Link Building
Link building is the practice of getting other websites to link to yours so that search engines treat your pages as referenced and worth ranking. It is the deliberate part of off-page optimization.
Why a link carries weight
A link is a public reference made by someone who does not own the page it points at. Search engines have read links that way since their beginning: as a vote, weighted by who is voting. The anchor text says what the target is about. A link from a page on the same subject means something different from a link on an unrelated one, and a link a site earned means something different from one it bought. Google’s spam policies describe links placed to manipulate ranking as link spam, so the practice is bounded: the links that count are the ones that would exist if no search engine did.
The ways to earn them are ordinary. Publish something worth referring to. Be listed where your trade is listed. Be quoted, and ask for the link when you are.
Links and being named by an assistant
An assistant with retrieval searches before it writes, so links still decide which pages are fetched at all. After the fetch the link stops mattering and the passage takes over: the assistant chooses text that answers the question in one place and attributes it. Aggarwal et al., “GEO: Generative Engine Optimization” (KDD 2024), measured a change in a source’s visibility in generated answers from edits to the source page alone, with nothing about its links changed. The two levers are separate. Links get a page into the set the assistant reads; citability decides whether anything on it gets quoted.
A common question
Do more links make an AI assistant more likely to quote a page?
They do a different job. Links decide which pages get fetched at all, since an assistant with retrieval searches before it writes; once the page is in hand, the link stops counting and the passage takes over, because the assistant picks text that answers the question in one place and credits it. Aggarwal et al., GEO: Generative Engine Optimization (KDD 2024), measured a source's visibility change in generated answers from edits to the page alone, with its links untouched.
Related terms
Sources
Boundary of the practice: Google’s spam policies. Source-side changes and visibility in generated answers: Aggarwal et al., “GEO: Generative Engine Optimization” (KDD 2024). No figures on this page are this site’s own.