For about two years now, the SEO internet has been holding a funeral for the link.
Every week, a new chart. AI Overviews are eating clicks. Zero-click search is the future. Links are dead, long live "brand mentions," please buy my GEO course. I've attended so many of these funerals I've started bringing a casserole.
Then on September 23, a chart showed up that went the other direction. Malte Landwehr of Peec AI posted data on X showing that the share of Google AI Overviews with external links inside the answer itself jumped from almost 0% to over 25%. Barry Schwartz picked it up on Search Engine Roundtable.
Not links off to the side in a little citation card. Links in the actual answer. Mid-sentence. Clickable. Like it's 2012 and Google remembered the web exists.
Here's my take, up front: this is the moment rankings and AI citations become the same thing. And links are how you get in.
Before we throw a parade
Let's be honest about what this is. It's one vendor's data, shared in one X post, as one chart. Barry disclosed he has a small investment in Peec. And, to his real credit, Barry also said the data didn't quite "feel" right to him, but he shared it anyway because it cuts against everything he's been reporting lately.
That's the kind of intellectual honesty our industry could use a lot more of. So I'll match it: treat this as a strong signal, not gospel. The real number might be 15%. It might be 40%. It might look different in your vertical than in the dataset.
But the direction matters. And the mechanism matters even more.
Two Currencies, one box
At Page One Power, we talk about links paying out in Two Currencies. Currency one: rankings. Currency two: AI citations. Earn the right links, and you get paid in both.
Until now, those felt like two separate ledgers. You ranked in the blue links over here. You may have gotten cited in an AI answer over there. Different box, different game, different LinkedIn thought leaders yelling about each one.
This change smashes them together. When the AI Overview itself links out inside the answer, that link is a ranking. It's the most prominent ranking on the page. It sits above the blue links, inside the thing everyone reads first.
Two Currencies, one SERP feature. Rankings and citations are merging into one spot. Links are how you get in.
So who gets picked?
Google isn't pulling those inline links out of a hat. AI Overviews lean on pages Google already trusts enough to surface. And trust on the web is still earned the same boring, stubborn way it's always been earned: other credible sites linking to you.
Let me give you a specific example. Say your cousin Dale makes the best smoked brisket in Idaho. Genuinely life-changing brisket. Dale has a blog about it. Dale's blog has four backlinks, and two of them are from Dale's other blog.
Someone asks Google how long to smoke a brisket. The AI Overview is not linking to Dale. It's linking to the site that the barbecue world, the food media, and a few thousand home cooks have been pointing to for years.
Sorry, Dale. The brisket was never the problem. The lack of anyone vouching for it was.
What the "links are dead" crowd got wrong
The mistake was mixing up the input and the output.
Clicks were the output, and yes, AI Overviews put clicks at risk. That was real. But links were always the input. They're how Google decides who deserves to be seen in the first place.
Now Google is adding output back into the AI answer. And guess what decides who collects it? The same input as before. The web's trust signals didn't get replaced. They got a new place to show up.
If you cut your link building budget in 2024 because someone on a webinar told you links were dead, I don't blame you. The charts were scary. But this is a pretty good week to put it back.
What to actually do about it
Keep earning editorial links from sites that matter in your space. Not volume for volume's sake. Relevant, credible sites that a human editor chose to link. Those are votes in both currencies.
Build pages worth linking mid-sentence. An inline link in an AI answer points to something specific: a clear definition, a real number, original data, a straight answer. If your page is 2,000 words of throat-clearing before it gets to the point, you're making Google work too hard.
Track it yourself. Watch whether your money queries trigger AI Overviews, and whether those Overviews link to you or your competitors. Don't bet your strategy on one chart. Including this one. Including anything I write.
Skip the magic GEO hacks. There's no secret prompt-injection trick that gets you linked inside AI Overviews. There's being the page the web already trusts. That's it. That's the trick.
The bottom line
Google put links back inside AI Overviews. Maybe at 25%, maybe more, maybe less, but they're back, and they sit in the most valuable real estate on the page.
And the thing that decides who gets them is the same thing that has decided who wins in search since the beginning.
Rankings and citations are merging into one spot. Links are how you get in.
