Does link building get you cited by AI?

Backlink outreach is the one piece of classic SEO advice every GEO pitch keeps intact. Build authority, earn links, wait for the ranking to move. Two correlation studies published in the last year, run independently of each other, agree that this habit barely carries over — and one of them found something that does.

Neither study proves that any single tactic causes AI visibility. Correlation studies never do. What they show is which signals move together with being mentioned by an AI assistant, at a scale no single business can test on its own. That is worth something even without proof of causation, because it tells you where the odds sit before you spend a euro.

The study that expected backlinks to matter

Seer Interactive pulled over 300,000 finance and SaaS keywords, collected the "People Also Ask" questions those keywords triggered on Google and Bing, narrowed the list to 10,000 relevant questions, and ran all of them through OpenAI's GPT-4o API to see which brands got named (Seer Interactive). Then they correlated who got mentioned against a set of SEO signals, backlinks included.

Backlinks did not follow the same pattern. In the researchers' own words: "We expected backlinks to play a big role, but their impact was weak or even neutral." Content variety — images, video, ads on the page — fared no better: "Multi-modal content didn't move the needle as much as we thought it would." Ranking on the search engine itself still mattered. The backlink profile that is supposed to produce that ranking did not show up as a separate factor worth chasing.

A bigger study puts a number on it

Ahrefs ran the same kind of analysis at a different scale: 75,000 brands with a Domain Rating above 40, checked against their visibility across ChatGPT, Google's AI Mode and AI Overviews (Ahrefs). Domain Rating is Ahrefs' own backlink-based authority score — the closest thing to a single number for "how good is this site's link profile."

For comparison, on Ahrefs' own scale: branded search volume correlated at 0.352 on ChatGPT and 0.466 on AI Mode, branded anchors at 0.628 on AI Mode, and how much a brand shows up on the open web by name ("branded web mentions") correlated at 0.66–0.71 across platforms. Total number of pages on a site barely registered, at roughly 0.194 — Ahrefs called it "almost no relationship." Domain Rating sat near the bottom, well below every mentions-based signal.

What actually correlated: video, not links

Ahrefs is careful about what this does and does not mean, and so are we: "correlation isn't causation… that doesn't mean improving these metrics will automatically boost your AI visibility." A brand that gets talked about on YouTube is probably also a brand people talk about everywhere else, which makes it hard to isolate video as the cause. What the number does support is a ranking of where the evidence points, and on that ranking, showing up in video content outranks everything backlink-related that either study tested.

Where a five-person business should put the hours instead

Yext looked at this from a different angle entirely: not what correlates with visibility, but where AI citations physically come from. Across 6.8 million citations pulled from 1.6 million AI-generated responses on Gemini, OpenAI and Perplexity, 86% originated from sources a brand itself controls or strongly influences — 44% from its own website, 42% from directory and platform listings, and a further 8% from reviews and social profiles. Only 6% came from sources genuinely out of a brand's hands: news, forums, and everything else (Yext).

For a company with five or twenty people, the practical order of operations follows from that. Before spending a quarter's budget on outreach for links, make sure the website answers the questions customers actually ask, close every open directory listing (Google Business Profile first, then the ones specific to the trade), and if there is any capacity left over, put it into a handful of plain, well-titled videos — a product demo, a few customer testimonials, an explainer for the most-asked question. None of this requires an agency retainer for link outreach. It requires deciding to spend the hours somewhere the numbers say they count.

None of this rules out link building for its original purpose — ranking on Google is still worth ~0.65 correlation with getting named by GPT-4o, and links still influence rankings. It just means "we'll build you backlinks" should not be sold as an AI-visibility service on its own. The data says something else earns that budget first.