Do Backlinks Still Matter When AI Answers the Question?

Do backlinks affect AI Overviews? Yes, but mostly indirectly. AI Overviews pull their sources from Google’s normal index, so links still help a page get found and rank. Links alone won’t get you cited, though. In one large study, brand mentions predicted AI Overview visibility about three times better than backlinks.

I run Linkscope, so I’d love to tell you links are the whole story. They aren’t. Below is what Google has actually said, what the large studies show, and what happened when my agency got a client into nine AI Overviews without building a single link.

How AI Overviews Choose Their Sources

Google’s own guide to AI features is short and fairly blunt. The same SEO basics apply. To show up as a supporting link, a page has to be indexed and eligible to appear in Search with a snippet. And there are no extra technical requirements beyond that. None.

The interesting part is how the answer gets built. Google says AI Overviews may use “query fan-out”, running several related searches across subtopics before writing a response. So your page isn’t only competing for the question someone typed. It’s competing for every smaller question Google asks on their behalf.

That’s where links come back in. Anything that helps a page rank in normal search, links included, helps it land in the pool Google pulls from. Links just aren’t the thing that decides which page from that pool gets quoted.

What the Data Says About Backlinks and AI Overviews

Ask ten SEOs “do backlinks affect AI Overviews?” and you’ll hear two loud answers. Links matter more than ever. Or links are dead. The actual studies land somewhere far less dramatic, so here’s what two of the largest found.

Ranking Still Helps, but Less Than It Did

In a March 2026 update covering 863,000 keywords, Ahrefs found that only about 38% of pages cited in AI Overviews also rank in the top 10 for the same search. Its earlier study put that overlap near 76%. Roughly 37% of cited pages didn’t rank in the top 100 at all.

Some of that comes from fan-out. Google is pulling pages that rank for the sub-questions, not the headline query. YouTube is a big chunk too: among cited pages that didn’t rank in the top 100, 18.2% were YouTube URLs. Ranking well still helps. It just isn’t the gate it was in 2025.

Brand Mentions Beat Backlinks

Ahrefs also studied 75,000 brands to see which signals line up with being mentioned in AI Overviews. Branded web mentions came out on top at 0.664. Branded anchor text was next at 0.527. Raw backlink count? Just 0.218, behind Domain Rating at 0.326 and referring domains at 0.295.

The gap at the top was huge. Brands in the highest quarter for web mentions averaged 169 AI Overview mentions, against 14 for the next quarter down. And 26% of the brands studied had zero AI Overview mentions, despite every one of them having a Domain Rating above 40.

What These Numbers Can’t Tell You

Correlation isn’t causation. Ahrefs says so itself. Big, well-known brands collect mentions and links at the same time, so it’s hard to pull the two apart. What the data does show clearly is this: a pile of links with no one talking about you won’t carry you into AI answers.

Nine AI Overviews With Zero Backlinks

Here’s the example I keep coming back to. At SEOSkit, we worked with PackMaxQ, a medical cold-chain company. We optimised 13 pages: four buying-segment pages and nine product pages. We didn’t build a single backlink during the project.

Nine of the 20 keywords we tracked showed the site in AI Overviews, and seven reached position 1. “Blood bank shipper” went from outside the top 100 to number one. All of it was on-page work: clearer answers, better structure, and FAQPage, Product, and Service schema. The full case study has the details.

Would it work the same way in a crowded consumer market? Honestly, probably not. It’s a specialised B2B niche. But it proves the point that matters here. A page that answers the question cleanly can win AI Overview citations without a link campaign behind it.

Where Links Still Earn Their Keep

So, do backlinks affect AI Overviews in a way worth paying for? Yes, if you’re clear about what they actually do. From what I’ve seen, links pull their weight in three places, and none of them is “links make AI quote you”.

First, discovery. A page nobody links to gets crawled less, and Google can’t cite a page it hasn’t indexed. Second, ranking for the sub-questions fan-out creates. Links are still one strong ranking signal among many, and a page that ranks for more variations gets more chances to be pulled in.

Third, and this is the one people miss: a good editorial link usually comes with a mention. Branded anchor text was the second-strongest signal in the Ahrefs study. A link from a real publication that names your brand counts on both sides of the brand mentions vs backlinks debate at once.

What to Do If You Want AI Overview Citations

If AI Overviews matter for your business, here’s how I’d split the effort. None of it is exotic. Most of it is ordinary SEO done properly, with more weight on being talked about than being linked to.

• Answer the question in the first two sentences of the page, then expand. That’s what gets lifted into an answer.
• Cover the sub-questions people ask next, since fan-out searches for those too.
• Use schema only where it honestly describes the page, like FAQPage on a real FAQ.
• Chase coverage that names your brand, even without a link. Unlinked brand mentions count for more here than in classic SEO.
• Ask for branded anchor text when you do earn links, rather than exact-match keywords.
• Keep building links to the pages you want ranking, because ranking still feeds the pool.

Then track it. Google says AI feature appearances are included in your overall Search traffic in Search Console rather than broken out. So most people pair Search Console with one of the dedicated AI visibility tools to see which queries actually cite them.

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