We've been saying it for a year: earned links pay in two currencies, rankings and AI citations/answers. Then Google spent the last four months making our argument for us, update after update, and honestly, we should send them a bill.
Since February, Google has pushed through a Discover-only core update, the fastest spam update on record (finished in under a day), a broad March core update that started scoring Core Web Vitals holistically instead of metric by metric, a May core update that rolled out faster and hit harder than March, and a second spam update in June that specifically went after black hat tactics.
That's five distinct moves in four months. Google isn't slowing down. It's accelerating, and every single update points the same direction.
Here's the direction: verified authority wins. Google's E-E-A-T standards keep tightening around content attributed to real authors with a track record, and anonymous or generic-byline content keeps losing ground no matter how good it reads. That's the whole game we've been playing since day one.
The AI content story backs this up as well. Google has been explicit that it isn't banning AI assisted writing. What it's targeting is content produced at scale with no human oversight and no actual information gain, regardless of who or what typed it. Translation: your standard content mills are getting caught, and earned editorial links from publications that actually vet what they publish are becoming rarer and more valuable at the exact same time.
Which brings us to currency number two. AI Overviews keep expanding into more query types, which means more of the buying journey is going through AI generated answers before a person ever clicks a blue link. The sources feeding those answers still come from somewhere. Getting cited depends on the same signals that earn a ranking: real authority, real publications, real trust. We've said this before and we'll keep saying it: link building isn't competing with AI search, link building is what AI search is built on top of.
One more thing worth flagging. The next major core update is tracking for August or September, historically the most volatile window of the year. If your authority signals are thin right now, that's the update that finds out. If you've spent this year building real bylines, real placements, real editorial relationships, that's the update that pays you back.
We didn't change our advice this year. Google just caught up to it.
Sources:
- Search Engine Journal, June 2026 spam update coverage
- Search Engine Roundtable, May 2026 core update completion report
- Google Search Central, Core Updates documentation
- Nutech Digital, 2026 algorithm update recap
- Digital Applied, 2026 algorithm timeline and June ranking volatility analysis
