Phil RisherPhlash Consulting · No. 1 Digital Marketing Consulting Company For $1m-10m Home Service Businesses 🚀

Every SEO company still selling you backlinks is selling you 2019. #shorts

11 Sept 2026 · 1 min

Watch on YouTube

1:01

In this short, Phil Risher argues that AI‑driven search engines no longer reward backlinks as a signal of authority. He describes the current "trust recession," where platforms can detect attempts to game rankings through purchased links or keyword stuffing. The only effective strategy now is to produce non‑commodity, trust‑building content that AI systems deem reliable. Risher advises businesses to mine their own customer calls for genuine questions and craft stories that answer those queries, positioning this approach as far more valuable than buying backlinks.

Chapters

Yeah, right now with AI search, backlinks does not build authority, trust does. We're in this trust recession, and if your SEO company is still talking about building backlinks for you to try to gain authority online, that's an old, old, old playbook, dying playbook. Right now, the only thing that matters is creating content that these platforms trust, because you could try to game the system and buy backlinks and jam keywords into blog posts, and these platforms know that. They know that people are trying to game the system. And that's why we're in this trust recession. So, the number one thing you could do is to create real content from real stories that is not commodity content, which is what Google says. They want non-commodity content. So, if you think, oh, well, if I just rank higher and I could go pay this company to buy me some backlinks and magically build up my domain authority and I'm going to rank and get all these leads, that's the old playbook. What you should do right now is take your customer calls, analyze them for the real questions that people are asking, And then create content answering those questions with real stories from inside of your business. This is going to build way more trust with AI platforms than buying backlinks.