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Tiered Link-Building in 2026: Outdated Tactic or Useful Strategy?

By Corey Batt

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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 … Continued

Contextual Link-Building: Still King in an AI-Powered SERP?

By Corey Batt

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There’s a ton of talk online about how AI search forced brands to prioritize contextual relevance over DA/DR scores when building links.  Here’s what most people are missing, though.  Top-level marketers were already focusing on quality and contextual relevance years before AI Overviews and ChatGPT.  Google’s algorithm had long been able to identify irrelevant backlinks, … Continued

Backlink Management for 2025: Indexing, Disavows, and What Google Still Ignores 

By Corey Batt

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Proper backlink management is paramount in 2025.  Even if you’ve completely adjusted your link-building strategy to appeal to LLMs alongside search algorithms, you still need to know how to manage your backlinks.  Neglect the links you’ve built, and you’ll inevitably wind up with: Broken links  Links you should disavow  Too many anchors of the same … Continued

Digital PR & AI SEO: Why Editorial Trust is the New Ranking Signal 

By Corey Batt

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If you want LLM-powered tools like ChatGPT to cite your content and recommend your brand, you need to build strong editorial trust. LLMs are able to reason through language, so they operate a lot like a researcher or journalist. Instead of only focusing on technical authority signals like DA/DR scores and link volume, AI search … Continued

How Brand Mentions Work in AI Search (And Where to Earn Them) 

By Corey Batt

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In the realm of AI search, brand mentions have become a valuable commodity for marketers eager to get their brands cited by tools like ChatGPT.  This is because, for LLM-powered search tools, brand mentions serve the same role as backlinks do to search algorithms. They’re trust-builders that influence which sources get summarized and cited on … Continued

AI Link-Building Tools We Actually Use (And Why Most Fall Short) 

By Corey Batt

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Since link-building can be incredibly time-consuming and challenging, it’s no wonder that so many marketers want to automate it with AI tools.  However, most AI-powered link-building tools either: Miss the mark entirely  Require too much human oversight to actually save time  That’s not to say that there aren’t high-quality AI tools out there that will … Continued

Our AI Search Playbook: What’s Actually Working in 2025

By Corey Batt

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AI platforms like ChatGPT and Perplexity, while still on the newer side, have been around long enough for savvy marketers like us to figure out how they work behind-the-scenes.                  We’ve been running tests and experiments on LLM-powered search tools for a long time now, and we’ve learned lots of interesting things about AI search optimization. … Continued

Do Premium Links Influence AI Rankings? Here’s What We’ve Seen

By Corey Batt

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There’s no doubt that premium backlinks positively impact organic search rankings on Google.  However, can the same be said for Gemini, Google’s large language model (LLM) that powers its AI Overviews? In the same vein, do other LLM-powered search tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity appreciate premium backlinks? The answer is yes, although LLMs value backlinks … Continued

AI Overviews: How to Get Cited, Ranked, and Clicked in Google’s Generative Results 

By Corey Batt

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Google’s generative AI Overviews (AIOs) have completely shaken up its search results, and they’re becoming more prevalent at an extremely rapid pace. This has made learning how to rank in AI Overviews an absolute necessity for search marketing.  Here’s why.  In January 2025, research showed they appeared for just 6.59% of Google desktop searches. In … Continued

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