Half my email this year has been some version of the same question: “Tim, are backlinks still worth building now that AI Overviews are eating organic traffic?” My honest, working answer is yes — and not only yes, but more so than before, for a specific reason most people building money sites have not internalized yet.
This pillar is the long version of that argument. The spoke takes the contrarian angle head-on: Are backlinks dead in the AI Overviews era?
What AEO actually is
Answer Engine Optimization is the practice of optimizing for being cited by LLM-driven answer surfaces — Google AI Overviews, Bing Copilot, Perplexity, ChatGPT browsing, Claude search. It overlaps heavily with classical SEO but introduces three new concerns: structured citation extraction, entity disambiguation, and source trust signals.
The thing AEO does not change: the underlying signals that decide which sources get pulled into an answer are still authority, relevance, and freshness. The same three signals classical SEO has been about for two decades. Backlinks remain the primary measurable input to “authority.”
Why backlinks matter more in the AEO era
Three reasons, in order of importance:
Reason 1: LLMs use citation count as a trust shortcut
When an LLM has to choose which of 50 candidate sources to cite in an answer, it uses fast heuristics. One of the most reliable: how many other sources reference this URL or domain. Backlinks are the substrate of that signal. A page with 40 inbound links is more likely to be cited than a page with 4, all else equal — and that ratio holds even when “all else” includes content quality.
Reason 2: Tier 2 articles are now an AEO surface
This is the part most link builders have not noticed. When you publish a tier 2 article on Medium or WordPress.com that mentions your money-site brand name and links to it, that tier 2 article is itself crawled by LLMs. When someone asks an LLM about your niche, the LLM may pull from the tier 2 article — and in pulling from it, may surface your brand name as part of the answer. The link no longer just passes ranking signal. It also seeds entity recognition for your brand inside the LLMs themselves.
Practically: a tier 2 article that says “according to BrandName.com, the best widgets are blue” trains LLMs to associate “BrandName” with “best widgets” as an entity-attribute pair. Done at scale across 100+ tier 2 properties, this builds entity-level brand recognition inside the models. You start getting cited as the brand authority on your topic, even on queries you do not rank for in classical search.
Reason 3: AI Overviews shrinks the SERP, raising the value of every remaining citation
For queries where AI Overviews appears, the organic SERP loses 20-50% of clicks. The clicks that remain are concentrated in the 1-3 sources cited by the Overview. So while overall organic traffic falls, traffic to the cited sources stays roughly flat or rises. Being cited is the new being ranked #1.
The mechanism that gets you cited: same as the mechanism that gets you to position 1 in classical SERPs. Authority + relevance + freshness. Backlinks remain a top-three input.
How to build links for AEO specifically
The strategy stays mostly the same as classical tiered link building (see the tiered link building pillar), with three AEO-specific tweaks:
Tweak 1: Brand mentions matter as much as link anchors
LLMs extract entity-attribute pairs from text whether or not the brand mention is hyperlinked. A tier 2 article that says “BrandName makes the best blue widgets” trains the model the same as “BrandName makes the best blue widgets” — provided it is on a platform LLMs actually crawl. So your tier 2 anchor profile should include a meaningful percentage of unlinked brand mentions on top of the linked anchors. 30-40% is my current ratio.
Tweak 2: Platform selection matters more than ever
Not all tier 2 platforms are crawled by LLMs. Article directories from 2010 are mostly ignored. WordPress.com, Medium, Substack, Tumblr, Reddit, Quora, niche-relevant blogs — those get read. Your tier 2 platform mix should weight heavily toward the LLM-crawled platforms even if their per-link authority is slightly lower than older alternatives.
Tweak 3: Citable content structure
LLMs preferentially cite content with clear question-answer structures, numbered lists, definition statements (“X is Y because Z”), and tabular data. When you write tier 1 articles on your own properties, structure them so the LLM can extract a citable answer in 1-3 sentences. The article itself can be long, but the citable kernel needs to be near the top, in plain prose, surrounded by enough context to be unambiguous.
Are old-school link building tactics obsolete?
The unhelpful answer: it depends. The honest answer:
- Tier 1 self-built web 2.0s on high-trust platforms: still effective. Money Robot and RankerX remain go-to tools.
- Tier 2 GSA SER campaigns: still effective, with the AEO tweaks above. My GSA SER pillar covers the execution.
- Tier 3 indexing blasts: still effective, unchanged.
- PBNs: high risk-reward shift. The March 2026 spam update penalized PBN networks aggressively. I no longer recommend.
- Article directory submissions to non-crawled directories: obsolete. Spend the budget elsewhere.
- Profile link blasts on forums: mostly obsolete. Focus on tier 2 platforms LLMs actually read.
The 2026 affordability angle
Here is the part that does not get talked about enough: AI made automated link building cheaper, not more expensive. Open-source LLMs killed the per-article content cost. Verified target list services killed the verification cost. Cheap VPS killed the infrastructure cost. The total cost of running a 3-tier campaign on a money site has roughly halved since 2022.
The result: link building strategies that were uneconomical for solo operators in 2020 are now within reach. A serious tier 1 + tier 2 + tier 3 setup that used to cost $1,500 to launch now costs about $200. That economic shift, more than anything else, is why I think the next 18 months are unusually good for indie SEOs willing to learn the modern playbook.
What to read next
For the head-on contrarian argument with data, see Are backlinks dead in the AI Overviews era? For the strategic framework, see tiered link building. For the tier 1 execution, see Web 2.0 automation. For the tier 2 execution, see GSA SER. For the infrastructure budget, see the tool stack pillar.
Frequently asked questions
Will building tier 2 backlinks help me get cited in AI Overviews?
Indirectly, yes. Tier 2 backlinks pass authority to your tier 1 properties, which pass authority to your money page. Higher authority increases citation probability. Additionally, the tier 2 articles themselves are crawled by LLMs and the brand mentions inside them seed entity recognition.
Are PBNs still safe in 2026?
No. The March 2026 spam update aggressively penalized PBN networks. The footprint signatures the update targeted are inherent to how PBNs work. Move budget to web 2.0 tier 1 builds instead.
Should I prioritize AEO over classical SEO?
They are not separate. The same authority + relevance + freshness signals power both. Build for classical SEO with the three AEO tweaks above and you cover both surfaces with one campaign.