Links and digital PR: how to earn links and mentions that search engines and AI assistants trust

Links were the idea that made Google work. A page that many other pages link to is probably worth seeing, and the words in those links say what it is about. That idea is still inside Google's ranking systems,¹ but a lot has been built around it since, and the arrival of AI assistants has added a second question: when an assistant names three businesses or cites four sources, what made it pick those?

This guide covers both. It starts with what is documented, measured and unknown about links and mentions, then moves to the rules: what counts as link spam, how the rel attributes work, when a disavow file helps. The second half is about earning links the way publications and communities actually give them, through digital PR, local and trade relationships, partnerships and outreach, and about the UK advertising and consumer rules that apply the moment money changes hands. It ends with how to measure the work honestly and an order to do it in.

Related reading on this site: the local SEO guide covers local links in the context of the map pack, the AI search guide covers how assistants retrieve and cite sources, and How an assistant decides which businesses to name goes deeper on mentions in AI answers.

Three kinds of evidence exist on this subject, and they should be kept apart. What the search engines document is reliable about policy and vague about weights. What practitioners and tool vendors measure is specific but correlational. What nobody outside the companies knows is how much any of it counts on a given query.

What the search engines document

Google uses links as a signal when determining the relevancy of pages, and to find new pages to crawl.² Its ranking systems guide names link analysis systems, including PageRank, among the systems that work out what pages are about and which might be most helpful for a query, and states that PageRank continues to be part of the core ranking systems.¹ Bing lists external links from relevant websites as one of the ways it discovers URLs, and says strong internal and external linking supports discovery, authority evaluation and eligibility for grounding, which is Bing's word for being used as a source in Copilot answers.³

Neither search engine publishes how much links weigh against other signals. The nearest thing to a public statement came from Gary Illyes of Google at Pubcon Pro in 2023, as reported by Search Engine Land: “I think they are important, but I think people overestimate the importance of links. I don’t agree it’s in the top three. It hasn’t been for some time.”⁴ He also said it is possible to rank without links, citing a site with no links at all that Google found only through its sitemap.⁴ Treat that as one employee's view at a conference. It is the platform's word, and it does not tell you what links are worth in your market.

What has been measured

Large studies keep finding that links and rankings move together. Ahrefs' 2023 study of around 14 billion pages in its Content Explorer index found that 96.55% got no traffic from Google. Of roughly 20 million pages with no referring domains, only 2,997 received more than 1,000 search visits a month, and pages with more referring domains tended to get more traffic.⁵ The same article states that backlinks are one of Google's top three ranking factors, which is the claim Illyes disputed, so the vendor and the platform disagree in public. Ahrefs itself notes that correlation does not imply causation and that its traffic figures are estimates.⁵

Moz's 2021 correlation study, by Tom Capper, looked at the first 20 organic results for 10,000 keywords from a suburban US location. Links to the page itself predicted rankings far better than links to the subdomain or domain; Moz's authority scores, which weigh link quality, outperformed a raw count of followed links; and on page one, branded search volume predicted rankings at least as well as domain strength.⁶ Capper's framing is the right one to carry into any link study: links are a fundamental part of how Google works, links correlate with rankings, building links may not always improve rankings, and sometimes links are a symptom of SEO performance and not its cause.⁶

What is not known

• How much a link counts compared with relevance, content quality, page experience or user signals, on any query. The weights are not published and vary by query, which is part of Illyes' point that there is no universal top three.⁴
• Whether unlinked brand mentions count in Google's ranking systems. Google has not documented using them. Its search quality rater guidelines tell raters to research a site's reputation through news articles, Wikipedia, blog posts, magazine articles, forum discussions and independent ratings,⁷ which shows the kind of reputation Google wants its results to reflect.
• How much value a nofollow, sponsored or ugc link passes. Since 2019 these are hints Google may use or ignore.⁸
• How quickly a new link takes effect. That depends on when the linking page is recrawled and on the systems that process it, and none of it is published.

The starting point for understanding PageRank is the original research paper and patent, with the caveat that how it works has evolved a lot since.¹ The paper, by Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page, treats a link as a citation. A page's PageRank depends on the PageRank of the pages that link to it, each divided by the number of links going out of that linking page, adjusted by a damping factor they usually set to 0.85.⁹

PR(A) = (1 - d) + d * ( PR(T1)/C(T1) + ... + PR(Tn)/C(Tn) )

T1...Tn  pages that link to page A
C(T)     number of links going out of page T
d        damping factor, usually 0.85

The paper's intuition is a “random surfer” who starts on a random page, keeps clicking links and occasionally gets bored and jumps to another random page; the probability of the surfer landing on a page is its PageRank.⁹ The paper also describes using anchor text, the words in a link, to describe the page it points to, which lets a search engine rank pages for words that never appear on them.⁹ Anchor text still matters in the same way: link text that is descriptive and relevant helps both people and Google understand the destination.²

Four practical consequences follow from the model, even though the modern system is different in detail. A link from a page that is itself well linked passes more than one from a page nobody links to. A page with hundreds of outbound links passes less through each one. Value flows on through internal links, which is why Capper notes that internal linking can achieve a similar effect to building links directly to a deep page.⁶ And a link has to be crawlable to count at all: Google can reliably follow an a element with an href attribute, and not a span or an onclick handler pretending to be a link.²

The spam stage matters more than it used to. The December 2022 link spam update used SpamBrain, an AI-based spam prevention system, to detect both sites buying links and sites used for the purpose of passing outgoing links, with the warning that rankings might change as spammy links were neutralised and the credit they passed was lost.¹⁰ That is the important word: neutralised. For most bought or scraped links the documented outcome is that they stop counting, which is also why most sites do not need to disavow anything (covered later).

AI assistants that search the web do two things that touch links and mentions. First, they retrieve pages from a search index. There are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode beyond normal SEO best practice,¹¹ so whatever links do for ordinary rankings carries over to whether a page is retrieved. ChatGPT search, when it uses partner search providers, typically rewrites the prompt into one or more targeted queries and may send more specific follow-up queries after reviewing the first results.¹² Bing ties linking directly to grounding eligibility for Copilot.³ So a page that ranks well partly because of its links has a better chance of being one of the pages an assistant reads.

Second, they write an answer from what they read, and that is where mentions come in. If ten of the pages an assistant retrieves for “best accountant for contractors in Leeds” name the same firm, that firm is more likely to be named in the answer, whether or not any of those pages link to it. The pages doing the naming are often third-party: review sites, directories, comparison articles, local press and forum threads.

What the studies have measured

Ahrefs published a study in December 2025 of 75,000 brands and how often ChatGPT, AI Mode and AI Overviews mentioned them. Branded web mentions correlated strongly with AI visibility: 0.664 for ChatGPT, 0.656 for AI Overviews and 0.709 for AI Mode. YouTube mentions correlated slightly more strongly still, at around 0.737. Link metrics, meaning number of backlinks and URL rating, showed very weak correlations with AI mentions across all three.¹³ Ahrefs filtered for sites with a Domain Rating above 40 and used Spearman correlation, and says itself that correlation is not causation.¹³ Ahrefs also sells the tool used to track those mentions, which is worth knowing when weighing the conclusions.

For local businesses, BrightLocal's August 2026 study ran 60,970 checks for 1,355 business locations in the US, UK and Australia across Google AI Overviews, AI Mode and ChatGPT. Google Business Profile accounted for 28.63% of all citations, and around 93% of the distinct domains cited were individual business websites.¹⁴ So the big platforms appear most often, but assistants read businesses' own sites at scale too.

Read together, the measured picture is this: being talked about across the web goes with being named by assistants, and having a large link count by itself does not. That fits how retrieval works. It does not prove that earning a mention causes an assistant to name you, and no assistant provider has published how it picks brands. I would treat mentions and links as two outputs of the same work: being worth writing about, in places your customers read.

The practical work of getting named by assistants, including tracking which prompts name you, is in the tutorial on getting recommended by AI assistants, and measuring it is covered in How to measure visibility in AI search.

Bing's guidelines say links should be earned organically through high-quality, useful content,³ and good anchor text is descriptive and relevant to both the linking page and the destination.² Beyond that, neither search engine lists what makes a link valuable. What follows is my synthesis of the PageRank model, the spam policies and the studies above, and it should be read as judgement.

Moz's finding that authority-weighted metrics beat raw link counts, and that page-level links predict rankings better than domain-level ones, is consistent with this.⁶ So is Ahrefs' AI study, where branded mentions mattered and link volume barely did.¹³ Volume still has a place: a site with ten good links is usually behind a competitor with two hundred good links. The trouble starts when volume becomes the target, because the cheapest way to hit a volume target is to buy, swap or automate, and each of those is link spam.

Google's spam policies define link spam as creating links to or from a site primarily for the purpose of manipulating search rankings.¹⁶ The listed examples are worth knowing word for word, because nearly every “is this allowed?” question is answered by one of them:

• Buying or selling links for ranking purposes, which includes exchanging money for links or for posts that contain links, exchanging goods or services for links, and sending someone a product in exchange for them writing about it and including a link.¹⁶
• Excessive link exchanges (“link to me and I'll link to you”) or partner pages exclusively for the sake of cross-linking.¹⁶
• Using automated programs or services to create links to your site.¹⁶
• Requiring a link as part of a terms of service, contract or similar arrangement without allowing the third-party content owner the choice of qualifying the outbound link.¹⁶
• Text adverts or text links that do not block ranking credit, and advertorials or native advertising where payment is received for articles with links that pass ranking credit.¹⁶
• Links with optimised anchor text in articles, guest posts or press releases distributed on other sites.¹⁶
• Low-quality directory or bookmark site links; keyword-rich, hidden or low-quality links in widgets distributed across sites; and widely distributed links in the footers or templates of various sites.¹⁶
• Forum comments with optimised links in the post or signature, and creating low-value content primarily to manipulate linking and ranking signals.¹⁶

Bing's equivalent is shorter: manipulating inbound links to inflate authority violates its guidelines, including link buying, link spamming, private networks and artificial social promotion schemes that simulate popularity, and sites doing so may lose rankings, lose grounding eligibility in Copilot, or be removed from the index.³

Paying for links is allowed, if the link says so

The policies do not ban paid links. Google accepts that buying and selling links is a normal part of the economy of the web for advertising and sponsorship, and such links are not a violation as long as they carry rel="nofollow" or rel="sponsored".¹⁶ That covers advertising, sponsorship, affiliate links and paid placements. Affiliate links should be qualified with rel="sponsored" whether they are created by hand or dynamically, and sites failing to qualify affiliate, sponsored or guest post links may face manual actions or algorithmic action.¹⁷

<!-- A paid placement, sponsorship or affiliate link -->
<a href="https://example.com/product" rel="sponsored">Example product</a>

<!-- A link in a comment, review or forum post -->
<a href="https://example.org/" rel="ugc">a reader's site</a>

<!-- A link you do not want to vouch for, when neither applies -->
<a href="https://example.net/" rel="nofollow">the claim in question</a>

<!-- Values can be combined -->
<a href="https://example.org/" rel="ugc nofollow">a forum link you also do not vouch for</a>

Use sponsored for adverts and paid placements, ugc for user-generated content such as comments and forum posts, and nofollow when the others do not apply and you would rather Google did not associate your site with the linked page.¹⁸ Values can be combined as a space- or comma-separated list.¹⁸ When Google introduced sponsored and ugc in 2019 it changed all three to hints: links contain useful information, such as the words that describe the content they point at, so Google may still use a qualified link in its systems.⁸ Existing nofollow on paid links remains valid, so there is no need to rewrite old markup.⁸

Guest posts, press releases and syndication

Guest articles are not a problem in themselves. In 2017 Google said it does not discourage articles that inform users, educate another site's audience or bring awareness to a cause or company, and that the violation is when the main intent is building links at scale back to the author's site.¹⁹ The warning signs it listed were keyword-rich links stuffed into articles, the same articles published across many sites, writers who do not know the subject, and the same or similar content repeated across articles.¹⁹ The spam policies now name optimised anchor text in guest posts and press releases directly.¹⁶ The safe pattern for a press release on a wire service is a branded or plain URL link, qualified, and the expectation that the release will earn nothing in rankings by itself. Its value is in being read by journalists who then write their own stories.

Two newer policies deal with buying a site's existing reputation, which is the bulk version of buying links. Anyone selling links or placements should know them.

The site reputation policy

This applies where third-party content is published on a host site mainly because of that host's established ranking signals, so the content ranks better than it could on its own. Third-party content alone is not a problem; it becomes one when it is there mainly to borrow the host's ranking signals.¹⁶ The policy's own examples are an educational site hosting sponsored reviews of payday loans that the same third party distributes across the web, and a medical site hosting a low-quality “best casinos” page placed there to rank.¹⁶ Wire services, syndicated news, forums, editorial columns, advertorials whose purpose is to reach the publication's own readers, and pages with properly qualified affiliate links are all listed as not violating it.¹⁶

Enforcement now differs by region. Outside the European Economic Area, violating pages may get a manual action. Inside the EEA, the pages may instead be treated as separate from the main domain and ranked on their own merits, without a manual action.¹⁶ For a UK site, the outside-EEA rules apply to UK searchers. The relevance to link building is that “we will publish your article on a high-authority news site” is often this practice in disguise, and the host is the one taking the risk.

Expired domain abuse

Buying an expired domain and repurposing it primarily to manipulate rankings with content of little value is expired domain abuse. The examples given include affiliate content on a domain once used by a government agency and casino content on a former school's site.¹⁶ Buying an expired domain is not banned in itself. Buying one for its old backlinks and redirecting it to your site, or filling it with unrelated content, is the pattern the policy describes. The rank and rent tutorial has the same warning for lead generation sites, and the exact-match domain tutorial covers choosing a domain for a real business.

Private blog networks and link farms

A private blog network is a set of sites, often built on expired domains, that exist to link to money sites. Bing names private networks directly as a link scheme,³ and SpamBrain was described as detecting sites used for the purpose of passing outgoing links.¹⁰ I would not touch them. The documented outcome is that the links are neutralised, so the best case is money spent for nothing and the worst is a manual action.

Most backlink audits are done for the wrong reason: a tool flagged hundreds of “toxic” links and somebody wants them gone. Scraper sites, odd foreign directories and spam pages link to almost every site that has been online for a few years, and the search engines are built to ignore them. An audit is worth doing for three narrower reasons: to understand which pages and campaigns have earned links, to find links you or a previous agency paid for or arranged, and to respond to a manual action.

Sources of link data

Search Console's Links report shows top linked pages, top linking sites and top linking text. It is a sample of the links Google has found, not a full list; tables are limited to 1,000 rows; links may since have been removed; and it does not say whether a link is nofollow.²⁰ Data is grouped by root domain, so subdomains and protocols are merged.²⁰ Third-party indexes from Ahrefs, Semrush, Moz and Majestic find different sets of links and add their own metrics. Combine at least Search Console and one third-party index, and expect neither to be complete.

When disavowing is and is not appropriate

The disavow tool is described as an advanced feature to be used with caution, which can harm a site's performance if used incorrectly.²¹ Google's conditions are specific: disavow only if you have a considerable number of spammy, artificial or low-quality links pointing to your site, and those links have caused a manual action or likely will.²¹ In 2024 John Mueller said on X, of the disavow tool, “At some point, I’m sure we’ll remove it,” and Bing had already removed its own disavow tool earlier that year, with Microsoft's Fabrice Canel saying its algorithms were now good at working out which links to count and which to ignore.²²

# Links from a paid guest post network, removal requested
# 2026-08-14 and 2026-09-02, no reply
domain:example-network-one.com
domain:example-network-two.net

# A single paid article where the rest of the site is fine
https://www.example-magazine.co.uk/2024/03/sponsored-article/

The file is plain text in UTF-8 or 7-bit ASCII with a .txt extension, one URL or one domain: entry per line, comments starting with #, up to 100,000 lines and 2MB.²¹ It takes a few weeks for Google to incorporate it as pages are recrawled.²¹ For a manual action, the process is to download your links, check them against the link spam policy, ask site owners to remove or qualify the bad ones, disavow what you cannot remove, then request a review. Disavowing all backlinks without attempting removal may lead to the request being rejected.²³ If your traffic has fallen and you are not sure links are the cause, work through the traffic drop tutorial first.

The site's off-site authority skill for AI coding agents follows the same boundary: it audits a profile from your own connected link data, can produce a disavow file where one is justified, and recommends only white-hat link building. It will not buy, exchange or fabricate links, and it does not do outreach for you.

Digital PR is public relations aimed at online publications, measured partly in links. It succeeds or fails on whether a journalist thinks the story is worth their readers' time, so it helps to know how journalists decide.

The most cited academic work on this is Harcup and O'Neill's study of news values, published in Journalism Studies. They analysed news stories in ten UK national newspapers, using sample weeks across November 2014, and proposed a contemporary set of news values that a story generally has to satisfy one, and preferably more, of to be selected.²⁴ Their list includes exclusivity (stories available first to the outlet, including from surveys and polls), surprise, conflict, bad news, good news, audio-visuals including infographics, shareability, entertainment, drama, follow-up of stories already in the news, the power elite, relevance to the audience, magnitude, celebrity, and the news organisation's own agenda.²⁴ They note the criteria are contested and shaped by practical limits such as time and resources.²⁴

Several of those values map straight onto digital PR. Original survey or data analysis gives a journalist exclusivity. A finding that contradicts what people assume gives surprise. A chart or map gives audio-visuals. A local cut of national data gives relevance. A comment on a story already running gives follow-up. Campaigns that hit none of them are adverts with a press release attached.

What journalists say about pitches

Muck Rack, which sells a media database and pitching software, publishes an annual journalist survey. Its 2026 report drew responses from nearly 1,100 journalists, 897 of them reliable after cleaning, with most respondents at outlets focused on local or regional coverage. On its open summary page, 86% of journalists said at least some of their work began with a PR pitch, and 82% said they use AI.²⁵ The full report is gated, so I have used only the figures on the open page.

Accuracy is also the journalist's problem, not just yours. The UK Editors' Code, enforced by IPSO for the publications that subscribe to it, requires the press to take care not to publish inaccurate, misleading or distorted information, to correct significant inaccuracies promptly, and to distinguish clearly between comment, conjecture and fact.²⁶ A journalist who runs your survey and then has to publish a correction because the method did not hold up will not open your next email. Give them the method, the sample, the dates and the raw tables up front.

BuzzStream's State of Digital PR report for 2026 surveyed more than 150 digital PR professionals. Pitching data-led content was the most common tactic, used by 95.9%, and pitching press releases rose from 68.8% to 79.1% on the previous year.²⁷ Finance was named the hardest sector to build links in (23.6%) and travel the easiest (46.6%).²⁷ BuzzStream sells outreach software and the respondents were self-selected practitioners, so treat these as what the industry reports doing, not as proof of what works.

Data-led stories

Analyse public data (ONS, Land Registry, DVLA, police.uk, NHS statistics, Companies House) or run a survey, and find a finding that is new, surprising or locally relevant. The strongest campaigns produce dozens of regional angles from one dataset, because each local paper wants its own town's figure. The weakest are thin “index” rankings built on a handful of arbitrary metrics. Before launch, ask whether a journalist on the target beat would write about this if nobody had pitched it.

Coverage of data stories often appears across syndication networks, where one regional publisher runs the same article on many titles. Reboot Online, a UK digital PR agency, published a case in February 2025 where a client site with no real visibility earned more than 180 syndicated links from one regional newspaper network within a couple of weeks, and went from not ranking near page one to page one for all its target keywords with no on-site changes in that period.²⁸ It is one site, reported by the agency that did the work, and the control was coincidental, so it shows what can happen. It does not show what usually happens.

Newsjacking and reactive PR

Newsjacking means offering useful comment or data on a story while it is running: a budget, a regulatory change, a heatwave, a product recall. It works when the business has genuine expertise on that subject and can respond within hours. Reactive PR means answering requests that journalists post on request services and social platforms. Both produce coverage that is often unlinked, because a quote does not need a link. That is fine. A named mention in a national story is still the kind of mention that reputation and AI visibility seem to track, and links tend to follow when the expert becomes a regular source.

Expert commentary

A business with a real expert (an accountant on tax changes, a vet on pet health, an engineer on building safety) can become a regular source for a few journalists on a beat. This is slow and relationship-based, and it compounds. It also suits what assistants appear to reward, since a named expert quoted across several publications is a strong, consistent signal about who the business is.

For local businesses, links are part of prominence, one of the three things Google's local ranking is based on. Prominence is how well known a business is, based on information such as how many websites link to it and how many reviews it has.¹⁵ Whitespark's 2026 Local Search Ranking Factors survey, an expert survey and not a measurement of Google, includes link signals (inbound anchor text, linking domain authority and quantity) as one group of factors; its author Darren Shaw writes that link signals appear to have dropped a bit in importance this edition.²⁹ The local SEO guide covers how the map pack is put together in more detail.

Good local and trade links come from relationships the business already has. The work is mostly noticing them and asking.

• Suppliers and manufacturers: many have “where to buy”, stockist, installer or approved-partner pages. If you are a genuine stockist or certified installer, ask to be listed.
• Trade bodies and professional registers: membership directories for accredited firms. Join for the credential and the trust it gives customers; the link is a side effect.
• Local press and community sites: openings, new hires, awards, apprenticeships, community work, local data. Local editors need local stories.
• Local organisations you actually support: schools, clubs, charities, business improvement districts, chambers of commerce.
• Events you run or speak at: event pages, speaker lists, write-ups by attendees.
• Customers who are businesses: a case study or testimonial they choose to publish, with their agreement and an honest description.

Sponsorship and partnerships without breaking the rules

Sponsoring a local team or event is a good thing to do and often a good way to be known locally. The link that comes with it is paid for, so it should be qualified with rel="sponsored".¹⁸ Making a link a condition of a sponsorship or contract without letting the other party qualify it is a listed example of link spam.¹⁶ So is sending products in exchange for a post with a link, and excessive link exchanges or partner pages built for cross-linking.¹⁶ A genuine partnership page, where two businesses that work together describe what they do together, is fine. A page of thirty unrelated “partners” is the pattern the policy names.

A sensible rule: if you would still do the sponsorship, partnership or membership with no link at all, it is a real relationship and you can ask for a link, qualified where money or goods changed hands. If you would not, you are buying a link.

Every pitch is an email to a person with too many emails. Outreach that respects that person also works better, because it is relevant, short and easy to say no to.

UK data protection law applies to outreach too. A journalist's or business owner's name and work email are personal data, so the UK GDPR applies even in a business context, and you need a lawful basis and must tell people how you use their details.³⁰ The email marketing rules in PECR do not apply to corporate subscribers such as limited companies, though you must not hide your identity and must give an address to opt out; sole traders and some partnerships are treated as individuals, and electronic marketing to them generally needs consent.³⁰ Whether a one-to-one press pitch counts as direct marketing is a judgement call. I would treat it as if it does: individual emails, a clear sender, an easy way to say “not for me”, and a suppression list that you honour.

• Ask for a link only where it helps the reader: when the article cites your data, the method page is the source. Do not ask for links on quotes or for anchor text.
• Never pay a journalist or offer a gift for coverage or a link. If a publication offers paid placement, that is advertising, and the rules in the next chapter apply.
• Correct errors in coverage politely and quickly, including ones that flatter you.
• Keep a record of who asked not to be contacted, and honour it across every campaign and every colleague.

Search engine policy is only one set of rules. The moment a business pays for content, UK advertising regulation and consumer law apply as well, and they ask a different question: would a reader know this is an advert? This section covers the UK. Other countries have their own rules, such as the FTC's endorsement guidance in the United States, so check the rules where your audience is.

The CAP Code

The UK Code of Non-broadcast Advertising (the CAP Code), administered by the ASA, requires marketing communications to be obviously identifiable as such (rule 2.1), and requires marketers and publishers to make clear that advertorials are marketing communications, for example by heading them “advertisement feature” (rule 2.4).³¹ The ASA's guidance on advertisement features draws a useful line. Where a brand pays or gives something to have content created, that content is likely to fall under consumer protection law and need disclosure as advertising; where the brand also has editorial control, it falls under the CAP Code too.³²

On labels, the ASA says “Ad”, “Advert”, “Advertising”, “Advertisement”, “Ad Feature” and similar are very likely to be acceptable if displayed upfront and prominently. It generally advises against “Sponsored”, because the term is open to varied interpretation.³² This creates an easy confusion for SEOs. rel="sponsored" is an instruction to search engines hidden in the HTML. It does nothing to tell readers anything. A paid article needs both: the HTML attribute for the search engines and a visible label such as “Advertisement feature” for people.

Affiliate links

Affiliate content is advertising under the Code, and both the business and the affiliate are responsible for it, even if the affiliate created the ad with no input from the business.³³ The ASA has ruled that the word “affiliate” on its own was not widely understood by consumers, that a disclaimer at the bottom of a post wholly about affiliate products is unlikely to be enough, and that the phrase “may earn an affiliate commission” was ambiguous because it suggested payment might not happen.³³ On the search side, affiliate links should carry rel="sponsored".¹⁷

Consumer law and the CMA

Since 6 April 2025, Schedule 20 to the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 lists as a banned practice “using editorial content in the media to promote a product where a trader has paid for the promotion without making that clear in the content or by images or sounds clearly identifiable by the consumer”.³⁴ A paid article placed on a news site without disclosure, the classic paid link, fits that description. The CMA's guidance on unfair commercial practices says the CMA can impose penalties of up to the higher of £300,000 or 10% of worldwide turnover for these infringements; this particular banned practice is one of the few that is not also a criminal offence.³⁵ Fake or undisclosed incentivised reviews are a separate banned practice in the same schedule.³⁴

Link building is easy to report dishonestly. Counting links found in a tool, adding up the authority scores of linking domains and quoting the combined readership of every outlet all produce large numbers that say little about what the business got. BuzzStream's 2026 survey found the most common way practitioners measure a campaign is the number of quality links (85.1%), followed by total mentions (72.3%) and total links (70.9%), and that the share citing organic traffic and rankings fell from 78% to 63.5% year on year.²⁷ The same respondents mostly said results take no more than six months to appear (85.2%), and 81% reported first coverage within a week.²⁷ Those are practitioners describing their own work.

Links also decay. Ahrefs' link rot study, last updated in February 2024, sampled 2,062,173 websites and found that 66.5% of the links pointing to them since January 2013 had rotted, meaning the linking page or the link itself had gone.³⁶ A report that shows only links gained overstates what is still there. Record links with dates and recheck them.

The order matters because some of the work makes the rest pay off. Links to a page that does not deserve to rank, or campaigns for a business with nothing new to say, waste money.

For most small businesses, the honest answer is that steps one to five are enough for a long time. A data-led campaign programme is worth it when the business competes nationally, or in a sector where competitors are regularly in the press. For the local version of this work, see the local SEO guide; for how the same reputation shows up in assistants' answers, see What AI search changes for local business.