Link building in AI search: a glossary
Link building
What is Link building?
Link building is the practice of getting other websites to link to yours, historically in order to pass ranking authority and now, increasingly, in order to place accurate statements about your brand on pages that AI systems read.
Who uses the term Link building?
Link building is the standard term across the SEO industry worldwide, used by agencies, in-house teams and the vendors who sell placements. It has been in continuous use since the late 1990s.
The term has outlived several of the mechanics it described. Reciprocal links, directory submissions and article spinning were all link building; so is digital PR.
How does Link building differ from related terms?
Link building is the whole discipline. Digital PR, guest posting, broken link building and citation building are tactics inside it.
Link earning is sometimes used to distinguish placements gained through merit from placements bought. The distinction matters commercially but AI systems do not read a link's commercial history, they read the page it sits on.
What does Link Building in the Era of AI Search Engines say about Link building?
The book's position is that link building did not die, it changed jobs, and has been promoted from vote-stuffing to evidence-building. Its closing argument is that the practitioners who understand the new job are about to have the best decade of their careers, and that the corroboration ledgers are mostly empty right now because most of the industry is still arguing about domain metrics.