Stop Building Links, Start Building Distribution

For decades, SEO professionals have invested enormous amounts of time, money, and resources into acquiring backlinks. We've developed elaborate outreach campaigns, purchased expensive link analysis tools, and created entire industries around convincing other websites to link to ours. But what if we're approaching the problem from the wrong direction?

Backlinks are still an important component of SEO. What needs to change is how we acquire them.

The traditional backlink building process is often inefficient, expensive, and unnecessarily restrictive. Teams spend countless hours pursuing individual links while overlooking opportunities to earn significantly more links through their existing marketing activities.

Meanwhile, the rise of AI search has introduced another reason to rethink this approach. Visibility in systems like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google's AI search experiences depends on more than traditional ranking signals. Brands also need to consider how their information is discovered, discussed, and referenced across the web.

This creates an opportunity to solve two problems with one strategy.

Instead of focusing exclusively on building backlinks, SEO teams should focus on building distribution.

Back in 2022, I wrote an article titled Forget About High-Quality Links! Do This Instead, challenging the SEO industry's obsession with acquiring backlinks exclusively from websites with high authority metrics.

My argument was simple. The definition of a high-quality backlink is subjective, and relying too heavily on third-party authority metrics can cause marketers to overlook valuable opportunities.

A link from a smaller industry blog, an active community website, or a niche publication might not look particularly impressive in your favorite SEO tool. However, that doesn't mean it's worthless. These links can introduce your brand to relevant audiences, generate referral traffic, and contribute to a more diverse backlink profile.

More importantly, smaller publications and communities often have audiences that include writers, researchers, journalists, and other people who publish content themselves. Reaching these audiences can create opportunities for additional links that wouldn't have existed otherwise.

When you focus exclusively on acquiring links from websites that meet arbitrary authority thresholds, you're restricting the number of people who can discover your content.

There is also the problem of scale. Traditional link building typically involves identifying prospects, evaluating their websites, finding contact information, sending outreach emails, and negotiating placements. All of that work might produce only a handful of backlinks.

Some of those links may be valuable, but the return on the time invested can be difficult to justify.

And when backlink acquisition becomes the primary objective, it's easy for teams to drift into practices designed to manufacture links rather than earn genuine recognition. Google's spam policies specifically identify manipulative link schemes, including paid links intended to influence rankings and excessive link exchanges.

To be clear, I'm not suggesting that all traditional link building is ineffective. Targeted outreach, digital PR, and relationship building can produce excellent results.

The problem is treating the acquisition of individual backlinks as the entire strategy rather than one possible outcome of a broader marketing effort.

In marketing, distribution is the process of getting your content, messaging, and expertise in front of the audiences most likely to find them valuable.

When SEO professionals think about publishing content, they often focus on the content itself. They identify a keyword, create an article, optimize the page, and publish it. Then they wait for search engines to deliver an audience.

Distribution takes a different approach. Instead of relying exclusively on search engines to bring people to your content, you actively bring your content to the people who might be interested in it.

This can happen through social media, email newsletters, industry publications, podcasts, professional communities, public relations, partnerships, and other marketing channels.

The important distinction is that distribution isn't simply posting the same link across every social media account you manage. Effective distribution requires understanding where your audience spends its time, what information it values, and how to present that information in ways appropriate for each channel.

For example, an original research report published on your website might become a series of LinkedIn posts, a discussion in an industry community, a newsletter feature, or the subject of a podcast interview. Each of these activities introduces your research to a different audience and creates new opportunities for people to engage with your work.

This approach changes how we think about content marketing.

Publishing content is only the beginning. Distribution is how that content finds an audience.

One of the biggest limitations of traditional link building is that it attempts to acquire links directly from specific websites.

Distribution works differently. Rather than asking individual website owners to link to your content, you're increasing the number of people who encounter it. Some of those people will have their own websites, newsletters, publications, or other platforms where they can reference your work.

Consider a company that publishes an original industry research report.

A traditional link building campaign might identify 100 relevant websites and send personalized outreach emails asking their editors to reference the report. Depending on the quality of the outreach and existing relationships, that campaign might generate a few backlinks.

Now imagine the same company develops a broader distribution strategy.

It shares its findings through social channels, introduces the research to relevant professional communities, incorporates the data into its email newsletter, and encourages its executives to discuss the findings during industry events and podcast appearances.

As the research reaches more people, journalists may discover the data and incorporate it into their reporting. Bloggers might reference individual findings in their articles. Other companies could cite the research when developing their own thought leadership content.

Not every mention will generate a backlink, and not every backlink will contribute equally to search performance. However, the potential pool of people who might link to the research becomes considerably larger.

This also creates a compounding effect. A link from one publication can introduce the content to another audience, which may lead to additional coverage and more links.

Google's own guidance on earning links emphasizes creating unique, compelling content that people naturally want to reference.

Distribution provides a practical way to help those people discover it.

In other words, strong distribution doesn't replace link building. It creates the conditions that make organic link acquisition more likely.

The benefits of distribution extend beyond traditional SEO.

Large language models and AI-powered search systems can draw on information from a wide variety of sources when generating responses. Depending on the system, those sources can include indexed websites, news publications, community discussions, and other publicly available content.

This changes the importance of how brands appear across the broader web.

With traditional SEO, marketers have historically focused on getting their own websites to rank for relevant search queries. With AI search, brands must also consider how their products, services, and expertise are represented by third-party sources that AI systems might retrieve or otherwise use.

For example, imagine someone asks an AI search engine to recommend software for managing a particular business process.

The system might encounter information from software comparison websites, industry publications, customer reviews, and discussions among professionals who use these products. A brand that appears consistently across credible, relevant sources has more opportunities to become part of the information available for that response.

Distribution helps create these opportunities by encouraging independent publishers, industry professionals, and customers to encounter and discuss your brand.

A successful distribution strategy can lead to more third-party mentions, editorial citations, product discussions, and references to your expertise. These references don't necessarily need to include a hyperlink to contribute to broader brand awareness or to become information an AI system might encounter.

However, we need to be careful about overstating what this means.

There is no guarantee that increasing brand mentions will cause an LLM to recommend your company. Training processes, retrieval systems, source selection, and citation behavior differ among AI platforms. We also shouldn't assume that every social media mention is directly ingested or treated as a ranking signal.

For example, OpenAI's documentation on ChatGPT search confirms that responses can include citations to web sources, while also acknowledging that citations may be incomplete or inaccurate. It does not establish a simple relationship between social engagement, brand mentions, and the likelihood of being recommended.

Nevertheless, there is a reasonable strategic argument for increasing your brand's presence in the sources that people and AI-powered search systems may consult.

The goal isn't to manufacture signals for LLMs. It's to establish a stronger, more consistent presence across the information ecosystem they operate within.

For years, SEO professionals have debated whether social media engagement influences search rankings. That debate has often distracted from a much more practical consideration.

Social media makes content discoverable by people who might otherwise never encounter it.

A post on LinkedIn might reach an industry journalist. A conversation on Reddit might introduce your brand to someone researching a product category. A video demonstration might inspire a blogger to write about your software.

These interactions can generate awareness, conversations, and occasionally backlinks. They also create opportunities for third parties to describe your brand in their own words.

That last point is particularly interesting when considering AI search.

Your website is only one source of information about your company. What customers, journalists, and other industry participants say about your brand can contribute to its broader public identity.

Distribution gives you opportunities to participate in those conversations, answer questions, correct misunderstandings, and introduce accurate information about your products or expertise.

But there is an important distinction between participating in communities and attempting to manipulate them. Flooding Reddit with promotional content or manufacturing positive discussions is not an effective long-term strategy.

The objective should be meaningful engagement that encourages genuine recognition.

If we're going to shift our focus toward distribution, we also need to reconsider how we evaluate success.

Traditional link building campaigns often measure performance by the number of acquired backlinks, the authority of referring domains, and the cost per link. These measurements can be useful, but they only capture a portion of the value created by broader marketing activities.

A successful distribution campaign might generate backlinks, referral traffic, newsletter subscribers, branded searches, social engagement, and mentions in third-party publications.

Some of those activities may lead directly to conversions. Others might establish relationships or generate exposure that becomes valuable months later.

For SEO teams, this means looking beyond isolated backlink counts and examining whether distribution is expanding the number of relevant audiences encountering the brand.

It also means measuring the quality of that exposure. Ten mentions in communities that are actively discussing your product category may be more valuable to your business than hundreds of impressions from audiences with no interest in what you offer.

AI search visibility adds another dimension worth monitoring. Teams can examine whether their brands are being mentioned or cited in relevant AI-generated responses and identify which external sources appear in those responses.

However, these observations should be treated as directional measurements rather than proof of causation. A distribution campaign followed by increased AI visibility does not automatically mean the former caused the latter.

The objective is to understand whether your marketing efforts are expanding your brand's reach, recognition, and opportunities for discovery across multiple channels.

One of the biggest advantages of distribution is that it doesn't require SEO teams to build an entirely separate marketing operation.

Most companies already have people working on public relations, social media, email marketing, content development, partnerships, and community engagement.

The opportunity is to coordinate those activities around shared objectives.

When the content team publishes an original research report, the PR team should know about it. When the social media team identifies a conversation gaining traction, the SEO team might have relevant resources to contribute. When executives participate in podcasts or industry events, those appearances can reinforce the same expertise and messaging found on the company's website.

SEO teams can help identify which topics, resources, and original insights deserve additional exposure. They can also ensure that the website provides useful, accessible destinations for people who want to learn more.

This doesn't eliminate the need for deliberate outreach. There will still be situations where contacting specific publishers, requesting attribution for original research, or developing relationships with industry writers makes sense.

The difference is that these activities become part of an integrated distribution strategy rather than an isolated campaign focused entirely on acquiring backlinks.

For in-house teams, this approach also creates opportunities for closer collaboration with departments that might not traditionally consider SEO part of their responsibilities.

And that collaboration becomes increasingly valuable as the lines between search, social media, public relations, and AI-driven discovery continue to blur.

Backlinks aren't going away, and SEO teams shouldn't stop caring about them. They remain an important part of how search engines discover and evaluate content.

But spending all of your time chasing individual backlinks misses the larger opportunity.

A strong distribution strategy puts your content in front of more people, encourages independent references to your work, and increases the number of places where your brand can be discovered.

Some of those interactions will generate backlinks. Others will produce brand mentions, referral traffic, relationships, and opportunities that are harder to capture in a traditional SEO report.

And as AI-powered search becomes another way people discover information, the value of being consistently represented across relevant sources becomes even more important.

The best part is that this approach doesn't depend on predicting exactly how search engines or LLMs will evaluate those signals in the future. It focuses on a fundamental marketing principle that has always mattered: getting useful information in front of the right people.

Stop treating backlinks as the product you're trying to manufacture. Start treating them as one of the outcomes of successful distribution.

Build the audience. Earn the attention. Give people something worth referencing.

The links can follow.

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One more thing: AI is only as good as its operator, and if you are reading this newsletter, you’re better than most!

Till next time,

PS: Let me know what you think of this issue, or anything else here: [email protected]