Before we jump in:

  • I hate to brag, but I will say I’m extremely proud to have placed 4th in the G50 SEO World Championships this past week.
  • I’m speaking at NESS, the global News & Editorial SEO Summit, on October 22. Growth Memo readers get 20% off when code “kevin2025”

Boost your skills with Growth Memo’s weekly expert insights. Subscribe for free!

Historically, backlinks have always been one of the most reliable currencies of visibility in search results.

We know links matter for visibility in AI-based search, but how they work inside LLMs – including AI Overviews, Gemini, or ChatGPT & Co.- is still somewhat of a black box.

The rise of AI search models changes the rules of organic visibility and the competition for share of voice in LLM results.

So the question is, do backlinks still earn visibility in AI-based modalities of search… and if so, which ones?

If backlinks were the currency of the pre-LLM web, this week’s analysis is a first look at whether they’re still legal tender in the new AI search economy.

Together with Semrush, I analyzed 1,000 domains and their AI mentions against core backlink metrics.

Image Credit: Kevin Indig

The data surfaced four clear takeaways:

  1. Backlink-earned authority helps, but it’s not everything.
  2. Link quality outweighs volume.
  3. Most surprisingly, nofollow links pull real weight.
  4. Image links can move the needle on authority.

These findings help us all understand how AI models surface sites, along with exposing what backlink levers marketers can pull to influence visibility.

Below, you’ll find the methodology, deeper data takeaways, and, for premium subscribers, recommendations (with benchmarks) to put these findings into action.

Methodology

For this analysis, I looked at relationships between AI mentions for 1,000 randomly selected web domains. All data is from the Semrush AI SEO Toolkit, Semrush’s AI visibility & search analytics platform.

Along with the Semrush team, I examined the number of mentions across:

  • ChatGPT.
  • ChatGPT with Search activated.
  • Gemini.
  • Google’s AI Overviews.
  • Perplexity.

(If you’re wondering where Claude.ai fits in this analysis, we didn’t include it at this time as its user base is generally less focused on web search and more on generative tasks.)

For the platforms above, we measured Share of Voice and the number of AI mentions against the following backlink metrics:

  • Total backlinks.
  • Unique linking domains.
  • Follow links.
  • Nofollow links.
  • Authority Score (a Semrush metric referred to as Ascore below).
  • Text links.
  • Image links.

In this analysis, I used two different ways of measuring correlation across the data: a Pearson correlation and a Spearman correlation.

If you are familiar with these concepts, skip to the next section where we dive into the results.

For everyone else, I’ll break these down so you have a better understanding of the findings below.

Both Pearson and Spearman are correlation coefficients – numbers between -1 and +1 that…


Source link

Disclaimer

We strive to uphold the highest ethical standards in all of our reporting and coverage. We blogs.grocliq.com want to be transparent with our readers about any potential conflicts of interest that may arise in our work. It’s possible that some of the investors we feature may have connections to other businesses, including competitors or companies we write about. However, we want to assure our readers that this will not have any impact on the integrity or impartiality of our reporting. We are committed to delivering accurate, unbiased news and information to our audience, and we will continue to uphold our ethics and principles in all of our work. Thank you for your trust and support.

Website Upgradation is going on for any glitch kindly connect at [email protected]

 

 

Categorized in:

Blog,

Last Update: October 1, 2025