Backlinks

In 2022 John Mueller said Google expected the weight on links to drop over time as it got better at reading how a page fits into the context of the whole web^[4]. Gary Illyes went further in September 2023, saying links had not been a top-three ranking factor for some time and that the industry overestimates them^[1], and in April 2024 said Google needs very few links to rank a page and had made links less important over the years^[5]. Mueller's 2024 advice against counting links was framed as a cost: time spent on link totals is time not spent making the site better^[6].

Ahrefs measured how site signals correlate with AI Overview visibility across the top 50 websites mentioned in 76.7 million AI Overviews. YouTube mentions came first at 0.740, with mentions on highly-linked pages at 0.70^[7]; branded web mentions were the strongest brand-level signal at 0.664, ahead of branded anchor text at 0.527^[2]. The ordering fits how answer engines work: they retrieve and summarise text, so an unlinked brand mention is usable evidence in a way that anchor text never was. The link between classic rankings and citations is also loosening. A second Ahrefs study, over 863,000 keywords and 4 million AI Overview URLs in March 2026, found 38% of AI Overview citations came from pages in the traditional top ten, down from 76% in mid-2025, with the rest drawn from ranks 11 to 100 and beyond rank 100^[3].

Paying for links violates Google's spam policies and is close to standard practice. An Authority Hacker survey found 74.3% of link builders pay for links and 92% assume their competitors do^[8], while 56% doubt Google can reliably detect and discount a paid link^[9]. Prices are openly quoted: SEOs put the acceptable price of a high-quality backlink at an average of $508.95, and a BuzzStream figure puts a direct guest post at $364.76, rising to $1,459.06 bought through a vendor^[10]. More than 76% of SEO professionals pay at least $300 a placement and 16% pay over $1,000 for a single high-authority link, against a global link-building industry valued at $25.97 billion in 2025^[11].

The two systems reward different work. A link still passes crawl paths and referral traffic and remains a cheap way to get a page discovered, so it keeps its place in search engine optimisation. What changed is the ceiling: an answer engine that draws two thirds of its citations from outside the top ten^[3] is not rewarding the same purchase, which is why generative engine optimisation counts mentions and citations rather than referring domains.