The industry is quietly defunding link building. That is the argument for doing more of it.
I have recorded a lot of interviews this year, and this is the one place where a former Ahrefs product manager, a data engineer who ran a hundred-industry correlation study, and a twenty-year agency SEO all ended up in the same spot without being asked to. Links are getting scarcer because fewer teams are paying for them. Scarce signals get more useful, not less.
Patrick Stox measured the correlation dropping and drew the opposite conclusion
Patrick spent about six and a half years at Ahrefs before going independent, which means when he says he looked at the data, he was looking at the index. He is blunt about what he found:
“the correlation with rankings went down overall compared to what we’ve seen traditionally”
— Patrick Stox, Unscripted SEO
Most people stop reading there. He did not stop there:
“the general trend I see in the industry is people are kind of going away from the links. And that means it’s actually probably gonna be more of a differentiator in the future… now that they’re more rare, the links actually matter more.”
— Patrick Stox
That is a supply argument, not a ranking-factor argument. If a signal is cheap to fake, everybody fakes it and it gets discounted. If a signal gets expensive and unfashionable at the same time, the systems that still read it get better information from it. You do not need a leaked document to follow that logic.
Ben Wills ran the study twice and put a warning label on the front
Ben builds AI search tooling at Opp Alerts and describes himself as roughly a third marketer, a third engineer and a third scientist. He ran two separate analyses, one in May and one in July, the second across a hundred industries with ten generated personas each. What he says about backlinks and LLM recommendations is careful, and the care is the point:
“The search principles are gonna come right back. You gotta have good quality content. There’s gotta be a lot of it distributed across the web. You gotta have backlinks.”
— Ben Wills, Unscripted SEO
He also wrote a full page of caveats before he let anyone near the numbers:
“There was a full page before I got to the data saying, This is correlation, not causality, this is what it means.”
— Ben Wills
And on what to do with a correlation anyway: “I basically treat it as it’s not perfect, but it’s at least data, it’s it’s at least decent enough to make a decision on.” That is the right posture. A correlation tells you where to look. It does not tell you what to build.
Rob Bonham’s easiest links came from companies already writing him cheques
Rob has spent over half his career inside agencies. When I asked him where the guardrails are in link building, he did not talk about vendors at all. He talked about suppliers.
“one thing that I’ve seen work quite a bit in in links is is getting links from like legitimate partners that that that you work with… And it worked tremendously well and it was very easy. Typically, good link building is is not very easy. It’s it’s tedious, it requires a lot of outreach.”
— Rob Bonham, Unscripted SEO
The client was an e-commerce MRO parts supplier carrying hundreds of brands. Those brands all had store locators. Nobody had ever asked to be listed. “We’re not paying for these links. We’re we’re not we’re not twisting their arm,” he said. That is the cheapest link inventory most companies own and never audit.
Christopher Gimmer thinks the inbox is what actually broke
Christopher bootstrapped Snappa and now runs Goodmetrics. His read on why outreach stopped working is not about Google at all:
“it’s it’s hard to do kind of traditional link building now just because like everyone’s inboxes are full of spam and stuff like that. And so I think people are more willing and likely to link out to a really good tool that actually solves a problem versus a yet another you know, blog post with you know, a wall of text.”
— Christopher Gimmer, Unscripted SEO
Put those four together and the shape of the work changes. The channel did not die. The cold channel died, and everything warm got more valuable by comparison.
What that actually means for your next quarter
- Audit your existing commercial relationships first. Suppliers, distributors, partners, franchisors, the trade body you already pay dues to. Rob’s point is that this is the one bucket where the relationship pre-dates the ask.
- Stop counting links and start counting mentions. Rob’s current priority is “unlinked mentions, getting b you know, visibility on on other third party publications and marketplace sites.” Those feed the same reputation the models read.
- Build the thing people link to. Christopher’s alternative to a wall of text is a tool. A calculator, a checker, a real dataset.
- Write your caveats down. If you are reporting a correlation to a client, do what Ben did and put the limits on the page before the chart.
Everyone is walking out of the room. That is usually a decent time to notice what they left behind.
Quotes are taken verbatim from the raw Riverside transcripts of these episodes, trimmed only for false starts and filler. More conversations like this at Unscripted SEO and SEO Arcade.
