Getting other websites to link to a site's pages. Links are a ranking input in classic search, and the pages they sit on are pages AI systems retrieve and cite.
Link Building is the work of getting other websites to link to a site's pages. A link from another site signals that the page is worth referencing, and search engines have used links as a ranking input since Google's PageRank in 1998. It is the authority part of SEO, alongside technical and content work.
A link's value depends on the page it sits on: how authoritative that site is, how closely its topic matches, where the link appears in the content, and the anchor text. An editorial link, placed by a publisher because the content earned it, counts. Links that are bought, swapped or generated at scale breach Google's spam policies, and Google discounts or penalises them. Links marked rel="nofollow", "sponsored" or "ugc" are treated as hints, not ranking votes.
AI systems answer from pages they retrieve through a search index, so links still decide which pages rank high enough to be retrieved. A placement also puts the brand's name on a third-party page, and that page can be retrieved, cited or included in training data whether or not the link is followed. The text around the link counts as well as the link: a page that names and describes the brand gives a model something to read, while a bare link gives it little. Citation mining shows which domains AI systems cite for a topic, which makes those domains placement targets.
