For many years, tiered link-building provided a way to strengthen the authority of your best backlinks, but does it improve visibility in AI search?
The answer is a bit complicated.
While the classic tiered link-building system is mostly obsolete, the logic behind it remains relevant and actually informs modern authority strategies.
To be clear, generative AI systems don’t use link graph metrics, but:
- Authority flows through structured hierarchies like topic clusters
- Supporting pages can still strengthen a primary page
- You need lots of small signals that support one central entity
This is the philosophy behind building links in tiers, and it’s alive and well in AI search, just in a different form.
In this post, we’ll explore the concept of tiered link-building, including the rare instances where it still works today.
We’ll explore:
- How tiered link-building works
- The original appeal
- Why it’s become outdated
- How the logic behind tiered link-building lives on
- Rare instances where it still yields results
How Does Tiered Link-Building Work?
As a concept, tiered link-building involves creating a pyramid-style hierarchy that funnels link juice (from PageRank) from the bottom to the top.
At the peak of the pyramid is tier 1, which are your most authoritative backlinks. These links point directly to your website, so they should be the cream of the crop.
Common examples of tier 1 backlinks include high-quality guest posts, linked brand mentions, content shares, and strategic link insertions (also called niche edits).
Tier 2 consists of lower-quality backlinks that point at your tier 1 backlinks and NOT your website.
Due to the way PageRank-style link scoring works, these backlinks send link juice to your tier 1 backlinks, effectively making them more authoritative.
The best part is that tier 2 backlinks don’t need to be as high-quality as your tier 1 links. You could use links coming from web 2.0 articles (i.e., from sites like Medium and HubPages), social media links, and lightly spun blog posts.
Tier 3 continues the trend and provides backlinks to reinforce your tier 2 backlinks. They come from even lower quality sources like forum comments, scraped content, press release dumps, and low-end article directories.
It’s a volume game that focuses on quantity over quality, but it had some real advantages in the past.
What Was the Appeal of Tiered Link-Building?
Before advanced machine learning and LLMs entered the picture, tiered link-building offered quick and relatively affordable results compared to other methods.
It was also extremely easy to scale, thanks to automated tools like SENuke and RankerX.
These make it possible for site owners to create thousands of tier 2 and tier 3 backlinks without putting in much effort.
In terms of results, it was possible to rank for competitive keywords at a fraction of the cost it would take to build lots of tier 1 backlinks.
Basically, it’s an authority hack that was difficult for Google to detect.
While Google’s algorithm has become increasingly good at catching spammy links pointing directly at your site, it’s not nearly as accurate at identifying backlink boosters that come from other websites.
Why Has Tiered Link-Building Declined?
Modern search algorithms and generative AI search platforms have shifted away from PageRank-style link reliance toward signals that are easier for machine-learning systems to evaluate at scale, such as:
- Embeddings
- Entity understanding
- Semantic relevance
- Factual clarity
In other words, links are no longer the primary signal that determines authority.
Modern AI search systems try to answer high-order questions like:
What is this page about? Is it relevant and factual? Does it provide a clear answer to the user’s query?
A large quantity of low-value links, or ‘links pointing at other links’, does nothing to help an AI model answer these questions.
With modern techniques like cross-attention, vector embeddings, and entity consolidation, authority is derived from semantic clarity, reputation, and content quality, not from backlink pyramids.
Brand authority is now measurable through signals such as:
- Public sentiment
- Third-party mentions
- Consistency across the web
Backlinks still matter, but the model determines whether they are semantically meaningful. Pushing quantity for quantity’s sake no longer works.
When Tiered Systems Still Make Sense: Using the Same Logic
As stated previously, the logic behind tiered link-building still applies to AI search. The key distinction is to use semantic hierarchies instead of link-based ones.
For instance, topic clusters are similar to link tiers.
Instead of lower-tier pages strengthening the main page, cluster pages deepen topical coverage and refine the embeddings of your pillar pages.
Also, structure still creates authority. The catch is that AI search infers authority through a clear internal semantic structure instead of a tiered link-building system.
An internal semantic hierarchy helps generative AI tools understand relationships, entity relevance, and chunk boundaries better. That means:
- Creating interlinked topical clusters
- Producing hyper-focused ‘chunks’ of content that align with each subheading (H1, H2, H3)
- Avoiding topical drift and content decay
- Optimizing for multiple trust signals (author profiles, citations, case studies, third-party brand mentions, etc.) to reinforce credibility
Lastly, there are some extremely rare cases where classic tiered link-building still works, like in local niches with little to no competition.
For example, there probably aren’t many mobile dog groomers in Dering Harbor, New York (population: 50), so a tiered push may still gain some traction in these cases. If you’re in a seriously competitive niche with hundreds or even thousands of brands, you’re better off focusing on modern authority strategies, like Digital PR.
Should You Use Tiered Link-Building in 2026? An Honest Recommendation
The truth of the matter is that tiered link-building is almost entirely obsolete at this point, so most site owners shouldn’t waste their time with it.
However, using the same logic behind tiered link-building works surprisingly well in AI search.
Topical clusters, chunking, and building relevant authority layers (brand mentions, digital PR backlinks, etc.) are still using structure to build authority; it’s just evolved into a new practice.
In short, tiered link-building won’t be making a comeback anytime soon, but it does have valuable lessons to teach marketers moving forward.
Do you need professional help improving your online visibility in 2026?
Check out ABC AI Plus, our fully managed AI search authority service, to give your brand the ‘early mover advantage’.