Having other websites linked to your website has always been important for SEO, but I want to talk about how AI search is changing the way that we build backlinks. Now these days, we actually don't build a lot of backlinks for most of our clients. We typically get much better results from just creating content for terms that our clients already have the authority to rank for.
But when we do build backlinks, we're thinking about it a little differently than we used to.
So there's essentially two types of back links you might build, link inserts or guest posts. A link insert is when you get another website to add a link to an existing page. And a guest post is when you get another website to add a page to their website linking back to yours.
The primary metric people use when determining the value of a link is the domain authority or domain rating. It's a measure of the quality of links pointing to that website. However, any halfway decent link builder understands that domain rating is not enough.
The page linking back to your website is not ranking in Google. If it's not receiving any organic search traffic, it's unlikely that it's improving your ranking. The best links come from the pages that are already ranking for the term that you're trying to rank for.
All this is still true for AI search. If you want your website to show up in AI search results, you need to have sufficient page rank. So what's different with AI search?
Well, first of all, it's a large language model performing the searches, not a human. And the terms that the large language models are typically much less competitive. So as long as you have content that's relevant to those hyper specific terms, you don't need as much page rank.
And more importantly to this conversation, you actually don't need your website to rank.
Remember, the goal in AI search is not traffic. The goal is that the AI recommends your brand as the solution. And to achieve that, we just need the large language model to site pages that recommend your brand.
It doesn't matter if those pages are on your website or a different website.
So now when replacing these link inserts or guest posts, we're not just thinking about the link, we're thinking about the recommendation. And we're not just thinking about whether or not humans are finding this page in search results. We're thinking about if large language models are citing the page, if large language models are citing this page when people are looking for recommendations for the type of product or service you offer.
And we can get not just a link, but also a recommendation for your brand on that page. And not only are we helping your website rank, but we're also placing one more recommendation that can help your brand get recommended in AI search. And the domain rating or domain authority of the website that we're getting the link from matters even less than it did before.
