Phil Risher says backlinks don't work anymore because AI search can spot them as gaming. Instead, listen to real customer calls, find their actual questions, and answer with honest business stories. That builds trust with search platforms in ways paid links never will.
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.
