Do backlinks matter for AEO (answer engine optimization)?
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Marketing Hub Marketing automation software Free and premium plans Service Hub Customer service software Free and premium plans Content Hub Content marketing software Free and premium plans Revenue Hub CPQ, billing, and payments software Free and premium plans Agent Hub Your central home for building and managing AI agents across the platform Learn more AEO (Beta) Answer engine optimization tools that track and improve your brand's visibility in AI results Learn more Home Marketing Do backlinks matter for AEO (answer engine optimization)? Do backlinks matter for AEO (answer engine optimization)? Written by: Cassie Wilson Clark THE STATE OF AEO IN 2026 Dive into data about how marketers around the world are adapting to AEO and learn how to implement AEO yourself. Roughly 58% of consumers now use AI answer engines in their product research each week — and that number is rising fast. As AI-powered answer engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews become primary discovery surfaces, content and SEO teams are asking the right question: is there a relationship between backlinks and AEO, or is it time to rethink the entire authority playbook? The short answer is that contextually relevant backlinks carry more value than high-volume, low-relevance links for AEO. But they no longer tell the whole story. This post breaks down exactly how backlinks and AEO interact, where the differences between AEO and SEO show up in practice, and what a balanced authority strategy looks like right now. Before diving in, keep in mind that tools like HubSpot AEO are built specifically to help marketing teams track and improve their brand’s visibility across AEO — more on that as we go. Traditional search engines use backlinks as a primary authority signal. A link from a trusted domain to your page is, at its core, a vote of confidence — one that gets weighted by the linking domain’s own authority, the relevance of the context, and the anchor text used. Answer engines don’t abandon the traditional logic of off-page SEO. But they layer a great deal more on top of it. When an AI answer engine like ChatGPT or Google’s AI Overviews assembles a response, it isn’t simply ranking pages by backlink count. It is identifying sources that can reliably ground the answer. Those sources are: What this means for content and SEO teams is that a high-authority backlink profile is a necessary but no longer sufficient condition for AI visibility. That’s exactly the gap HubSpot AEO was built to close. The tool gives marketing teams a single place to monitor how often their brand appears in AI answers — and what content is driving (or missing from) that visibility. Navigate the AI revolution with proven strategies to optimize your content for AI visibility. Backlinks still matter for AEO, especially considering SEO is the foundation for any good AI search strategy. However, the type of link matters far more than it once did. Nathaniel Miller, Head of Marketing at Ashbrook Technologies, said in a recorded interview for the Found in AI podcast: “The companies ranking highest across AI platforms tend to be the ones with both strong authority and strong backlink profiles.” He added that “if you’re not getting qualified traffic from that link, it’s basically a logo slap. The real value is in relevance and authority — not just size.” In traditional SEO, strong domain authority and link volume influence rankings. But in AEO, relevance and semantic alignment between the linking source and your brand’s topic cluster matter much more. Here’s how different link types map to their influence in AEO versus classic SEO: High — especially if the publication is a grounding source for AI Alongside backlinks, mentions and co-citations are equally important. A brand mention — even one without a hyperlink — tells an AI system that a source is referencing your brand in a given topical context. When that happens repeatedly across credible sources, it builds the kind of authority that influences the likelihood of citation in AI-generated answers. While brands with a strong backlink profile tend to be cited often, that doesn’t mean the AI-generated answer will link to the brand. As Charlie Graham, founder of RivalSee, shared on the Found in AI podcast, roughly 85% of brands mentioned in ChatGPT responses have no citation link at all. Users see the name, remember it, and search for it afterward. That downstream effect is a real authority signal. It just does not show up in traditional analytics. Pro tip: HubSpot AEO can help you identify which of your pages are earning citations and which link types are actually moving the needle in AI-generated answers. AEO extends SEO rather than replacing it, building on SEO’s foundations and extending them into an environment where the interface — and the evaluation criteria — are meaningfully different.
Source: HubSpot
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