Link popularity
Link popularity is how many links point to a website or page, and how good they are. It was one of the first things search engines ranked by.
Link popularity is a measure of how many links point to a page or a website from other sites. The simplest version just counts them. Better versions count the number of different sites linking, and weigh each link by how strong and relevant the linking page is.
It was one of the first ideas behind web search: if lots of other pages point to a page, it's probably worth showing. Google's PageRank was built on it.
Quantity versus quality
Early on, more links meant higher rankings, so people made links in bulk. Search engines responded by weighing quality far more than quantity. Today, ten links from respected sites in your field can do more than a thousand from directories and link farms, and the second kind can hurt you under Google's spam policies.
SEO tools show link popularity as counts of backlinks and referring domains, and roll it into scores like domain rating or domain authority. Those scores are each tool's own estimate. Google doesn't publish one.
Popularity in AI answers
AI platforms have their own kind of popularity: how often, and how widely, a brand is mentioned in the pages they read. Links help pages rank and get read. But in an answer, it's the mentions in the text that carry the recommendation.
For example, Harrow & Pine might have half as many backlinks as a bigger competitor and still be named more often in AI answers about grinders, because it's described on the three review sites those answers keep using.
In AnswerOrbit
Sources lists every website the answers used for your prompts, with how many answers used each one and how many times it was linked. That's link popularity measured where it counts for AI answers: the sites the platforms actually read. See Sources.