Are Backlink still important for LLM search engines?

Hi,
Before the launch of LLM search engines, we were building backlinks for their website to rank on the search engines. We were using some free tools like checkbytools and ahref for checking the backlinkks. Now everybody talking about AI traffic and things have changed.

People are more focused on the listing website in AI overview or llm search engines.

Do we still need to work on backlinks? Backlinks are still important in SEO or things changed to somewhere else?

 

Backlinks will always be important, for logical reasons.

Google cannot goto your site and say 'This is great content, I will rank it high'

Why? Because it's a bot, and it cannot make subjective calls, as what is great to one person might not be to another.

So it relies on signals, the heaviest weighted will always be backlinks, again, for logical reasons.

 

I think the backlinks and content are same important for website ranking.