in November 2025. Ryan Law, Ahrefs's Director of Content Marketing, on the same data: the strongest single correlation his team measured was branded web mentions, at almost 0.67. Backlinks came in at 0.218.
The shift is not subtle. Brands in the top quartile of branded web mentions earn a median of 169 AI Overview mentions. Brands in the bottom half average between zero and three. The visibility cliff is steep, and the lever moving you up it is the entity, not the link.
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How does entity stacking actually work?
Remon described entity stacking the way someone who has stopped treating it as optional describes it. For new sites, it is the foundation. The work is concrete:
- Profiles on the social platforms your audience uses
- Listings in the right business directories
- Profiles on review aggregators (G2, Capterra, Yelp where relevant)
- Industry-specific platforms and forums
- The same name, the same description, the same URL, the same logo, across every surface
The traditional SEO read on this work is "citations" or "NAP consistency": classic local SEO hygiene.
The AI search read on the same work is bigger. Peec AI's analysis of 30 million sources across ChatGPT, Google AI Mode, Gemini, Perplexity, and AI Overviews ranked the most-cited domains in March 2026: Reddit first, YouTube second, LinkedIn third, Wikipedia fourth, and Forbes fifth. Review platforms (Yelp, G2) cluster heavily in recommendation queries.
Every surface on that list rewards consistent brand presence over time. Reddit citations come with the catch Remon flagged in the same conversation: new accounts get banned almost on sight, because every promotional move reads as advertising.
His tactical workaround is to build your own subreddit. As the moderator, you control the community; you do not get banned, and your bio carries a link back. The same logic applies to LinkedIn (consistent company page + employee posts) and YouTube (transcripts and descriptions are what the LLMs read).
Entity stacking is the operating system. The link-building Remon still sells is one application running on top of it.
Why is entity consistency the right audit for AI search visibility?
The reframe is simple to state and hard to swallow if you have built a measurement stack around DR. SaaS teams keep asking how to get more backlinks for AI Overviews.
The right audit checks whether AI can identify your brand as a single, consistent thing across the web before it decides whether to mention you.
Three failure modes show up immediately in that audit. The brand uses different names on different platforms (full name, abbreviation, product name, company name).
The descriptions across surfaces contradict each other (sometimes you sell software, sometimes a "platform", sometimes a "solution"). The brand has no presence at all on the platforms LLMs actually read most: Reddit, YouTube, LinkedIn.
A team that fixes those three before buying its next batch of guest posts is buying signal that compounds. A team that buys 100 cheap links into the bottom-quartile mention bucket is buying nothing the AI search layer can see.
Remon's €500 floor and Ahrefs's 0.664 correlation point to the same fact from different angles. Authority is now an entity-graph problem. Counting links was a fine proxy when ten blue links were the ranking surface. They no longer are.
What changes for your SaaS link-building budget?
If you have under $500 a month for "link building", redirect every euro of it to entity work first. Set up the profiles. Get the names consistent. Get on the platforms LLMs cite. None of that costs more than time. None of it requires an agency invoice.
If you have a real budget, the order changes too. Audit the entity before the next link order, not after.
Buy your placements where the topical context is real, where the site has its own organic traffic, where a brand mention with context is the actual deliverable, and a follow-link is a side effect.
That is what authority looks like in 2026 when AI search is the buyer of your visibility. Remon turned a paying DR-pump request down because the work he sells under his agency's name has to keep working when the buyer is no longer Google's blue-link ranker. Most SaaS teams are still buying for the previous buyer.
Resources
- Ahrefs: An Analysis of AI Overview Brand Visibility Factors (75K Brands Studied) (Linehan and Guan, May 2025)
- Search Engine Journal: Ahrefs Data Shows Brand Mentions Boost AI Search Rankings (Montti, November 2025)
- Editorial.Link: Link Building Pricing 2026 (Tsybuliak, March 2026)
- Search Engine Land: AI Search Engines Cite Reddit, YouTube, and LinkedIn Most (Goodwin, March 2026)
- Backlinko: Entity SEO. How to Build Digital Brand Visibility in AI Search
Listen to the full conversation
The full SEO Cast interview with Remon Hendriksen runs in Dutch and covers his agency setup, his views on Reddit as a backlink surface, and the migration mistake he is still not proud of. Worth the 22 minutes if you want another practitioner confirming the approach we already run for our clients: entity work has become the foundation of any quality link-building program.
Head of SEO
As Head of SEO at Seeders, Hans helps companies scale smarter by combining search behaviour, paid performance, and conversion insights into systems that drive real growth. Recognised as a Top 20 Content Marketer by Small Business Trends, he brings a lean, experimental approach focused on building what actually works. Rather than relying on reports or one-off strategies, Hans focuses on creating marketing systems and tools that turn visibility into measurable business impact. His goal is simple: help clients move from scattered efforts to structured growth.
