Will brand mentions eventually matter more than backlinks?

Seeing more cases lately where brands with strong online discussions get surfaced everywhere despite having weaker backlink profiles than competitors. A few years ago, I would’ve assumed the site with the stronger domain authority and bigger link profile would dominate visibility automatically. But now I keep noticing brands getting mentioned inside Reddit threads, YouTube comments, LinkedIn discussions, comparison posts, and AI answers even when their traditional SEO metrics don’t look that impressive. Feels like AI systems are paying much more attention to whether people actually talk about a brand consistently across the web, not just how many sites link to it. Almost like contextual presence and entity recognition are starting to compete with classic authority signals.