We just got back from Ahrefs Evolve in sunny/stormy San Diego. On paper, it was an AI search conference. AEO in the session titles, AI visibility in the workshops, an Anthropic marketer on the main stage. Our AIO/GEO/AEO Bingo card was full by lunch on day one.
But read the agenda a second time and something funny shows up. Strip out the AI vocabulary and a big chunk of the program is about one thing: getting other people's websites to talk about you.
The opening keynote after Tim Soulo's welcome was Ross Simmonds on "Reddit, YouTube & Backlinks." Day two had Ross Hudgens on "PR for Machines: Earning Coverage That LLMs Repeat." The lunch workshops were Farzad Rashidi on "Citation Engineering: Off-Page SEO for AI Answers" and Noah Greenberg on "Scaling Offpage Authority for AI Search." The headline panel asked whether getting named by AI is "Earned, Bought, or Engineered?"
That's not an AI conference. That's a link building conference that got a new wardrobe. And honestly? It looks great on us.
Sessions that made the case
Here's the off-page thread running through the two days, straight from the agenda:
| Session |
Speaker |
What it says about links |
| How To Win In The New Search Era: Reddit, YouTube & Backlinks (Day 1 keynote) |
Ross Simmonds, Foundation |
The "new era" playbook still has backlinks in the title. Distribution is just link building's cooler cousin. |
| The New Viral (Day 1) |
Brianna Doe, Verbatim |
Creator trust is hard for AI to fake. Same reason a real editor's link is hard to fake. |
| PR for Machines: Earning Coverage That LLMs Repeat (Day 2) |
Ross Hudgens, Siege Media |
Digital PR, data reuse and "best X" placements, pitched as GEO. It's Media Blitz with a new badge. |
| The New Way the Web Works: Zero Clicks, Declining Traffic, No Attribution, Yet More Influence than Ever (Day 2) |
Rand Fishkin, SparkToro |
Clicks are shrinking, influence isn't. Being cited and being linked is how influence gets measured now. |
| Earned, Bought, or Engineered? The Truth About Getting Named by AI (Day 2 panel) |
Jen Cornwell, Dawood Bukhari, Jonah Pessin, Chris Porteous; moderated by Kamila Olexa |
The whole debate in one title. More on this below. |
| Citation Engineering: Off-Page SEO for AI Answers (lunch workshop) |
Farzad Rashidi, Respona |
"Placing editorial content" on trusted sources to earn citations. Also known as link building. |
| Scaling Offpage Authority for AI Search: A 90-Day GEO Playbook (lunch workshop) |
Noah Greenberg, Stacker |
A 30/60/90-day off-page plan. Authority still has to be earned somewhere else first. |
The masterminds told the same story: Farzad on "Off-Page SEO for AI Visibility," Ross Simmonds on "The State Of Reddit In The SERP & LLMs," Dawood Bukhari on "Controlling AI Consensus." Even the sponsors on Tim's "Tim Grills the Sponsor" panel were mostly off-page businesses: Respona (outreach), Stacker (story distribution), SearchEye and Digital Web Solutions.
The data backs up the agenda. Rand's own SparkToro numbers put zero-click Google searches at 68.01% in Jan to Apr 2026, up from 60.45% in 2024. And Ahrefs, the host, just published a 15 million query study showing ChatGPT searched the web in only 14.4% of answers and "seems to be prioritizing original sources over sites that summarize them." Fewer clicks, more weight on who the web already trusts. That's both currencies tightening at the same time.
Earned, bought, or engineered?
The panel had audience voting on earned vs. paid AI citations, volume vs. quality, and durability.
Whatever the room said, here's our vote: earned. Not because we're precious about it. Because we've watched this exact movie before.
- Bought mentions are paid links with a new invoice. Google's Gary Illyes already warned back in May that "seeking inauthentic 'mentions' across the web isn't as helpful as it might seem."
- Engineered citations are PBNs in a fleece vest. Anthropic's usage policy, updated Oct 8, now bans using Claude to "manipulate the sources from which search engines or AI systems draw answers." When the AI companies start writing the spam policy too, the shortcut window is closing.
- Earned is the only one that pays in both currencies. An editorial link on a real publication helps you rank, and that same page is what AI systems retrieve, trust and cite. One placement, two paychecks.
The nuance worth keeping: "engineered" doesn't have to mean fake. Picking the right publications, building data a journalist actually wants and pitching it well is engineering. It's just engineering in service of earning. That's the line between a strategy and a scheme, and it's the same line it was in 2012.
What it means for link building
Three things we're taking home from San Diego:
- The industry is renaming link building, not replacing it. "Citation engineering," "offpage authority," "PR for machines." Call it whatever gets the budget approved. The work is the same: earn a real mention on a site people and machines already trust.
- Digital PR is the shared language now. When the SEO side (Hudgens, Simmonds) and the PR side are pitching the same thing, the brands that already run real earned media programs are ahead. That's exactly why we built Media Blitz.
- The second currency raised the price of the first. Fewer clicks means each ranking is worth less as traffic. But it's worth more as a signal, because the pages that rank and get cited are the ones AI pulls from. Links are how you get on that page in the first place.
If you're auditing your own program after the show, start with our six types of links and ask one question of each: would this placement still exist if nobody paid for it? If yes, it's paying you in both currencies. If no, it's a bill waiting to come due.
