Backlinks have been a confirmed Google ranking factor for years. But have you ever seen ChatGPT pull up information from a site with no domain authority or organic traffic? I have.
LLMs clearly don’t weigh links the same way Google does. Yet a Semrush study found a strong correlation between the quality of a site’s links and its visibility in AI search.
Backlinks still matter for SEO and AEO, but acquiring them comes with caveats — low outreach reply rates, little control over how other sites link to yours, resource limitations, and the inevitability of link decay.
After six years of link acquisition experience across 90+ SaaS brands, I’ve found that three approaches — link building, linkable assets, and digital PR — work best when they support one another. Used together, they can help you become the central authority on the topics that matter to your brand.
How link building, linkable assets, and digital PR differ
I’ll use these three terms to name separate link acquisition approaches.
- Link building involves asking for links. Whether you’re guest posting, restoring broken links, or trying to get links in brand mentions, there’s usually an explicit ask.
- Linkable assets are pieces of content that naturally attract backlinks. You don’t ask for them. You earn them through the appeal of the content.
- Digital PR is based on a story that grabs attention. You ask outlets to take a look at your story, not to give you links. Yet you can earn links as a result of your story’s newsworthiness.
Both link building and digital PR require proactive outreach, but the ask is different: links versus story coverage. Linkable assets can earn links on their own, though promoting them with digital PR can significantly increase the volume and quality of these links. And note that linkable assets are just one of the content types that can create PR-worthy stories.
Historically, link building success has been measured by the number of followed links and the quality of the linking sites (mainly based on domain authority and organic traffic).
But holding linkable assets and digital PR to that same bar is short-sighted. A brand mention in top-tier media outlets covering a relevant topic can be more powerful than a standard followed link.
That’s especially true in AI search, where a study found visibility in AI Overviews has a stronger correlation with brand mentions (0.664) than with backlinks (0.218). This is likely why I now see link-building outreach used to request brand mentions, even if they carry no links.
Plus, linkable assets and digital PR create nofollow links and brand mentions, which you can then address through link building.
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The case for link building
Out of the three approaches, link building has the highest probability of driving links to your commercial pages. That’s because you have a level of control over what links you’d be receiving as you’re explicitly asking for them.
Some tactics, like guest posting, also allow you to control the context and anchor of your links, as long as they pass editorial approval.
But adhering to Google’s link spam policies makes it very challenging to scale link building, as Google condemns both link buying and excessive link exchanges. If you’ve come across a scalable link-building approach, it probably violates these guidelines.
Based on a 2024 Google Search document leak, we can infer that the search algorithm devalues the impact of poor backlinks or ignores them entirely. This strengthens the case for fewer, higher-quality links.
Despite all the challenges, I view link building as an essential element of a well-rounded link acquisition strategy. It’s one to use with caution and rigorous quality control. When I use it, I target predominantly landing pages and converting BOFU blog posts because linkable assets and digital PR struggle to deliver such backlinks.
The set-it-and-forget-it linkable assets
There are different types of linkable assets. They fall into two broad categories: self-earning assets that attract links on their own and PR-promoted assets that you actively pitch through digital PR.
While there are no hard lines on what falls into one bucket or the other, I typically let linkable assets that are easy to produce deliver results naturally. This includes:
- Free tools such as a domain name generator or a mortgage calculator.
- Top lists of people, companies, or software in a given industry.
- Templates and checklists, such as an SEO audit template.
- Statistical articles based on third-party data, such as a collection of stats from other companies.
All of these formats can deliver links on their own, as long as they gain visibility through search rankings or passive distribution to your email list, social following, or other existing channels.
Yet they don’t make good PR outreach material.
A free tool such as Canva’s business name generator is useful, so it’s no wonder it got close to 2,000 followed links from unique domains. Out of all these links, none come from a reputable media outlet.
That’s not to say tools in general can’t earn media links. But they usually support a story a journalist is already writing, rather than being the story itself. This is how Canva’s image generator got featured in Inc.com and Fast Company as part of a broader story about AI.
Third-party statistical data runs into the same limitation. It works like a charm in earning natural links because tracking down a data point’s original source is often difficult. So, many writers default to linking to the first current stat they find.
That’s how, at my company, we recently got a link in a U.S. Chamber of Commerce article that has over 30,000 organic monthly clicks. But you can’t pitch this to journalists because the data isn’t originally yours, it’s just an aggregation.
Self-earning linkable assets are usually easy to produce and can reliably scale link acquisition. For consistent results, you can produce multiple assets targeting a variety of topics to cast a wider net.
Also, to give your self-earning linkable assets an initial push and help them rank, you can get their first few links with guest posting or broken link building. As long as you keep your assets up to date, they can deliver links for years.
But self-earning linkable assets typically drive links only to themselves. They can’t deliver links to your commercial pages. A good middle ground is to create internal links from your linkable assets to your related commercial pages. This way, your converting pages will still get part of the asset’s link equity.
Where digital PR comes in
Digital PR can involve promoting original linkable assets, but it can also include expert commentary, a founder interview, or an interesting take on something in the news. No matter the story you’re creating, you need something that will interest journalists, and ultimately, their audience.
Links from digital PR typically point to a linkable asset or your homepage.
Facing the unpredictability of digital PR
This tactic is scalable because a successful campaign can take off and be syndicated hundreds of times. Here, though, lies the biggest flaw of digital PR — its results are hard to predict.
Even a seasoned PR professional can’t guarantee a campaign will land coverage. That explains how our study of what people build with Hostinger’s vibe coding tool received no backlinks at all.
The good thing is, a digital PR story doesn’t have to be a one-time push. You can keep updating your successful campaigns and relaunching outreach over time to continue getting coverage.
For a campaign that flops, sometimes taking a different angle or tying to something happening in the news can spark attention.
The cost of digital PR campaigns
Your spend on a digital PR campaign can vary a lot, even when you’re working entirely with first-party data, such as proprietary data or an original survey.
Research based on data from your tool’s usage requires only data analysis and creation of visual assets that clearly communicate your key findings. A large survey, by contrast, can set you back a few thousand dollars.
Using a blended approach that draws on different data sources (first-party, third-party, and open data) typically helps you develop a strong methodology while keeping costs reasonable.
For instance, at a SaaS company, we created a statistical linkable asset using the most recent third-party data. We then enhanced it with extra data points collected with Semrush and Google Trends.
Creating this asset didn’t require its own budget, but because it interpreted readily available data in a new way, it secured more than 50 links from unique domains, including Entrepreneur and Shopify.
When it comes to surveys, you can take a small sample of niche respondents and then combine the insights with data from free sources such as Google Trends, online reviews, government statistics, or social media APIs to add more angles to your story.
Here’s an example. Gusto surveyed 1,000 U.S. workers to uncover insights into job anxiety related to the rise of AI. Then, layering in Google Trends data for state-level insights, the team avoided the need for a statistically significant survey for every state. More than 40 unique domains link to this page.
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How link building, linkable assets, and digital PR work together
As AI search share continues to grow, brands need to think of their off-page efforts holistically. The goal is to build quality links while becoming the central authority on a topic and consistently getting mentioned in relation to it.
To achieve that, you need to put your eggs into three baskets: link building, linkable assets, and digital PR.
Let’s illustrate how the three interact for an imaginary time tracking tool:
- Link building can kickstart a linkable asset: You build a link from a guest post about team productivity to your linkable asset — a page with 50 productivity statistics.
- Linkable assets can support your commercial pages: You add internal links from that statistics page to your time tracking tool’s landing page.
- Self-earning linkable assets can become PR-worthy stories: You pitch the media with a story on how much time workers spend answering emails, based on your tool’s internal data.
- Digital PR can create new link building opportunities: You reach out to the sites that covered your email-time story but didn’t link to it, and request the link.
- Digital PR stories can become evergreen self-earning linkable assets: Your email-time story keeps earning links on its own, long after the initial outreach push ends.
All three approaches help you in traditional and AI search, building connections between your brand and the topics you want to be known for.
To track the impact of link acquisition properly, I’d recommend building out four views:
- Referral traffic and revenue from links.
- Correlation between links acquired and a page’s performance in rankings, traffic, AI visibility, citations, and revenue.
- AI visibility and citations of your linkable assets.
- Overall brand visibility and citations, split by topic and market.
The ultimate goal is to own a topic. In other words, when someone is writing a well-researched piece on a key topic for your brand, you already have all the resources they might need.