Backlinks Right Now: Five Reports, Summed Up

Every week someone asks me whether backlinks still matter. Five reports are doing the rounds in SEO circles right now, and between them they answer the question better than any opinion piece could. Here is what each one actually found, in my words, and what I think a small business should do about it.

1. Ranking first no longer gets you quoted by Google's AI

Ahrefs re-ran its study of where Google's AI Overviews take their citations from, and the overlap with normal rankings fell off a cliff. In July 2025, 76% of the pages Google quoted in an AI Overview also ranked in the top ten for that search. The 2026 re-run, covering 863,000 keywords and four million cited URLs, puts that at 38%. Roughly a third of the citations now come from pages ranked 11 to 100, and another third from pages that do not rank in the top 100 at all. Almost a fifth of those unranked citations are YouTube videos. Ahrefs is honest that part of the drop is better detection on their side, so the two numbers are not a clean comparison. The practical point stands anyway: being number one for a keyword used to be most of the battle for AI visibility, and now it is less than half of it. Cover the topic from several angles and formats instead of polishing one page for one phrase.

2. Being mentioned beats being linked, for AI answers

The second Ahrefs study looked at 75,000 brands and asked which off-site signals line up with how often a brand is named in AI Overviews. The winner by a distance was plain mentions of the brand name across the web, with a correlation of 0.664. Branded anchor text came next at 0.527, branded search volume at 0.392. Domain Rating sat at 0.326, referring domains at 0.295, and the raw number of backlinks at 0.218. Brands in the top quarter for web mentions averaged 169 AI Overview mentions; the next quarter down averaged 14. Correlation is not cause, and Ahrefs says so. But if you are a small business deciding where to spend effort, this says a newspaper paragraph that names you, with no link, is worth more to AI search than a directory link nobody reads.

3. For ChatGPT, links still matter, but as a threshold

SE Ranking went the other way and found that referring domains were the single strongest predictor of whether ChatGPT cites a site, across 129,000 domains and 216,000 pages in 20 niches. The shape of the curve is the interesting part. Sites with up to 2,500 referring domains averaged under two citations; the biggest jump came around 32,000 referring domains, where the average nearly doubled. Domain-level trust mattered far more than page-level trust, Reddit and Quora mentions lined up with roughly four times the citations, and government and university domains did not get a free pass. The finding that stung a little here: adding an llms.txt file had no measurable effect on ChatGPT citations. We offer a free llms.txt generator and we still think the file is a cheap, harmless courtesy to AI crawlers, but nobody should expect it to move a needle on its own. The honest reading of SE Ranking's data is that a small site will not out-link its way into ChatGPT. It gets cited by being the clear answer on a topic and being talked about where people talk.

4. Toxic backlinks are now a courtroom matter

In June a federal judge in Chicago let most of a lawsuit between two car-shipping brokers go forward. Montway says a rival, Nexus AT, pointed thousands of spammy links at Montway's sites, some with the company's own domain name as the anchor text leading to gambling and adult sites, others with anchor text like "online casino" and "heroin is a drug" pointing back at Montway. The court said that reads like negative advertising, so the false advertising, trademark and tarnishment claims survive, along with an Illinois consumer protection claim. The California claim was thrown out. Nothing has been proven yet; this was only the motion to dismiss. Still, it is the first time I have seen a court treat a negative SEO campaign as something you can sue over under advertising law. If you ever notice a wave of junk links aimed at your site, screenshot everything, export the backlink report, and keep the dates. Google says it ignores most of that spam, and usually it does, but a paper trail now has legal value.

5. Google's spam updates keep coming, and this one took two weeks

Google's September 2026 spam update started on September 24 and finished on October 8, after 13 days and 16 hours. That is the fourth spam update of the year and by far the slowest: March took under a day, June two days, August under three. Google did not say what it targeted, and nothing in its notes mentions links. The link spam policy has not changed either: buying or selling links to move rankings, big link exchanges, automated links and content that exists only to carry links are all still against the rules, and a paid link has to carry a sponsored or nofollow tag. If your traffic moved during those two weeks, check Search Console before you blame the update. A rank tracker showing a wobble is not evidence; a sustained drop in impressions and clicks is.

What I take from all five

Links are not dead, but they are no longer the whole job. For classic Google rankings, real editorial links from relevant sites still carry weight, and the spam updates mean the shortcuts carry risk. For AI answers, which is where more and more small-business searches end up, the signal is your name showing up in places people trust, whether or not a link comes with it. Local press, podcasts, industry newsletters, a straight answer on Reddit, a case study a client is happy to share: that is the work. Publishing something original helps on both fronts. This week we put out a dataset measuring 192 three.js websites with Lighthouse, and the write-up follows next week. Nobody links to a brochure, but people link to numbers. If you want help figuring out which of these moves fits your business, the lead generation page explains how we work, and the AI search optimization page covers the mentions side.