Hi there,
Amit here from The Links Guy here.
There’s a belief spreading quietly right now:
“Backlinks don’t really matter anymore because AI search doesn’t use them.”
It sounds reasonable on the surface.
But when you look at the data, it doesn’t hold up that cleanly.
In September 2025, Kevin Indig, in partnership with Semrush, analyzed how backlink-related signals correlate with AI visibility and mentions (i.e. “Share of voice”) across systems like:
ChatGPT
ChatGPT (Search enabled)
Gemini
Google AI Overviews
Perplexity
The analysis covered:
1,000 randomly selected domains
~35,000 datapoints
Multiple correlation methods (Pearson and Spearman)
Here’s what the data actually showed.
Authority still correlates with AI visibility.
Authority Score (Semrush) → AI mentions
Pearson: 0.65
Spearman: 0.57
The relationship wasn’t linear - visibility increased sharply only once higher authority thresholds were reached. A few high level points I gathered from it:
Unique linking domains mattered more than raw backlink counts.
In other words, who links to you correlated more strongly than how many links you had. Nothing majorly different here.Quality of links (if we consider “domain authority”, traffic of those linking sites, inbound links, spam score etc) goes up very sharply, at higher quality markers.
Important not to get bogged down with Semrush’s “authority score” here, but when you take into account things which tend to indicate a good quality site, overall, it impacts AI visibility.
Follow and nofollow links both showed meaningful correlations.
The distinction mattered less than it historically has. Makes sense, if you get digital PR coverage, or niche media that won’t use dofollow links, it's still worth getting.Image links correlated more strongly with AI mentions than text links, particularly in mid-to-high authority domains.
Source (full study):
https://www.growth-memo.com/p/how-ai-really-weighs-your-links-analysis
A few important clarifications.
First, correlation ≠ instruction.
I would say the image-link finding is not a recommendation to go chase image links as a tactic.
In practice, image links usually indicate:
original visuals
charts, diagrams, or data others want to reference
content that’s reused because it adds clarity to a complex topic
At TLG, we see this pattern ourselves - people naturally embed and link to images when those assets genuinely help explain something.
Second, the takeaway isn’t “links are back” or “links are dead.”
It’s that authority and third-party references still matter, but not in a simplistic, linear way.
Backlinks haven’t disappeared from the system.
They’ve just become one signal among several that AI systems appear to use when inferring authority. But - make sure you’re getting good quality links/citations.
That distinction matters - especially if you’re trying to build something durable.
— Amit