client wants to move backlink budget into citation building, is this real? ok so im running fractional marketing for a small saas (analytics product, around 40 customers, mostly self serve). the founder hired a new advisor last month and now hes telling me to 'stop spending on link building' and put the money into 'citation building' so they show up in AI answers. first reaction was eyeroll. sounded like another buzzword. but i went and read a few things and im actually not sure where i land. what im seeing: \- traditional backlinks: still help google, but the SERPs above the fold for our terms are now AI overview + 2 forum threads + 1 brand. organic position 4-5 gets like nothing. \- 'citations' as i understand them: getting your brand named in places LLMs pull from. so reddit threads, podcast transcripts, listicles, comparison pages, twitter, etc. the overlap is messy. a good listicle is both a backlink and a citation. but a podcast mention is a citation with no backlink at all.…