Link Building
Link building is the deliberate work of earning references from other websites to your own pages. A backlink signals to search engines, and to a lesser extent to AI systems, that someone outside your organization vouches for the page. It still matters, but it's no longer the strongest lever you have: unlinked brand mentions now track more closely with how often AI assistants cite you than backlinks do.
Why link building matters
Search engines can't taste the quality of a page directly, so they lean on outside signals, and a link from a respected, topically relevant site is one of the oldest and most durable of those signals. That part of SEO hasn't changed. What has changed is how AI systems weigh it. An Ahrefs analysis of roughly 75,000 brands found that how often a brand is mentioned across the web correlates with AI citation rate at about 0.664, close to three times the correlation backlinks alone show (about 0.218). That doesn't make link building useless; it means links are one input into a broader reputation signal, and chasing links while ignoring mentions, reviews, and press coverage is optimizing for the weaker half of the equation.
How link building works
It starts with something worth linking to: an original guide, a dataset, a calculator, a piece of research nobody else has published. Then comes outreach — pitching that asset to editors, industry sites, partners, and associations who cover the topic. Guest posts, expert interviews, directory listings, and digital PR all generate references, but the deciding factor is always the quality and relevance of the linking page: one link from a domain your audience already trusts outweighs dozens from unrelated directories. Anchor text, the clickable wording of the link, should read naturally in context rather than being stuffed with your target keyword — search engines have penalized that pattern for over a decade, and it does nothing for an AI assistant trying to understand what the linked page is actually about.
Common mistakes
The costliest mistake is still buying links in bulk — it risks a manual penalty and burns budget on placements that carry no real trust. Repetitive, keyword-stuffed anchor text is nearly as damaging, since it reads as manipulation to both algorithms and human editors. Chasing volume over relevance is another common trap: a hundred links from sites with nothing to do with your industry move the needle less than a handful from sources your actual customers read. Teams also neglect internal linking, which is what spreads the authority those external links bring across the rest of the site. One newer mistake worth naming: publishing an llms.txt file and treating it as a link-building or AI-visibility shortcut. Google's John Mueller has confirmed no Google Search system reads or acts on llms.txt, and an Ahrefs analysis of roughly 137,000 sites that published one found about 97% saw no measurable referral traffic tied to it. Earned links and earned mentions still do the work that file doesn't.
Relation to AI recommendations
AI assistants increasingly answer questions directly instead of handing back a list of links, which shifts what link building is for rather than making it pointless. A strong link profile helps establish your brand as an entity a language model associates with a topic, and that association can influence whether it names you in an answer. But AI citation and organic ranking are genuinely different games: Ahrefs found only about 6-8% overlap between URLs ChatGPT cites and Google's top 10 for the same query, and roughly 80% of ChatGPT's cited URLs don't even appear in Google's top 100. A page can rank nowhere and still get cited, or rank well and never get mentioned. Treat link building as one part of a wider reputation strategy alongside brand mentions, citable data, and consistent facts about who you are — not as a standalone tactic aimed at a single search engine.
Example
A small bicycle workshop in Utrecht publishes an illustrated guide on cleaning and oiling a chain. It's specific enough and clearly demonstrated enough that a national cycling magazine links to it as a further resource, and two regional club websites follow with their own references. Those three backlinks lift the workshop's visibility for chain-care searches. Separately, cyclists start mentioning the workshop by name in forum threads and local reviews, unlinked. Months later, someone asks an AI assistant how to care for a bike chain, and it names the workshop directly. The links helped it get found; the mentions helped it get remembered.
Common questions
Is bought link building allowed?
Paid links meant to manipulate rankings violate Google's guidelines and can trigger a penalty. Paid placements are only acceptable if they're disclosed as advertising and marked with a nofollow or sponsored attribute so they don't pass ranking credit. Earned links from genuine outreach and useful content remain the safer, more durable route.
Do I still need links if I'm optimizing for AI search?
Yes, but they're not the whole picture. Links still help search engines and AI crawlers find and trust your content, but Ahrefs data shows brand mentions correlate with AI citation far more strongly than backlinks do. Build both: earn links where you can, and work to get your brand named and discussed across the web even where no link is attached.