Agree with the consensus here, and Alrebro makes a fair point about crawlability. One thing I'd add: think about how AI answers actually get built. They quote from sources that are easy to extract and attribute — clear headings, direct answers early in the section, factual statements that stand on their own. A page can have solid backlinks and still rarely get cited if its content is buried in meandering prose. In practice I now treat link earning and 'quote-readiness' as two halves of the same effort. Original data, proprietary research, and concrete examples earn the links; clean structure and quotable summaries make sure those links translate into citations when the answer engines respond. Also worth noting: unlinked brand mentions on authoritative, topical sites increasingly do real work. When a niche's trusted sources consistently name you as the go-to, that shapes how models describe the category — no hyperlink required.
Yes, backlinks are still important for LLM-powered search engines, although their impact varies across platforms. Quality backlinks can help build website authority, credibility, and discoverability. However, LLM search visibility also depends on helpful content, relevant information, brand mentions, and a technically accessible website. Focus on earning relevant, trustworthy backlinks naturally rather than building links just for quantity.
A practical way to settle this for your own niche instead of in theory: take 20 questions your customers actually ask, run them through ChatGPT search, Perplexity and Google's AI Overviews, and note which domains get cited. In most niches the list is dominated by pages that other sites already reference: review roundups, comparison pages, forum threads, explainer-style resources. So links still matter, but often one step removed. The link that helps is the one that gets you mentioned on the pages the AI keeps citing, not a random guest post on a site nobody quotes. Two other things worth checking. First, whether AI crawlers can reach your pages at all, since robots.txt rules and Cloudflare's bot settings block some of them by default now. Second, whether your brand is described the same way across the places that mention you. If three sites describe you three different ways, the summary you get back is usually muddled.