I'm not just talking about platforms pushing new features (like Instagram prioritising Reels over photos), but about the bigger picture.

There's so much AI-generated content now, and it's being produced at an incredible speed.

To avoid blending into the crowd, we've had to rethink our approach.

Backlinks are still one of the strongest signals Google uses to judge whether a page deserves to rank . But the math changed. Google's December 2024 and October 2025 spam updates devalued link networks, paid placements, and AI-generated guest-post farms . The old volume play is dead. The new play is about quality, relevance, and context.

In the age of AI search, backlinks influence visibility differently. They act on the retrieval layer the live search index that grounds AI answers rather than the model's frozen training weights . A domain's Authority Score correlated with AI mentions at Pearson 0.65, according to a Semrush study of 1,000 domains tracked across five AI surfaces . Raw backlink volume correlated far more weakly.

Two insights from the data:

I will go first.

"Do you do backlinks?"

Every week. Sometimes every day. From prospects. From agencies. From people who read one SEO blog post from 2018.

Backlinks are not the problem. Backlinks are a solution to a problem that has changed.