Link building is a traditional search engine optimisation (SEO) technique that, when done right, has the power to transform your rankings and credibility in search engine results pages (SERPs). What’s not to love? It has stood the test of time for a reason; it works. If growing your online visibility in the SERPs is important to you, then you can’t afford to ignore link building or engage in shoddy practices.
After all, earning quality, authoritative backlinks to your website can help your online presence soar. If you’re unsure how to do this, our up-to-date guide for 2025 is here, with everything you need to know!
Why This Guide Matters in 2025
SEO is constantly changing. Whether it’s a new algorithm, core update, or a trend that shakes up how search engines value websites and their content, there is a lot to keep up to date with. Artificial intelligence (AI) has turned the world of search upside-down, changing how users interact with search engines and how the results themselves are displayed. It seems that AI’s influence on SEO is here to stay.
The introduction and rise of generative search, Google AI Overviews, and large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, Bing Copilot, and Perplexity have meant that digital marketers everywhere are having to level up their SEO efforts to remain visible in AI-powered results.
However, link building in 2025 is still as relevant as ever as an off-page SEO strategy. With an even bigger focus on building high-authority, relevant backlinks from highly trusted and verifiable websites that adhere to Google’s E-E-A-T (experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trust), link building is a tried-and-tested way to improve your traditional and AI search visibility. It’s these types of highly credible backlinks that signal to AI models and conventional search engines that your content can be trusted, increasing the chances of being included in such results.
In this link building and AI SEO guide, you can expect to learn more about:
- Link building basics
- How to build credible backlinks
- The types of links you should be building to boost your backlink profile
- The strategies you should be using
- Advanced link building strategies
- The link building tools that can help you
- Measuring the impact of your link building campaigns
- The trends that will shape the future of link building
The Basics of Link Building
So, what is link building? Link building is the process of getting one-way hyperlinks – or backlinks – from a third-party website to another website. When other websites link to your webpages, it tells Google that your pages are important and boosts your authority in the SERPs – that’s how the search engine giant’s PageRank algorithm works.
Think of backlinks as little votes of confidence for your website and its content. When discussing the backlinks basics and how they work to boost SEO, building quality backlinks from trusted and topically relevant websites creates link equity – also known as ‘link juice’ – that passes authority and value from one site to another. The more high-quality backlinks a page has, the higher it tends to rank in the SERPs and the more likely it is that a website’s content will be included in AI Overviews or AI-driven search responses.
It’s important to highlight that not all backlinks will boost your website’s authority in the same way. To reap the benefits of link building, you need to understand how Google evaluates backlinks. Fundamentally, the quality and relevance of the referring domain to your website are the most important factors. Links from a spammy, low-quality website will do your backlink profile more harm than good.
To ensure maximum positive impact from any type of link building, it’s vital to ensure that your backlinks come from sites with a good domain authority (DA) score, as this is usually an indication of a website’s calibre. Google also looks at the anchor text used for the hyperlink. It needs to be relevant to the page that is being linked and tell search engines and users what to expect by following it.
So that’s link building in a nutshell. Now let’s move on to the nitty gritty of actually building these precious backlinks.
How to Build Links: Add, Ask, Earn, Curate
There are 4 main link building methods you can use to earn backlinks:
- Adding links – manually adding your link to another website.
- Asking for links – reaching out to website owners to link to you.
- Earning links – creating valuable content that people want to share and link to naturally.
- Curating links – inserting your link into existing blog content already on the internet.
The following sections will explain each of these types of backlinks in a little more detail:
- Adding Links
This type of link building involves manually adding your link to a website that doesn’t belong to you. Also referred to as citations, this is a very easy technique to employ, so it doesn’t carry an awful lot of weight as far as link strategies go to improving your backlink profile. However, they can help you establish your online presence and lay the building blocks of a wider link building strategy.
You can build these types of links by:
- Creating social media profiles and linking to your website.
- Making submissions to online business directories.
- Posting in forums and community-based websites.
- Listing your business on review sites.
Make sure that you only add your website link to relevant business directories, review sites, and forums.
- Asking For Links
As the name suggests, this method requires you to contact other website owners and ask them to link to your content. This is known as outreach in the SEO world, and there’s a lot more to it than simply politely asking web admins to link to your website’s content.
For outreach SEO to work and have the maximum impact on your backlink profile, you need to reach out to websites that cover topics related to your industry. Gathering a list of trusted and relevant websites that you want to contact can be time-consuming, but it will be worth it once your link goes live.
You’ll need to demonstrate to website owners that your link will bring value to their content. If you’re adopting a guest posting approach for this type of link building, you’ll need to prove to them that your article is well-written and is something that will bring value to their website visitors. It’s not worth building backlinks to every page on your website, so you’ll have to identify which ones are worthy.
For the best chance of success using this type of link building, you’ll need to focus on building genuine relationships with website owners. That’s exactly what we do here at Click Intelligence. Cold emailing won’t cut it.
These are the most common techniques that involve asking for backlinks:
- Skyscraper – Involves finding an outdated page that lots of websites are linking to, and then creating a much better version on your own website and asking website owners to link to your page instead.
- Guest posting – Requires you to write an article for another website that they can publish. You can then include your own editorial links within the article.
- Resource link building – Asking for your link to be included in articles that list resources or businesses similar to you. For example, ‘Top 20 Link Building Agencies’ would be a perfect article for Click Intelligence to get included in.
- Image link building – This involves finding websites that have used your images without crediting you and asking them to link to your website.
- Broken link building – Finding links to 404 error pages and asking them to replace the broken link with a link to your website’s content instead.
- Journalist requests – This is when you respond to a journalist’s request to contribute an expert quote for their article.
- Digital PR – Putting a story together that relates to your business or industry.
- Unlinked mentions – Find occasions where your brand is mentioned online but not linked, and ask the website to hyperlink to your site.
- Earning Links
Earning links is when other people or websites link to your content without you asking them to. This type of earned media backlink is incredibly valuable when it comes from a reputable source. To increase your chances of earning links in this way, you need to ensure that your content is unique, expertly written, and offers valuable insights into your industry.
The types of content that can earn you links include:
- Whitepapers
- Thought-leadership pieces
- Surveys
- Breaking news
- Experiment results
- Infographics
- Curating Links
Also known as niche edits, curating links involves finding a relevant blog or article already published on the internet and requesting that your link be included in it. You’ll just need to provide a small contextual paragraph for your link to be included seamlessly, and then ask for this to be added to the existing article. All you need to do is prove to website owners that your paragraph and link add value to their article in some way.
This technique is beneficial because existing articles have already been crawled and indexed by Google, meaning you can benefit from the link juice much faster.
Which Links Move the Needle?
Not all backlinks will have the same level of impact on your backlink profile. Updates Google makes to its algorithms, along with the shift to AI-driven search, mean that link building is more nuanced than before. When you earn valuable backlinks, you can expect to see a true difference in your search engine visibility. So, what are the best SEO links you should be building in 2025 and beyond?
To be effective, your backlinks should take into account:
- Topical relevance
- Authority
- Placement context
- Entity alignment
- AI citability
- Topical Relevance
Semantic relevance is becoming increasingly important in SEO, and link building is no exception. You need to be earning backlinks from websites that cover topics that are directly relevant to your business. These backlinks pack a much bigger punch than links from more general websites, as they show search engines that other figures within your industry rate your content. Remember what we said earlier about each backlink being like a vote of confidence? This has an even bigger influence when that nod comes from an established website in your industry. So, if you are a construction business, for example, you need to earn backlinks from websites that specialise in this area.
- Authority
Links from spammy, low-authority websites won’t do much to boost your backlink profile. Links from high-authority and credible sites will, however. Authority is still one of the major trust signals for Google when it comes to measuring how it perceives your backlinks. However, there is little point in targeting sites with high authority scores if they don’t cover topics related to your business; you need to ensure they align topically as well. To get an idea of a site’s authority, it’s worth checking out Ahrefs’ Domain Rating (DR) and Moz’s Domain Authority (DA) score.
- Placement Context
The positioning of your link within the content is another factor that Google considers when determining how natural and contextual a link appears. The more natural and contextual your backlinks are, the better. To get contextual linking right, you’ll need to make sure that your anchor texts are semantically relevant to the content you are linking to and that it is surrounded by relevant text that flows well. If you can, positioning your backlinks above the fold so users don’t need to scroll to find them will have a bigger impact. This also gives Google the subtle nod that your link can be trusted. Links placed lower in the content or in sidebars carry less value.
- Entity Alignment
Thanks to continued algorithm developments, Google has a better understanding of real-world concepts, people, and companies, and how they are connected. Entity SEO focuses on the relationships between connected entities, and when your backlinks align with this, they will pass you more value. For example, if you sell cybersecurity software, a link within an article that discusses cybersecurity trends, threats, and developments will do wonders for your backlink profile as these entities are clearly connected.
- AI Citability
In addition to the above, in 2025, you need to make sure your backlinks are geared towards AI citability. Doing this will ensure that your content is more likely to be picked up by AI models and search features when they generate responses to user queries. To bolster the AI citability of your backlinks, ensure that you’re doing all of the above and that your links appear in well-structured content that aligns with E-E-A-T and is inserted into text that provides the user with helpful information.
Best Link Building Strategies
There are so many link building strategies out there, and some are more effective than others. It’s important to know which strategies will bring the biggest boost to your backlink profile. In our opinion, these are the top link building tactics you should be implementing:
Blogger Outreach
Blogger or SEO outreach means getting in touch with bloggers who are relevant to your business and industry to secure an editorial link back to your website. This might involve you writing a blog to post on their site with your link already included in it.
When to Use: To build relevant and contextual backlinks. Blogger outreach is also a great way to connect with an engaged audience that is already interested in topics related to your business.
Curated Link Building
Curated link building, also known as niche edits, is when you place your links into content that already exists on relevant and trusted websites. Often, you’ll need to provide a contextual paragraph so your curated links can be slotted seamlessly into the content.
When to Use: If you want to build your backlink profile quickly. As your link is being added to a pre-existing article that has already been crawled and indexed by search engines, you’ll benefit from the link juice quicker. It’s also an easily scalable option.
Digital PR
If it’s noticeable authority building you’re looking for, digital PR is what you need. This tactic involves creating newsworthy content that attracts the attention of industry-related blogs, media outlets, and journalists. When done right, you’ll earn high-authority backlinks and brand exposure.
When to Use: If you want to position yourself as a leader in your industry and enjoy top-tier backlinks that can truly make a difference to your backlink profile.
Citations
Mentions of your business name through citations can help send trust signals to Google that your brand is legitimate. Particularly important in local SEO, citations help you build a strong foundation to build your wider link building strategy from.
When to Use: To earn ‘quick win’ backlinks that help boost your credibility.
Media Placements
Media placement link building concentrates on getting your brand mentioned in high-authority publications. When your link is included in a contextually relevant way in this style of article, you’ll see an uplift in visibility and trust.
When to Use: It can be good to use media placements if you are trying to break into a highly competitive market, are launching a new product, have a fresh take on industry developments, or want relevant content promotion opportunities.
Expert Quotes
This is where you provide expert insights for journalists, bloggers, and industry-focused publications to earn quality, authoritative backlinks. You’ll receive a link back to your website in exchange for quotes.
When to Use: To share your expertise and earn top-tier links that will help position you as a leader in your industry.
Resource Link Building
Involves getting your webpages linked in existing lists of resources. These links can help position you as an expert in your field and build trust with search engines and users.
When to Use: To showcase your brand amongst your competitors and to build trust and credibility.
Link Building Strategy Deep Dives (Click Intelligence Services)
The team here at Click Intelligence specialises in delivering stellar link building campaigns for in-house teams and white label SEO agencies, helping to boost our clients’ backlink profiles, organic traffic, brand reputation, and online visibility. Now, let’s take a look at each of the above strategies in greater detail and explore how we can help you achieve the best results.
Blogger Outreach
Blogger Outreach is one of the most effective link building strategies for acquiring editorially placed backlinks from reputable websites that are highly relevant. To be successful, blogger outreach needs to be done right. You need to build genuine relationships with bloggers and website owners who have sites that cover topics relevant to your business and industry, and are read by people in your target audience. Links that you earn this way carry a lot of weight when it comes to raising your backlink profile.
How Click Intelligence Can Help With Blogger Outreach
We always take a relationship-based approach to blogger outreach. Over the years, we’ve established relationships that we continue to nurture with bloggers based in a range of industries. The long-term partnerships we’ve built with website owners mean we have a high success rate when securing quality backlinks in this way. Before we get started with blogger outreach, we’ll carry out in-depth research into your business, its audience, and industry to identify websites that are the perfect fit for your link. We’ll then craft an expertly written, bespoke piece of content for the third-party site to publish.
Curated Link Building
Curated link building or niche edits is all about getting your links added to existing authoritative content that has already been published on the internet and is highly relevant to your niche. Since the content you’ll be adding your link to has already been crawled and indexed by search engines, you’ll be able to piggyback off this and see almost instant improvements in your backlink profile. All you need to do is provide a contextual and well-written paragraph that contains your backlink to the website owner so that they can add it to their existing article.
How Click Intelligence Can Help With Curated Link Building
We carry out in-depth research to identify existing blog posts and articles that would benefit from having your link added to them. The next step is for us to craft a top-tier paragraph containing your backlink to persuade the blogger to include it in their existing article. This will then give your backlink profile a direct boost and help to diversify your link building efforts.
Digital PR
Digital PR links from trusted industry publications and media outlets can do wonders for your backlink profile. As well as boosting your backlink profile with high-authority links, digital PR helps to increase brand exposure where it matters – in industry-relevant publications, which helps to position yourself as an expert in your field.
How Click Intelligence Can Help With Digital PR
We’ve got the right experience of working with businesses in more than 40 different sectors, which means we’ve got the knowledge to help build your strategic digital PR campaign that grabs attention and makes journalists and industry experts want to feature your company. Once we’ve crafted the content that gets noticed, we’ll reach out to our industry publication contacts to secure the best coverage for you.
Citations
Citations, which are linked mentions of your business online, help to prove your legitimacy to search engines and AI models. Typically found on directories and business listings, they help you build trust and visibility, which will have a positive impact on your rankings and inclusion in AI-driven search results.
How Click Intelligence Can Help With Citations
Our team takes a careful, manual approach to citation building that includes carefully selecting relevant listings to cite your brand. We’ll craft compelling and engaging contextually relevant content to be included in directories that show off your experience and expertise in your field. Whatever your industry, we’ll ensure that each citation we gain is fully optimised for maximum impact.
Media Placements
For backlinks that pack a serious punch, look no further than securing highly relevant media placement links. These types of links are gained when you feature in reputable industry-focused online publications and news outlets. By having a link to your business editorially placed in one of these websites, it signals to search engines that your brand has influence and credibility. This helps to drive interested organic traffic your way, boost your brand image, and domain authority. This type of link building is very effective for those based in highly competitive industries like iGaming, where a highly tailored approach to iGaming SEO is needed to see the best results. You can find out more about our iGaming link building service here.
How Click Intelligence Can Help With Media Placements
Over the years, we’ve established strong relationships with journalists and editors, which helps us to place your brand on the most authoritative websites. Our content team carefully crafts fresh, expert-level, original content that these websites want to publish. Next, we’ll get in touch with our media industry contacts for the best media placement opportunities for your brand, helping you gain an advantage over your competitors.
Expert Quotes
This link building strategy involves earning backlinks from top-tier news and industry publications by providing them with quotes. When you provide expert insight comments to the media in this way, you’ll gain quality, highly authoritative backlinks that help to position you as a thought leader within your industry. As well as boosting your backlink profile, you’ll also earn important referral traffic from people who read your quotes and are already interested in your business and the services you provide. It’s a win-win.
How Click Intelligence Can Help With Expert Quotes
As with all of our services, we take a highly tailored approach to expert quotes. This involves starting with a detailed consultation so we can understand exactly what you want to achieve with our expert quotes service. From here, our team will craft compelling pitches to aim at only the most relevant publications that we’ve already got contacts in, which will give your backlink profile a big boost.
Resource Link Building
Resource link building involves getting your content featured on existing resource pages on authoritative websites. These types of links signal to search engines that your content is valuable and relevant to your industry and help you to improve your backlink traffic, while also giving you a hearty boost in referral traffic.
How Click Intelligence Can Help With Resource Link Building
To be included in resource lists, you need to prove to publishers that you have something of value for them to link to. Our content team can create professional, informative content that resource websites want to link to. When the content is live on your site, we’ll get source-relevant, high DR score sites in your industry that will help improve your position in your industry as an expert in your field and win you extra online search visibility.
Email Outreach That Works in 2025
The secret to building effective, high-authority backlinks in 2025 is email outreach. Email outreach SEO is the process of contacting website owners and bloggers to request a backlink. However, how you go about email outreach matters, and you need to take a very careful approach to it. When you focus on building relationships with website owners instead of simply cold emailing, you’ll notice that your response rate gets higher and more bloggers accept your backlink requests.
Best Practices for Email Outreach
To get the most out of your email outreach efforts, you need to follow these steps:
- Gather a List of Targets
The first and most important step in email outreach is to compile a list of all of the websites you want to target. It’s a good idea to know what you want to gain from outreach so you can identify the right sites to target. For example, if you want to build backlinks, you’ll want to identify sites that have linked to pages that are similar to yours before. Taking a targeted approach at this stage can save you time later on and increase the likelihood of having your requests approved.
- Find Email Addresses for Relevant People
Next, you’ll need to gather email addresses to send to. As personalised outreach is more effective than generic outreach, it helps if you can find email addresses of specific people at the publication you want to contact, like “fred@website.com” instead of generic email addresses like “info@website.com.”
- Use Unique Email Templates
Link building and email outreach are long-term SEO techniques, so it is likely that you’ll have hundreds of emails to send over the course of your efforts. It’s easy to think that using a template equates to something being bad, but when you do it right, crafting your own link building email template can save you time and increase your chances of success. How do you make a template unique, you ask? Here’s how:
- Take a look at example email outreach templates for inspiration
- Put your own spin on the template by adding some personal touches. You might choose to include some humour, but make sure you keep it engaging.
- Keep things short so bloggers don’t toss your email in the bin.
- Take extra care with email subject lines, making sure they’re snappy and engaging, but long enough to tell the recipient what your email is about.
- Repeat the process to have different templates you can use for outreach.
Your email template should demonstrate genuine interest in the blogger’s site and clearly show how including your content and/or backlink will benefit them and their readers.
- Make Your Emails Personal
Personalised outreach emails are more likely to get a response than generic ones. Sending a generic email, starting with ‘Dear Sir,’ is more likely to be ignored than those that actually address the recipient by name. To make your email personal, make sure you:
- Use their name.
- Reference something you’ve seen on their site.
- Give them a natural, genuine compliment.
- Get To The Point
It’s likely that the websites you are contacting are inundated with backlink requests, so you need to get to the point quickly while still being polite. It’s a good idea to use the inverted pyramid approach, where all the most important information is placed at the top, with less important information at the bottom. Make sure you include all the relevant information; the last thing bloggers want is to get into a back-and-forth with you to decipher your request.
- Use Email Outreach Tools
Outreach automation tools can take the stress out of email outreach. The right tools can help you scale your efforts and create targeted emails that get responses.
Advanced Link Building Tactics
While email outreach might form the basis of most link building tactics, there are some advanced link building techniques you should know about. These techniques go beyond the basics of good link building and will offer you even more opportunities for earning backlinks that make a difference.
Unlinked Mentions
Now, you might think that whenever someone mentions your brand in an article, they’ll link to you. That’s not always the case. Every mention of your brand that does not contain a link to your website is a wasted opportunity to earn a backlink. The good news is that most website owners will be happy to link that unlinked mention if you get in touch with them.
Reverse Engineering Your Competitors
If your competitors are outperforming you in the SERPs, you’ll need to carry out competitor backlink analysis to analyse their strategies and spot new opportunities for acquiring impactful links. Reverse engineering links that your competitors have involves examining the backlinks they have, the content that their links lead to, and identifying gaps you have in your own backlink profile. With this information, you can create a list of new prospects to reach out to that aren’t currently linking to your website.
Expert Quote Placements
Expert quotes are comments from people or businesses with authority and knowledge in a certain sector. They are gained by responding to media requests for comments to include in articles published in highly respected news or industry publications. They add important credibility and insight to articles and also result in you receiving a highly authoritative backlink from a reputable online publication in return. As well as giving your backlink profile a massive boost, they also help you to position yourself as an expert in your field, which will benefit your business’s thought leadership SEO and will raise brand awareness.
Link Building Tools & Tech Stack
It is perfectly possible to carry out your link building efforts without the help of specialist tools. However, there are many tools and software out there that can help streamline your regular and international link building processes, allowing you to make the most of your time and resources.
These are the top link building tools you should be looking to implement into your link building workflow:
- Google Alerts – You can set up alerts to be notified whenever a word or phrase is mentioned on a new page. This is a great way to identify new link prospects or find unlinked brand mentions.
- Ahrefs Free Backlink Checker – Great for monitoring your or your competitors’ backlink profiles, as it displays the top 100 links that point to any URL.
- Ahrefs Content Explorer – Helps you find relevant websites to contact for guest posting and link requests.
- Ahrefs Site Explorer – Allows you to see all links that go to any URL and lets you filter them by a range of metrics. When doing this with competitor URLs, you can find new opportunities for backlinks to your own site.
- Ahrefs Alerts – A paid option that is similar to Google Alerts but allows you to filter based on SEO metrics.
- Pitchbox – One of the best email outreach platforms. Enables you to send personalised outreach emails at scale, saving you time.
- io – When it comes to SEO outreach tools that can help save you time, Hunter.io is a great option. It’s an email finder or look-up tool that makes finding the contact details for publishing sites easy.
- SurferSEO – SurferSEO is a content optimisation and analysis tool that helps you create high-ranking blog posts and articles. It’s a great tool for those who want to optimise their content so it appeals to those linking to it. Not quite seen as an AI writing tool, but it uses similar technology to suggest improvements to the content you’ve written.
- BuzzSumo – Helps you spot outreach opportunities in the media and search. It can also be used to carry out backlink analysis.
Measuring Link Building Success (Classic + AI KPIs)
It’s so important to keep track of the impact your link building campaigns are making. Monitoring your success will help you identify what’s working to better your backlink profile and what improvements you can make to your approach to link building for even better results. Without doing this, you’ll never know if your link building is being effective or not.
These are the key link building KPIs (key performance indicators) you should be measuring to get a clear picture of your link building success:
Domain Authority or Domain Rating
Moz’s domain authority (DA) and Ahrefs’ domain rating (DR) scores are used to determine the authority and quality of every backlink you earn. Google does not officially use them, but they use a secret scoring system to determine the authority of a domain. Looking at these scores can help you get an idea of how much link juice – or link equity – is being passed to your site through backlinks from another site. The higher a website’s authority, the more link equity will be transferred to you.
When doing link building campaigns to increase your standing in the SERPs, regularly checking your DA and DR scores can give you an idea of how your site’s authority is changing. It’s best to check this metric monthly so you can get a clear visual of how your authority is improving over time.
Traffic
There are 2 types of traffic you should be tracking when assessing the success of your link building campaigns: referral traffic and organic traffic.
Referral traffic is any visit that comes from your site through a backlink and not from a search engine query directly. It’s any traffic that comes from someone clicking on your link on a third-party website. It’s important to track this because links from other sites can help drive direct website traffic, conversions, and brand visibility. When you build links on sites with high traffic, tracking referring domains like this can help you see the true impact of your links.
Your organic traffic is important to track because it is the clearest sign that your authority is growing in the SERPs. If your link building campaign is paying off, it should lead to higher rankings and more users being able to find you through search.
Keyword Growth
When SEO link tracking, measuring your keyword growth is essential. As you know, backlinks help pages to rank, and if you’re building links to pages where you’ve targeted certain keywords, it’s a good idea to track the movement of your keywords in relevant search results. If you notice improvements in your rankings, great! If they aren’t getting higher, it might be a sign that you need more high-quality backlinks added to your profile.
Number of New Backlinks
Tracking the total number of new individual backlinks you have over a set period can help you gauge the effectiveness of your link building campaign. It helps you get a clear picture of whether you are building links consistently enough, which is vital to maintaining momentum and achieving better results in the SERPs. The number of links you build each month will depend on how competitive your industry is and how quickly you want to see results. Be sure to consider the DA and DR scores of the websites you’re targeting for backlinks to see the biggest uplift.
Referring Domains
Referring domains count how many unique websites link to your site, not the individual links you have. It’s important to monitor your referring domains because Google puts a lot of value on domain diversity. Getting links from different websites will do much more for your backlink profile than having several backlinks from just a handful of sites. The more sites that are linking to you tell Google that more separate domains trust you, which translates to better authority for you. Again, it all depends on your goals and industry as to how many unique domains you should aim for each month, but as a general rule, anywhere between 5 and 20 is a good goal to have.
AI Overview Appearances
Thanks to the rise of AI-driven search and features, your backlinks now have an influence on your visibility in these types of search results. To measure your AI snippet visibility, you can use visibility tools like Semrush and Ahrefs that can show when your website appears in an AI Overview. This type of tracking is still in its infancy, but as a rule, as your authority grows, you’ll expect to appear in more of this type of no-click search result. It’s important to look at this as more and more users are choosing to get their information from AI Overviews that offer fast answers when they need them most.
LLM Citations
People are turning to LLM models like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Bing’s Copilot for answers over search engines. Tracking your citations in LLM responses can be tricky, as measuring tools are still being developed. Semrush’s AI Toolkit can provide data on how your brand compares to competitors when it comes to LLM visibility. You can also manually check your visibility by running common queries in LLM models to see how often your brand and its content are mentioned.
Entity Boosts
Entity tracking is another way to measure the success of your link building campaigns. Similar to how keyword growth is measured, if you’re optimising your content for entities and creating backlinks to it from high authority websites, you should see your entity performance skyrocket with an impactful link building campaign. If you’re not seeing the improvements you’d like, then it’s a sign you should be building more high-quality links to your content.
Working Out Your Link Building ROI
Return on investment (ROI) in link building refers to the value you receive from your campaigns in relation to the expenses incurred. In other words, link ROI refers to metrics such as leads, traffic, revenue, and rankings. If the increased leads and traffic coming your way from link building are growing, it should be translating into more revenue for your business, and this is what you need to focus on. Link building is a slow and steady SEO technique that can take time to bear fruit, so you may need to wait anywhere from 6 months to a year to see a difference.
Future Trends in Link Building
SEO is constantly evolving, and link building isn’t immune to these changes, especially at a time when AI and LLMs are entering the SEO space. Quality, authoritative backlinks will always be important for search engine success, traditional and AI-based. However, these are our predictions about what the future of link building might look like.
LLMs and AI Might Shift Link Value
AI and LLMs are showing no signs of disappearing from the online space anytime soon. SEO has largely revolved around link building for decades, but LLMs and AI may change that as the types of links that you’ll need to build to appear in AI-driven responses and the strategies used to create them may alter.
The traditional approach to link building of earning backlinks from high-authority sites is still important. However, LLM link signals favour brand mentions, entity associations, and contextual relevance much more. This means that for your link building strategy to be effective in appearing in this new wave of search, you’ll need to put greater focus on appearing in trusted sources that lend themselves to being widely referenced and shared across the internet.
The more your brand name is mentioned in trusted, contextually relevant content on the web, the more likely it is that LLMs and AI-driven models will pick up on it. Your targeted AI SEO links need to be able to position you as a thought leader. Think Digital PR, Media Placements, and Expert Quotes to put your brand in the spotlight in AI search.
Content-As-Source Strategies Will Be Important
As we go forward, there will be an even bigger focus on content-as-source strategies to earn backlinks and appeal to modern AI-driven search engines. Source-optimised content is content that has been produced to be used as a source of high-value information that people will naturally want to link to and cite.
What type of content falls into this bracket?
- Data-rich content that discusses the results of surveys or research you’ve carried out.
- Content that provides expert commentary in the form of interviews or analysis.
- Information-rich definitive guides and resources (like this one).
- Curated lists.
- Infographics, charts, and maps that display complex information in straightforward ways.
For the biggest impact, you need to make sure that you are writing well-structured content that is clear, relevant, and satisfies the user intent of the keywords you are targeting. Content that has an easy-to-follow structure, with short, scannable sections and meaningful headings, also makes it easier for search engines and AI models to understand the content your backlinks lead to.
AI summaries are going to continue to be a huge aspect of search in the future, and to appeal to these, your content will also need to include:
- Bullet points
- Numbered lists
- Summaries
- Definitions
- FAQs
- How-tos
By focusing on the quality and type of content you create, you’ll naturally earn links and grow your brand mentions, which will build your authority and make AI-driven searches and LLM models notice you.
The Role of Structured Data
While structured data or schema markup doesn’t have a direct role in link building, it can indirectly affect it. Structured data is a type of website code that makes it easier for search engines to understand what your content is about. It also makes it easier for AI-driven searches and search engines to display your content in various ways, such as in AI summary SEO results, including AI Overviews, featured boxes, ‘People Also Ask’, rich snippets, and in LLM responses. Additionally, this also makes it easier for other sites to pull your data and for more reputable ones to trust you and link back to you, which is a win-win for your backlink profile.
There are different types of schema markup you can use in your content to make it easier for search engines and other websites to understand it and link back to you.
Here are some of the most relevant that you should be implementing in your content to stand out:
- About schema – Helps define what your pages are about so search engines and machines can easily parse and cite your content. It can be helpful to use on ‘About Us’ pages to help machines learn more about what your website is about, and build credibility.
- Article schema – Helps search engines’ read’ your article and blog content. Adding the following schema markup helps to give your pages additional context: ‘datePublished,’ ‘headline,’ and ‘author.’
- FAQ schema – ‘FAQPage’ schema highlights FAQs on your pages.
- Q&A schema – For question-and-answer style content, use QAPage markup with ‘question’ and ‘answer’ clearly flagged.
- Organisation markup – Use to add context about your company. Helps build brand identity and trust.
- Author markup – Tells search engines who the author is, building credibility and trust.
FAQs: Answering Common Link Building Questions
With so many digital marketing techniques out there, link building can be a lot to get your head around. That’s why we’ve put together this handy link building FAQs with all the answers to the most common backlink questions.
What Is Link Building?
When it comes to safe SEO practices to improve your online presence and visibility, link building is one of the best. It’s a technique that focuses on building high-quality links from reputable third-party websites to your own, which will improve your backlink profile and lead to increased authority and better rankings in the SERPs.
What Is A Backlink?
A backlink is a link that points to your website from another site. They’re an important ranking signal that indicates to search engines that your website and its content are relevant and can be trusted, resulting in better rankings and higher search engine visibility.
What Is Link Equity?
Also referred to as link juice, link equity is used to describe the SEO value that one website sends to another through linking. Websites with a higher authority score and a reputation for trustworthiness will pass on more link equity than those with lower scores and a reputation for being untrustworthy. To gain the most link equity, you should focus on building links from top-quality sites.
What Are The Benefits of Link Building?
Link building brings with it plenty of benefits. As well as better rankings in search engine results and improved visibility in the SERPs, you can expect increased organic and referral traffic. High-quality backlinks that are relevant help to grow your authority, which is important if you want to impress search engines and AI models.
What Is The Best Type of Link For Link Building?
The type of links you build will depend on your business and industry. As a rule, search engines and AI models prefer to see a diverse backlink profile, so it’s a good idea to incorporate a few different link building techniques into your strategy. Concentrating on getting links from authoritative sites and building them regularly and consistently is the best approach to take for meaningful results.
Is Guest Posting Dead?
The simple answer is no. If you want to build quality, contextual, and editorially placed backlinks, guest posting is an excellent way to do this. Link building is always evolving, and some techniques are more effective than others. However, guest posting is a technique that has stood the test of time in terms of helping websites build authority in the SERPs.
What Is Link Velocity?
Link velocity is a term used to describe the speed at which a website acquires backlinks over time. It’s a metric that basically indicates how fast a site gets links from others. Link velocity refers to the number of new backlinks acquired over a specified timeframe. A positive link velocity suggests that your site is attracting more links over time, a negative link velocity indicates it’s losing links over time, and a competitive link velocity tells you how your link velocity compares to a competitor. To impress search engines, you need to maintain a steady link velocity, so they don’t mistake your backlinks as spam if you build too many too quickly.
What’s The Difference Between Nofollow and Dofollow Links?
A dofollow backlink is one that passes authority from one page to another and has a positive impact on rankings and online search visibility. A nofollow link is a link with the “rel=nofollow” HTML tag that tells search engines to ignore it when crawling and indexing. Because of this, they do not pass authority on between sites. When it comes to deciding on nofollow vs dofollow links, dofollow links help your SEO, and nofollow links don’t pass on any value, but can help your referral traffic if someone clicks on it.
Do Nofollow Links Help?
In terms of whether or not nofollow links help your SEO, they don’t have a direct impact on your rankings. However, despite telling search engines to ignore the link, nofollow links do serve a purpose. Anyone reading an article with a nofollow link can still click on it and be transported to your site, so nofollow links can help boost traffic. As well as this, they can help to diversify your backlink profile so it does not just contain dofollow links, which could flag spammy practices to search engines, making it appear more natural, and protecting you against penalties.
How Fast Should I Build Links?
How aggressive your approach to link building is will depend on a few factors, including your industry and competitors. It’s important not to trigger any of Google’s spam detection algorithms by building massive volumes of links all at once. Instead, it’s best to take a slow and steady approach to acquiring links for maximum impact.
How Many Links Do I Need To Rank Better?
There’s no definitive answer to exactly how many links you need to rank better. The number of links you need to stand out in the SERPs will depend on several factors, including your starting point, business needs, industry, and how your competitors compare to you. While the number of backlinks you have does have some impact on your backlink profile, it’s much more important to focus on the quality of the links pointing towards your site, as these carry more weight in boosting your backlink profile.
Conclusion: Build Links That Endure Algorithm Changes
Whether you’re building links yourself or working with an agency like ours, you need to ensure that your approach to link building is sustainable and benefits your long-term SEO. Sustainable link building is all about building links that survive algorithm changes and the continuing rise of AI search engines and features.
To do this, you need to double down on your efforts to make sure that the links you are building are coming from high-authority, relevant websites that users and search engines trust and value highly. Without this, your link future-proofing won’t stand a chance. Traditional, white hat SEO techniques with an even stronger focus on trust and authority remain the most powerful way to build links that truly make a difference to your backlink profile long-term and increase your online visibility in traditional search engine results and AI ones.
If you’re worried about any element of link building in 2025 and beyond, then this helpful guide has all the information you need to remain successful in the SERPs and AI results. What’s more, our white label link building service and regular link building service have firm foundations in trust-based SEO that will stand up to any future algorithm changes, so get in touch to find out more about how we can help you future-proof your link building efforts.
