Link building
Link building is the work of getting other websites to link to yours, to bring visitors and help your pages rank.
Link building is the work of getting links to your pages from other websites. Links bring visitors who click them, and search engines treat links from other sites as a sign your pages are worth showing. So for most of the history of SEO, link building has been one of the main jobs.
In AI search the job looks a lot like PR. The page that links to you matters, and so does what it says about you.
Ways to earn links
The methods that last are the ones where the other site gets something real:
- Making something worth citing, like original research, a free tool or a definitive guide
- Pitching stories, data and expert comment to journalists and editors
- Writing guest articles for sites your customers read
- Asking sites that mention you without a link to add one
- Getting listed in the directories and roundups people in your industry use
- Finding broken links on other sites and offering your page as a replacement
Buying links, swapping them in bulk or making them with software breaks Google's spam policies, and since Penguin, Google is good at ignoring them or worse.
Link building for AI answers
When an AI platform searches before it answers, it reads a handful of pages and names the brands they recommend. Many of those pages are the same roundups, reviews and guides link builders have always chased. The difference is the prize. A link helps your page rank. A mention in the text, with a reason to choose you, is what the answer repeats.
For example, getting Harrow & Pine onto a magazine's "best coffee grinders" list with the line "the quietest grinder we tested" can get it named in AI answers to "quiet coffee grinder," whether or not the list links to it.
In AnswerOrbit
Sources shows the sites the AI answers to your prompts actually read. The Gaps tab lists the ones whose answers name your competitors and not you, scored by how often they're used and how many competitors they name, each with a suggested way in. Recommendations turns them into tasks, and never suggests links you pay or trade for. See Sources and Recommendations.