Backlinks Aren't Dead. But Your Link-Building SEO Strategy Is

If you have ever hired an SEO agency, you have almost certainly heard this line: "If you want to rank, you need links." Every SEO proposal has a line item for "link building": so many press links, so many guest posts, so many "high-authority" links per month.

Lately you may have heard the opposite: "Backlinks are over. It's all about AI now."

Let me be blunt: both statements are wrong. And the first one, "SEO means buying links", is quietly burning marketing budgets every single day, on a signal Google itself has publicly downgraded for years.

I used to be on the other side of this. For a while I judged an SEO campaign by exactly one number: how many new referring domains we added this month. More links meant a good-looking report. It took me a long time, and a few projects where rankings refused to move while the link count climbed steadily, before I was willing to question that whole belief.

This post is the result of that rethink, with the data so you can check it yourself.

Google downgraded backlinks itself, and said so out loud

This isn't SEO-industry gossip. The person saying it is Gary Illyes, an Analyst on Google Search and one of a handful of official spokespeople for the algorithm.

At Pubcon in September 2023, Illyes said: "I think they are important, but I think people overestimate the importance of links. I don't agree it's in the top three. It hasn't been for some time" (Search Engine Land).

He didn't stop there. In April 2024 he went further: "We need very few links to rank pages… Over the years we've made links less important" (Search Engine Journal).

Around the same time, coinciding with the March 2024 core update, Google quietly edited its official spam documentation and dropped the word "important" when describing the role of links (Search Engine Roundtable).

Why would Google do this? Because it no longer needs links the way it used to. PageRank, born in 1998, rested on one idea: every link is a "vote", and since a machine couldn't understand content, it had to count votes. But the 2026 algorithm is not the 1998 algorithm. Language-understanding models like BERT and MUM let Google judge directly whether a piece of content actually answers the question, instead of inferring it indirectly from a vote count.

The consequence is concrete. The "300 press links + PBN + guest posts" package, the default SEO recipe for a decade, is buying a devalued signal. Worse: buying links violates Google's spam policies, which means you are paying to take on extra risk of a penalty.

But wait: the data says backlinks aren't dead

At this point you might conclude: fine, drop backlinks entirely. Don't. This is exactly where most "backlinks are dead" articles lead you astray, because they only tell half the story.

The other half rests on two pieces of evidence that are hard to argue with.

First: the 2024 Google internal documentation leak. In March 2024, Google accidentally published internal technical documentation for its search systems, exposing more than 14,000 ranking attributes. In it, people found seven different variants of PageRank still being computed, along with a metric called siteAuthority, something Google had repeatedly and publicly denied existed (iPullRank, SE Ranking).

In other words: links are still in the machine. They just aren't the main engine anymore.

Second: what actually ranks on page one. A 2026 study by WebFX analyzed 1,462 domains ranking on page one of Google, and the numbers are worth sitting with:

100% of page-one domains had an active backlink profile. Not a single exception in the entire dataset.
The median was 907 referring domains per site, ranging from 76 (fashion) to 3,027 (finance and insurance).
Top-ranking sites gained an average of 48 new referring domains per month, most of them earned naturally by content worth referencing.

Illyes has told the story of a page ranking #1 for "Porsche cars" with zero links; Google found it through the sitemap. Yes, that really happened. But it's an anecdote; the 1,462 domains are data. In a competitive niche, when every competitor on page one has a link foundation and you don't, "you can rank without links" is theory, not strategy.

The two sections above in one line: Google has demoted backlinks from "deciding factor" to "baseline requirement". Think of it like a business license: without one you'll struggle to operate, but holding more licenses doesn't make you beat the competition.

The real battlefield has moved: AI doesn't count links, it counts mentions

This is the most important part of the post, and the part traditional SEO packages haven't touched yet.

As I wrote in SEO for businesses in the AI era, a large share of searches now end on the results page itself: people read the AI-generated answer and leave. The survival question is no longer "what position am I in?" but "does the AI mention me when it answers my customers?"

And when it picks which brands to mention, AI barely cares how many backlinks you have.

In May 2025, Ahrefs analyzed 75,000 brands to find which factors correlate most strongly with being mentioned in Google AI Overviews. The results:

Factor	Correlation with AI visibility
Brand mentions across the web (including unlinked)	0.664
Branded anchor text	0.527
Branded search volume	0.392
Referring domains	0.295
Number of backlinks	0.218

Read the first and last rows carefully: a brand mention, even without a link, carries roughly three times the weight of a backlink in the AI's eyes. The three strongest signals are all brand signals, not link signals.

The gap is even more brutal at the extremes: the top 25% most-mentioned brands appeared in AI Overviews 169 times on average; the next group down appeared just 14 times, a more than tenfold difference. And 26% of brands were never mentioned by the AI at all. Completely invisible.

Ahrefs' follow-up study in December 2025, covering ChatGPT and Google AI Mode as well, added a striking finding: brand mentions on YouTube had the strongest correlation (~0.737), ahead of every other factor, across all three AI platforms. Backlinks, meanwhile, trailed at 0.15 to 0.25.

Ahrefs is careful to point out that correlation isn't causation, and I'll repeat that caveat to you. But when the same sample of 75,000 brands, measured across three different AI platforms, produces the same ranking order (mentions first, links later), it's no longer statistical noise. It's the new rulebook.

So what do you do with your SEO budget? A 70/20/10 framework

Criticism without a solution is irresponsible. Here's how I allocate effort for a business website today, broken into ratios so it's easy to picture:

70%: Content worth citing (the foundation for both Google and AI)

Modern Google and AI both boil down to one question: is your content worth referencing? Concretely:

Answer the questions your customers actually ask, directly: one question per page, with the answer in the first paragraph.
Publish real numbers, real prices, real experience. What AI likes to cite most is specific, sourced data. My public pricing page is one example: transparent pricing is content that both buyers and AI can digest.
Use structured data (schema.org) so machines understand your business: what you offer, where, at what price, and who's behind it.

20%: Get named where real people gather (and where AI is reading)

This replaces the old link-building budget. The goal isn't the link. It's your name showing up in real conversations:

Third-party reviews: Google Maps, the review platforms that matter in your industry.
Communities: industry groups, forums, Q&A threads where your customers actually spend time.
Real press and PR: one article that names your business with a genuine story is worth more than 50 bought "press links", because it generates mentions, search demand and trust all at once.
YouTube: per the Ahrefs data above, this is currently the channel most strongly correlated with AI visibility. A review or tutorial video that mentions your brand carries surprising weight.

10%: Backlinks, but the earned kind, not the bought kind

Still necessary, in their proper role as a baseline:

Links from reputable publications genuinely writing about you (not paid placements dressed up as articles).
Links from partners, associations, suppliers: real business relationships.
Links that arrive on their own because your content is worth referencing. Remember those 48 new referring domains a month at the top sites: most of them didn't ask.

And three things to stop today

Buying links in bulk: paying for a devalued signal plus penalty risk.
PBNs and junk guest posts: exactly what Google's spam updates target.
Measuring SEO by links per month: measure organic traffic, inbound leads, and from 2026 onward, whether you appear when AI answers questions about your industry. The simplest test: open ChatGPT or Gemini, ask the exact question a customer would ask ("who's the best X provider in city Y?") and see whether your name is there.

The cost of picking the wrong side

Back to the opening claim, "backlinks don't matter in SEO anymore". You now have enough data to see where it's wrong and where it's right.

It's right that the links-are-king era is over. Google confirmed it, the internal documents confirmed it, and the AI data confirms it.

It's wrong in jumping from "demoted" to "discarded". 100% of page-one sites still have a backlink foundation. Dropping links entirely is as much of a mistake as only knowing how to buy them.

But the biggest risk for a business isn't either extreme. It's continuing to pay for a 2015 strategy while the battlefield has moved somewhere else. Every month your marketing budget flows into link packages is a month your competitors spend accumulating the asset that both Google and AI now reward: being named, being trusted, being cited.

26% of brands are completely invisible to AI. That number won't shrink, and which side of it you land on is a choice you make now, not after a customer has asked an AI and heard your competitor's name.

If you want to know where your website stands (does Google trust it, can AI see it?), I can audit it for free and tell you straight, even if the answer is "you don't need to hire anyone yet". Service details are on the SEO & performance page.

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