Is voice a backlink?

I was recently listening to a podcast and there they shared what happened to one of their YMYL sites.

The site was in career niche(pretty hard) and was pretty much dead for the first 13 months. Then they just mentioned it on their popular youtube channel. Suddenly, 2k people visited due to the mention.

Days after the visits, organic traffic quadrupled.

They say it happened to one of their other sites too in parenting niche, another YMYL.

Is google now counting voice mentions too?

I personally highly doubt they are counting voice mentions.

Could be other reasons, such as traffic/interaction statistics from Chrome, Google, or whatever else.

I think word spread and people simply searched for it and visited via G.

Happened all the time when I promoted supplements mentioned in small local TVs. TV commercial = organic traffic.

it was most likely brand searching (like domain.com, after people listened to the domain name in the clip).