For most businesses, no, not in the way agencies sell it. Backlinks still carry weight, but they rank below content quality and technical health for the vast majority of sites. Paying for links is both against Google's rules and a poor use of a marketing budget compared to fixing what you already own.
We get asked this on almost every scoping call. A founder has been quoted a few thousand a month for link building, and they want to know whether it will work. The honest answer is usually that the same money spent on the site itself would move more revenue.
This is an opinionated piece. We are a Webflow studio, not a link vendor, so we have no reason to talk links up or down. What follows is what Google has actually published, what the largest public dataset shows, and where we land after building and fixing a lot of sites.
Yes, but less than the industry implies and less than they did ten years ago. Links remain a signal of trust and a route for crawlers to discover pages. They are no longer the dominant factor. Google has spent years reducing their weight in favor of content understanding and user signals.
The confusion comes from mixing two different questions. "Do links help?" and "Should links be your main investment?" have different answers. Links help. They should not be your main investment unless you are competing in a market where every serious player already has a fast, well-structured, genuinely useful site.
Most businesses are not in that position. Most businesses have a slow site, thin pages, and no clear topic focus. Links will not fix any of those, and Google will not rank a weak page just because someone pointed at it.
Less than people assume, and it has been consistent. Search Engine Land reported in September 2023 that Gary Illyes, an analyst on the Google Search team, told Pubcon Pro in Austin: "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."
That is a Googler describing links as important but not a top three factor, and saying that had already been true for a while. It is not a claim that links do nothing. It is a claim that the SEO industry weights them wrong.
Illyes also said it is possible to rank without links, and described a site with no links that ranked first on the strength of its content and was found through its sitemap. He framed this as uncommon rather than typical, which is the right way to read it.
Notice what Google does not publish. There is no official document that says "get more backlinks". Google's actual documentation about links is mostly about making them crawlable and describing them accurately.
Because most pages get no traffic at all, with or without links. Ahrefs studied roughly 14 billion pages in its Content Explorer index and found that 96.55% of them get zero traffic from Google, and 1.94% get between one and ten visits a month. Having no links is one feature of that group, not the sole cause.
The same Ahrefs research found that among indexed pages with no referring domains, only about 2,997 pulled more than 1,000 monthly search visits. That works out to roughly one in 6,671. It is a real and sobering number, and it is the strongest argument in favor of links.
But Ahrefs is careful in a way that most people quoting it are not. The study says plainly that correlation does not imply causation. Pages that earn links tend to be pages worth linking to. The link and the traffic often share a cause rather than one producing the other.
We read that dataset as evidence that being unremarkable is the problem. A page nobody links to is usually a page nobody found useful enough to mention. Buying a link for that page does not change what it is.
Usually the content, with links acting as confirmation. A genuinely useful page attracts links, gets shared, gets cited, and accumulates the engagement Google can measure. Strip the usefulness out and add links, and you have a page with borrowed authority pointing at nothing worth ranking.
This is where we take a position that annoys people. We think a large share of link building spend is buying a proxy for quality instead of buying quality. It is cheaper to be linkable than to be linked to, and the linkable version keeps paying after the campaign stops.
The exception is real and worth naming. In genuinely competitive commercial markets, insurance, finance, legal, everyone at the top already has good content. There, links become the tiebreaker. If that is your market, budget for them. If it is not, you are solving a problem you do not have.
Links that a real person chose to add because your page helped them. Editorial mentions in industry publications, references from suppliers and partners, citations in research, and coverage of something you actually did. These come from doing something worth mentioning, which is slower and far more durable than outreach.
Relevance beats domain authority every time in our experience. A link from a small, focused site in your industry tells Google more about what you are than a link from a large general site that covers everything. Domain authority is a third-party score, not a Google metric, and treating it as a target leads people to chase the wrong links.
Anchor text matters, and Google is direct about how. Its Search Central documentation says good anchor text is descriptive, reasonably concise, and relevant to both the page it sits on and the page it points to. The same standard applies to the links you control, which is why we treat internal linking as the link work most businesses are neglecting.
Anything built primarily to move rankings. Google's spam policies define link spam as "the practice of creating links to or from a site primarily for the purpose of manipulating search rankings." That definition is broad on purpose, and it covers most of what gets sold as link building.
Google names the specific patterns in the same policy. Buying or selling links for ranking purposes, including exchanging money for links or for posts containing links. Exchanging goods or services for links. Sending someone a product in return for a write-up with a link. Excessive link exchanges and partner pages built only for cross-linking. Automated link creation. Low quality directory links. Hidden links inside distributed widgets. Optimized links dropped in forum comments.
There is a legitimate path through this. Google says it is not a violation to have paid or gifted links as long as they carry a rel="nofollow" or rel="sponsored" attribute. That attribute is the whole difference between a disclosed commercial relationship and a policy violation. Most link vendors will not use it, because a disclosed link does not do the thing the client is paying for.
Read that carefully and the business model becomes clear. If a link only has value when it is undisclosed, you are paying for the undisclosure, not the link.
Indirectly, and less than they help in classic search. AI systems mostly cite pages they can retrieve and parse, and the barrier there is technical and structural rather than link based. A page that is not indexed, or whose content only appears after JavaScript runs, will not be cited no matter how many links point at it.
Links still feed the pipeline. Google's AI features draw on its index, and links help pages get discovered and crawled. So links matter upstream. What they do not appear to do is override a poorly structured answer. In our experience the pages that get pulled into AI answers are the ones that answer a specific question cleanly, which is exactly what query fan-out rewards.
The signal that seems to carry over is the one links were always a rough proxy for, which is whether other credible sources treat you as credible. That is the same territory as experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trust, and it is built by being visibly good at something rather than by acquiring links.
For most, close to nothing as a direct line item. Spend the budget on making pages worth linking to, then on getting them in front of people who write about your industry. If you have a monthly retainer for links and no plan for what those links point at, cancel it and put the money into the pages.
A reasonable order of operations helps. Fix indexing and rendering first, because an uncrawlable page cannot rank at any link volume. Then fix speed, because slow pages lose visitors regardless of position. Then build genuinely complete content on the topics you sell. Then, and only then, think about earning links.
We put it this way to clients: if we turned off every backlink you have today, would your site still deserve to rank? If the answer is no, links are covering for something. If the answer is yes, links will amplify something real.
Audit what you already have before chasing more. Look at which pages hold links, confirm those pages are still good, and fix the internal links pointing at them so the value spreads through the site. That work is free, fully under your control, and usually neglected.
Then pick one thing worth being mentioned for. Original data, a tool, a genuinely better guide than what exists, a public result. One of those earns more real links than a year of outreach emails, and it keeps earning them.
If you are not sure whether links or your site itself is the bottleneck, we are happy to look and tell you straight, even if the answer is that you do not need us. Let's talk. You can find our team at phoenix.studio.
Tell us where you want to go. We'll tell you how we'd get you there.