SEO expert Phil Risher says backlinks no longer move Google and AI rankings. Now it's brand trust: a YouTube channel with helpful videos, local news mentions, active social media, real answers to customer questions. Local service businesses like plumbers and roofers are dropping in rankings even with strong backlinks if they lack these signals.
Yeah, every dollar that you're putting into backlinks right now is solving a problem that doesn't exist anymore. Here's what changed. Google and AI now pick winners based on brand trust, not backlinks. So if you're a plumber, like a roofer, HVAC company in a competitive market, this will hit you hard. You are not dropping in rankings because you need more backlinks. You're dropping because nobody's talking about your business anywhere else online. YouTube, you have nothing. In the news, in the local news area, nothing. Social media content, nothing. On your website, you're not answering real customer questions. You're just jamming keywords in. There's no trust being built. The old scorecard was rankings. The new scorecard is trust. Let's just say that you went to Google and you typed in plumbers near me, and the top result has half the backlinks that you do, but they've got a YouTube channel with 40 videos answering real customer questions. They've been quoted in their local news article, and they're active on their social media accounts, and they post content on their website from real customer questions that's not commodity content. Google sees all of this and thinks, wow, this brand is real and this brand is everywhere that people are looking. So, here's what I would recommend doing this week. Post something that's actually helpful. Take a real customer question and answer it. Share a real story of how you solve this problem. Once you're showing up at 5 or 6 places online, that's how you build trust and that's how you build a brand of authority worth recommending.
