Link-building hasn’t gone away in 2025, but it certainly has evolved.
Backlinks are still major trust signals for search engines, and they also influence the LLMs that power ChatGPT and Google’s AI Overviews.
That means building backlinks can work double duty for you and improve your SEO and GEO (generative engine optimization).
The caveat is that the concept of what makes a trustworthy backlink has changed.
Trust is no longer about counting links; it’s about verifying content quality, relevance, and accuracy. LLMs don’t evaluate link volume or assign authority through a link graph.
However, backlinks still serve as trust signals for LLMs.
How is that?
It’s the context that matters, not the link itself. If a credible domain mentions your brand and links to your website, it’s still a sign of trust, but it has to do with semantics instead of hyperlinks.
This also explains why unlinked brand mentions can improve your credibility on AI platforms, while traditional search engines require a link to infer authority.
In this guide, we’ll teach you what makes a backlink trustworthy to search algorithms and LLMs.
Here’s what we’ll cover:
- What Google still values in backlinks
- How AI models interpret link trust
- The difference between high-trust and low-trust backlinks
- How to build or buy trustworthy backlinks in 2025
