Show Notes
Less than a third of SEO teams say their link building programs are actually delivering results — yet investment in the channel keeps climbing. This episode of
Marketing unpacks what's driving that contradiction, drawing on
the latest link building statistics and trends for 2025 to map out what's broken, what's working, and where the biggest strategic opportunities lie heading into the second half of the year.
The episode covers a wide sweep of the current landscape, from AI-driven traffic disruption to Google's tightening enforcement posture to the rise of entity-based authority signals. Key topics include:
- The AI Overview traffic hit: When an AI summary appears on a search results page, click-through rates to organic listings can drop by nearly 50% — even for top-three-ranked pages — fundamentally changing how link value should be calculated.
- What Google's 2024 spam updates mean for link builders: Enforcement against scaled content abuse, expired domain abuse, and site reputation abuse (parasite SEO) has meaningfully raised the risk profile of tactics that were common practice just a few years ago.
- Tactics holding their value: Digital PR built around original research, expert sourcing through journalist platforms, and evergreen resource link building continue to generate the editorial signals that both Google and AI answer engines reward.
- The AI citation gap: Only 11% of SEO teams have a repeatable process for earning citations in AI-generated answers — representing a wide-open competitive advantage for teams willing to build that capability now.
- The shift to an entity-first mindset: Brand mention velocity, reference query growth, and entity co-citation are emerging as measurement metrics alongside traditional domain rating and referring domain counts, reflecting Google's Knowledge Graph-driven approach to authority.
- Entity infrastructure as a foundation: Consistent schema markup, structured authorship signals, and aligned brand data across directories and platforms are no longer just technical hygiene — they determine whether brands get correctly attributed in machine-mediated search environments.
The episode closes with a clear strategic framework: prioritize editorial digital PR, modernize measurement to connect links to real business signals, maintain strict compliance practices, and invest in entity infrastructure as the base layer that makes everything else attributable. If your team is still measuring link building success purely by DR and referring domain counts, this episode makes a compelling case for why that scorecard needs to expand.