There’s a persistent assumption in ecommerce marketing that off-site SEO – link building, external mentions, third-party coverage and the like – can be too risky to touch based on Google’s moralising, or too challenging to pursue without the right media connections.
The data across competitive ecommerce sectors in 2026 suggests that this is an increasingly costly position to hold, particularly when it comes to building an online footprint that supports AI visibility.
In this short article I’ll share what some snapshot analysis of the health and supplements ecommerce niche suggests, and what in-house teams can realistically do about SEO opps in this area but first it is worth looking at some of the basics.
Content Volume isn’t a Link Strategy, nor a Complete AI/SEO Strategy
Health and wellness brand Bulk’s “The Core” content hub has tens of thousands of indexed pages.
Across all of them, a Semrush data pull shows around 41 backlinks total. That’s not a typo and it implies that much of this content, whatever its quality, is not bringing authority into the site and may as a result not be a go-to source for either AI platforms or search engines.
In contrast, Myprotein’s single best-performing informational page – a survey on health and fitness spending – has earned more referring domains on its own than Bulk’s entire content library.
This pattern shows up across sectors where brand recognition and even high quality content output don’t automatically produce the kind of editorial backlink depth that moves commercial rankings.
The formats that tend to earn links – outcome-based comparisons, data-led pieces, expert-authored guides – need to be built with link earning/digital PR in mind and then actively promoted.
While this is a much-needed aspect of ecommerce marketing and SEO, it isn’t always the best approach to gain links to product and category pages.
For those doing neither serious link-earning or link building (where there is an agreement from a publisher to link to a brand’s priority pages based on some kind of commercial arrangement or other incentive), content that exists but hasn’t been thought about in these terms tends to sit there quietly generating very little.
The gap between leaders and challengers is largely structural
Last month when we pulled Semrush data across the activewear sector, Gymshark stood out.
This is a brand with genuine household name recognition with nine-figure revenue and real cultural reach – but roughly 4,400 referring domains, around 50% nofollow links, and 71% of its backlinks pointing at the homepage rather than revenue-driving product pages. Lululemon and Under Armour, by contrast, have 2,000-2,500 backlinks per referring domain, reflecting decades of accumulated editorial coverage.
This means authority is being drawn into the site, building trust, AI understanding and a healthy footprint but even here there could be missed opportunities where link building can play a more direct role in pushing non-brand rankings for more commercial terms.
With the Gymshark example, the practical consequence is that their product and category pages are largely without meaningful authority signals – and this pattern holds for most modern ecommerce challengers regardless of how well-known they are.
Homepage-heavy link profiles can work for brands with decades of brand equity behind them but for challengers, the same pattern leaves the pages that actually need to rank without proper support.
Off-site SEO and AI visibility are Entwined for eCommerce Brands
This is where the picture has shifted most in the past 12 months based on our most recent snapshot analysis but also public data from some of the ecommerce industry’s most trusted tools.
Ahrefs’ 2025 study of 75,000 brands found a 0.664 Spearman correlation between branded web mentions and AI Overview visibility – the strongest correlation across any factor they tested. Mentions on highly-cited pages correlate at around 0.70 with AI Overview visibility; mentions on high-traffic pages at around 0.55.
None of that proves absolute causation but the pattern is consistent enough that brands sitting out off-site SEO or waiting passively for their content to be organically linked to, tend to be the ones losing ground in AI – and AI citation share is climbing priority lists in in-house reporting faster than most teams expected.
We recently interviewed Fernando Angulo, Senior Market Research Manager at Semrush, on this topic:
“The brands that treat traditional link building as the foundation, digital PR as the amplifier, and brand mention density as the end goal are the ones building visibility that survives the shift to AI search. For challenger brands, that sequencing is not just smart SEO – it is how you get into the conversation before the bigger players notice you are there.”
The underlying logic here connects to something we’ve been developing in our own work with ecommerce clients – the idea that being visible in search is no longer the whole job.
Brands increasingly need to be understood and consistently retrieved by AI systems, not just indexed by them, as well as being remembered by humans.
Off-site signals – authoritative mentions, topically relevant coverage, a coherent external footprint – are a significant part of what shapes that – and we know that being a clear, distinct entity makes it easier for AI platforms to surface your brand effectively.
We call this broader approach Distinctiveness Intelligence® : this is our proposition for helping brands be memorable to humans and retrievable by AI, across every market they operate in.
Three things in-house teams are typically underinvesting in
- Destination URLs. Most challenger brands have homepage-heavy backlink profiles.
Controlled link building lets you direct authority deliberately to category and product pages that need to rank – something earned PR coverage is structurally less able to do as consistently, since journalists naturally link more often to homepages or campaign pages rather than product categories.
- Anchor text. A healthy profile has brand anchors as the largest single category, with topical and long-tail anchors making up most of the remainder. Digital PR gives you whatever anchor text the journalist chooses; link building lets you plan this. The difference shows up in audits more often than most teams realise.
- International reach. Translated content sites gain around 327% more AI Overview visibility than untranslated equivalents according to 2025 data from Weglot, 2025 and for ecommerce brands with any cross-border ambition, multilingual off-site SEO tends to be the fastest route to meaningful visibility in new markets.
At ICS-digital we work with ecommerce clients across 100+ languages, and in most cases local links with topical relevance outperform broad international placements fairly quickly.
Going broader across multiple markets rather than deeper in one geo can also be where the quickest gains are for challenger brands who don’t have the passive backlink advantages of major household names.
The Practical Takeaway for Ecommerce Brands – Off-site SEO In 2026 Works
As eCommerce marketers the question worth asking isn’t “do we have enough links to rank?” It’s closer to: are the right kinds of relevant publishers reinforcing what we want our brand to be known for – and is that coverage reaching the pages that actually convert?
For teams with active SEO and link acquisition programmes, the focus should be on destination URL diversification, anchor profile health, and building authority into the content formats AI platforms are increasingly drawing citations from.
For teams that have treated off-site as something other people do, or outdated or dangerous: the competitive gap is real, measurable, and it compounds.
From what we’ve studied and measured as a major SEO agency, the brands pulling ahead in terms of having non-brand clusters of keywords on the rise and product/category pages that rank aren’t necessarily bigger but they are more deliberate, more strategic and they understand the full mix of methodologies that go into SEO and AI gains.
ICS-digital is a multilingual digital marketing agency working with ecommerce brands across dozens of sectors and markets – at unmatched scale.
We offer full service multilingual onsite and offsite SEO, copywriting, link building, digital PR, advertising and translation services across 100+ languages, alongside our Distinctiveness Intelligence® approach to AI visibility.
Find out more at distinctivenessintelligence.ics-digital.com or explore our link marketplace at https://marketplace.ics-digital.com.
