Are Backlinks Still Important for SEO in 2026 or Is the Backlink Obituary Premature
Every few months someone publishes the backlink obituary. Backlinks are dead, the post says, Google moved on, content is all that matters now, stop wasting money on link building. The post does numbers. People share it. And a quarter later someone writes it again, because the first funeral did not take.
I work with subject matter experts who are very good at their jobs and understandably confused by this. They read one confident headline declaring backlinks obsolete, quietly cut link building from their SEO plan, and six months later they cannot work out why a competitor with thinner content keeps outranking them on the search terms that pay the bills. The obituary cost them rankings. So let me answer the question the headlines keep dodging.
Are backlinks still important for SEO in 2026
Yes, backlinks are still important for SEO in 2026. Backlinks remain a core ranking factor, and Google's reasonable surfer patent confirms backlinks are still scored on quality. Backlinks still matter, but the relevance and authority of the referring domain now decide how important each backlink is.
That answer holds up against what Google says in public, what Google built in private, and what independent search data keeps finding. Those three sources rarely agree this cleanly, so each one is worth walking through.
Why the backlink obituary keeps getting written too early
The death notices are not invented out of nothing. They come from real Google statements that get stretched past what they actually said. In September 2023, Gary Illyes told a conference that links are not a top three ranking factor. Notice what he did not say. He did not say backlinks stopped mattering for SEO. He said the weighting moved.
Then in March 2024, Google links documentation update, so links became "a signal" rather than "an important signal." A month later Illyes said Google needs very few links to rank a page, and the room heard "links are over." He walked the comment back on X within a day. John Mueller has added his own version, telling website owners there are more important things to work on than chasing link counts.
Read those quotes together and a careful reader gets "backlinks are weighted a little less and quality matters more." A headline writer gets "backlinks are dead." That gap is the whole obituary industry. The smarter move covered in link building strategies was never to chase link volume in the first place, so the people doing SEO right were never the target of these warnings.
What Google's patents reveal about backlinks and link quality
Here is the part the obituaries skip, and it is the part that settles the argument. Google still describes PageRank as "one of our core ranking systems" in its own guide to how search works. A ranking factor that Google was actually retiring would not sit in that document.
PageRank also stopped being a flat counter of backlinks a long time ago. Google's reasonable surfer patent describes ranking a page based on the probability that a real person actually clicks each link, using features like the link's position on the page, its font, and its anchor text. A link buried in a footer passes almost nothing. A relevant link inside the body of a related article passes real authority to your website. The "quality over quantity" advice everyone repeats is not a slogan. It is literally how the patent assigns weight to links, and it traces straight back to the original PageRank patent that has only grown more selective about which backlinks count.
The "quality over quantity" advice everyone repeats is not a slogan.
The 2024 API leak removed the last doubt. The leaked documentation, broken down in detail by iPullRank, showed Google storing link features it had downplayed in public, including a site-level authority measure and signals that classify backlinks by source quality and trust. A search engine that had truly moved on from links would not maintain that machinery. The public message softened. The internal scoring did not.
Why the data still shows backlinks are important for search rankings
Step away from Google's words and the patents, and the independent studies point the same direction. Backlinko's analysis of 11.8 million search results found that number one result has 3.8x more backlinks, and that a website's overall link authority correlates strongly with higher rankings. Ahrefs, working from a far larger index, found that 66% of pages have no backlinks.
Correlation is not causation, and the honest version of this argument admits that ranking well also earns a website more links. But the pattern is too consistent to wave away, especially in competitive markets. Try to rank a page for a commercial term against established websites with strong referring domain profiles, and no amount of clean content closes the gap on its own. Backlinks remain the ranking factor that separates pages competing for the same quality bar, which is exactly why they still matter for SEO.
Are backlinks still important for AI search and SEO
The newer claim is that AI search makes backlinks irrelevant. The data says the opposite. Ahrefs found that 76% of AI Overview citations rank in top 10, and the backlinks that earn those top rankings are what get a page into the AI answer. Semrush's study of a thousand domains went further, finding that link quality and AI brand mentions, stronger than authority score and far stronger than raw link counts.
This is where the modern version of link building earns its keep. The goal is no longer a pile of backlinks. It is relevant, editorial links from authoritative websites that both Google and the AI systems read as a credible vote. A backlink from a respected publication in your field does more for your rankings than a hundred directory listings, because relevance and the authority of the referring domain are exactly what the scoring rewards. The authority engine that builds real backlinks was always built on that principle, not on link volume, which is why it keeps working while volume tactics keep dying.
How search engines score your backlinks for SEO
Strip away the noise and the way search engines score links for SEO is simple. Search engines read every backlink pointing to your pages as a signal, then discount most of those signals based on the quality and relevance of the linking site. To search engines, a backlink from a high authority website in your niche is an important vote in the search rankings. A few links from unrelated, low quality sites are almost worthless to search engines, and a run of spammy links can hurt your SEO. This is why two websites with near identical pages rank in completely different positions. The website with relevant backlinks from authoritative referring domains wins, and the website leaning on link volume stalls. For most pages, the important SEO shift is to stop counting links and start weighing the quality and importance of each backlink and the domain behind it. Search engines made that the important distinction years ago, and the websites that adjusted their SEO are the ones still ranking.
What still matters when you build quality backlinks
So backlinks are not dead. Bad backlinks are dead, and they have been dead for years. The links worth pursuing are relevant to your topic, come from websites with genuine authority, sit inside real editorial content, and arrive from a diverse set of referring domains rather than the same few sources repeated. Anchor text should read naturally, because search engines use it and the surrounding text to judge relevance, and keyword-stuffed anchors look like manipulation to Google.
The businesses that get SEO right treat link building as one part of a larger trust signal, alongside content that demonstrates real expertise and a website structure that puts authority where it needs to go. They stop reading the obituary and start asking a better question, which is not whether backlinks are still important but which links are worth earning. That question has a clear answer, and it has changed far less than the headlines want you to believe.
By Katrina Kendall
Katrina Kendall
Content Strategist at Right Thing SEO, where she helps business owners sound like the experts they already are. Her focus is on translating real-world experience — the kind that lives in a founder's head but never makes it onto the page — into content that satisfies Google's E-E-A-T standards and actually converts. Before joining Right Thing, she spent six years in B2B content strategy, where she got tired of watching brilliant operators get outranked by generic blogs written by people who'd never done the work.