@tjrobertson52

Backlinks have always been one of the primary factors for ranking at the top of Google. As an SEO, I've bought many thousands of backlinks over the last 16 years. But recently I've been buying far fewer, and so I just want to talk about why.

So if you don't know, a backlink is just a link from another website pointing towards your website. It's actually the thing that made Google Google. Google was the first search engine to realise that they could approximate authority and trust by counting the number of backlinks pointing towards your site.

Of course, SEOs like me realised that this was a gameable system and immediately started building links. And then the war between Google and the SEOs began. And Google's over time, gotten better at realising which back links are legitimate and which ones were created for the purposes of manipulating search results.

And for years now, Google has been telling us that backlinks matter less and less, and pretty soon they won't matter at all. But any SEO who's actually doing SEO can tell you that backlinks still do matter. However, measuring how much backlinks matter is actually really difficult.

There are hundreds of variables that determine ranking. Those variables are changing constantly, and so isolating just one of them is impossible. And this is why even some of the smartest, most experienced SEOs constantly argue about how much backlinks still matter.

The part of the reason that I'm buying fewer Backlinks? Is that just anecdotal? From my own experience and from hearing the experience of others, I really do feel like backlinks matter less than they used to.

But that's not the main reason I'm buying fewer backlinks. The main reason has to do with large language models in AI search. I believe that within a few years, large language models are mostly going to replace traditional search engines.

And this isn't because people are going to stop using Google, they won't. It's because Google themselves are trying to replace their traditional search results with their own large language model. An early data from AI.

Search shows that backlinks really don't matter much at all. The leader in this research right now is a company called profound, and they just did a presentation at Brighton SEO where they show there's almost no correlation between sites to get a lot of backlinks and the sites that AI search sites. 038 and for over 97% of websites, there was no correlation at all.

Now, of course, all this is still evolving and changing very quickly. It's impossible to say how much backlinks will matter a year from now, but we know that Google wants to depend on them less and less. So while we still do buy backlinks when there's a specific competitive search term we're trying to rank for, we're more focused on creating and distributing high quality content and getting mentioned.

Where the large language models are looking before they recommend our clients or their competitors