What Is Link Building?
Link building is the deliberate practice of earning hyperlinks from other websites to your own, historically to accumulate the authority that drives search rankings. Modern practice has shifted from acquiring links as tokens to earning coverage — links arrive as a byproduct of being worth referencing.
From link earning to mention earning
LLM-driven discovery quietly redefined the deliverable. A language model learns brand-category associations from raw text co-occurrence; whether a mention carries an <a> tag is irrelevant to what the model absorbs during training. That reframes the campaign target from "get a followed link" to "get named, accurately, in the places engines read" — with the link as a welcome bonus that still feeds classic rankings and crawl priority. The best placements score on both axes.
Tactics ranked for the dual objective
- Original research — publish data nobody else has; journalists link to it, and statistics pages are among the most-cited content types in AI answers.
- Digital PR — expert commentary and story-driven pitches earn editorial coverage on high-authority news domains that both link graphs and training corpora weight heavily.
- Review-platform depth — G2 and Capterra profiles rarely pass much link equity but are retrieved constantly for commercial prompts.
- Community participation — authentic Reddit and forum presence; Reddit content gained further weight after its 2024 licensing deal with Google.
- Linkable assets — calculators, benchmarks, templates that attract organic references for years.
What's off the menu hasn't changed: paid links, link exchanges, and private blog networks violate Google's link spam policies, and post-SpamBrain they're more likely to be silently discounted — money spent on nothing.
Example
A cybersecurity vendor redirected half its link budget into an annual breach-cost report. Year one produced 90+ referring domains, but the compounding return showed up in AI visibility tracking: the report's headline statistics began appearing — with the vendor named — in ChatGPT and Perplexity answers about breach costs, an outcome no directory link ever produced.
Related terms
See backlink, digital PR, linkless mention, original research, and off-page SEO.
Frequently asked questions
- What link building tactics still work?
- Earning coverage with citable assets: original research and statistics, free tools, expert commentary for journalists, and genuinely useful resource content. Tactics based on buying or exchanging links violate Google's link spam policies and carry penalty risk.
- Should link building change because of AI search?
- The targeting should. Prioritize placements on pages AI engines actually retrieve and train on — review platforms, comparison posts, Reddit and industry communities, trade press — and value the mention itself, not just the link attribute attached to it.
Keep exploring
See how AI engines talk about your brand — track mentions across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini and 5 more. Start with Menra