Does Link Building Still Help, or Is It Mostly Outdated Advice?

The short answer

Link building still does something. It's just not the thing most business owners think it is anymore, and it's definitely not the thing that determines whether ChatGPT or Perplexity recommends you when someone asks for "a good plumber near me" or "best dentist for kids in Austin."

Links were built for a different job: helping Google's crawler understand that other websites trust you enough to point at you. That job still exists. Google still uses links as one of many ranking signals. But the AI recommendation layer that's growing on top of search works differently, and treating link building as your main strategy there is where the "outdated advice" complaint comes from.

What links actually still do

Backlinks from real, relevant sites (a local news mention, a chamber of commerce listing, an industry association page) still tell search engines something useful about your credibility. That hasn't gone away.

What has changed is the return on effort. A lot of the link building industry that grew up around SEO turned into a numbers game: directories, guest posts written purely to plant a link, paid placements on sites nobody reads. Search engines got much better at spotting that pattern and discounting it. So the practice of buying or mass-producing links stopped paying off the way it did years ago, even though the underlying idea (real endorsements matter) is still true.

For a local business, this means the links worth having are the ones that would exist anyway if you were doing normal business things: your local paper covering an event you sponsored, a supplier listing you as a certified installer, a neighborhood blog reviewing your shop. Those are slow to get and hard to fake, which is exactly why they still carry weight.

Why AI recommendations run on a different signal set

Here's the part that matters most if you're thinking about where to spend your time. When ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, or Perplexity answer a question like "who should I call for emergency HVAC repair in Denver," they're not crawling a link graph the way a search engine ranks pages. They're drawing on patterns learned from huge amounts of text, plus, for some tools, live web results pulled in at the moment of the answer.

What tends to show up in that mix is consistent, clear, structured information about your business: what you do, where you operate, what makes you different, phrased in plain language across your site and the places that mention you. Schema markup that tells machines what kind of business you are. A clear meta description. Headings that state facts instead of burying them in marketing copy. Consistency in your name, service area, and specialty across the web, not just backlinks pointing at you.

A pile of low-quality backlinks doesn't help with any of that. It doesn't make an AI model more likely to describe you accurately, because the model isn't counting your links, it's trying to understand and recall who you are and what you do.

What's actually worth doing instead

If you're deciding where to put your energy, this is the honest order of priority for local businesses right now:

• •Make sure your own site clearly states what you do, who you serve, and where, in plain sentences an AI could quote back
• •Add basic schema markup so search engines and AI tools have structured facts to work from, not just prose to interpret
• •Keep your business details (name, address, services, hours) consistent everywhere you're listed
• •Earn the occasional real, relevant mention, a local write-up, a partner page, an association listing, without chasing volume
• •Check periodically whether AI tools actually mention you when someone asks a relevant question, and fix the gaps you find

That last point is the one most businesses skip, because until recently there wasn't an easy way to check it. That's the specific thing Belcher does: it asks the AI models a recommendation-style question about your business, reads your site for the basic signals mentioned above (schema, meta description, headings, page speed), and generates the fix content, schema snippets, FAQ blocks, meta descriptions, that you can paste in yourself.

The honest takeaway

Link building isn't dead advice, but it's old advice for a problem that's changed shape. If your goal is to be findable and understandable to both search engines and AI tools, a handful of real, earned mentions will always help a little. But the bigger lever now is making sure the facts about your business are clear, structured, and consistent everywhere they appear, so that when an AI model is asked about a business like yours, it actually has something accurate to say.