Link Building in the Era of AI Search Engines Book Review | James Dooley Interviews Paul Truscott

James Dooley (0:00)

Link Building in the Era of AI Search Engines Book Review.

Today, I'm joined with Paul Truscott, one of the co-authors of the book. And Paul, I want you to jump straight in, and why is Link Building important? No, for AI search engines.

Paul Truscott (0:19)

Okay. All of the LLMs, okay, when they're looking at sources to site, they look at the age of the source, but they have no way of looking at the link profile like Google does. Okay. So in the past, when we built links, guest posts and such like, niche edits, we're concerned not very much with the content really, other than that it's relevant and our anchor text is appropriate, etc. But we don't think too much about the structure of the article, right? We're just, you know, it's keywords in there, making sure that all of that is good, or typically, this is what most people have done.

Now, with the AI Search Engines, the structure of that content and how it's laid out and what it says is absolutely vital.

Because if that link source is going to be used by the AI engines, it's not going to be used so much from the link perspective, it's going to be used from a citation perspective. And so it's important. This is actually important in Google too, because Google is doing the same thing. So we've got to think a lot more carefully now about how we structure the content, where we're placing links, the content behind the link, the source page that it's coming from. What's it saying about us? How is that content structured? Is it written in a way that is easily digestible by these large language models? And if it's not, we need to address that because at the end of the day, and this comes back to something that Quora has said, which refers to Google specifically, but it also is important for these engines. And that's cost of retrieval. If we make it expensive for these LLMs to retrieve and process the data, they're just going to ignore it. They'll move on.

So we've got to make sure we make everything nice and easy for them. And that's what the book tells you how to do.

James Dooley (2:16)

Yeah, for sure. Anyone who's wanting to know the authors of the book called Link Building in the Era of AI Search Engines, the authors are AI James Dooley, Paul Truscott, here you are, here he is on the episode, Peter Jones and Mike Lovatt. You've got four authors there that have all had their own chapters that are all explaining the importance of link building for LLMs. Now, these are for all the different LLMs, whether it's ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini, Grok.

I think what Paul has touched upon there is so important. It's not really now just chasing the DR and the PageRank distribution. Nowadays, it's about that external topical map or semantic content network to echo what you have off your website and repeat who you are, what you do, and why you are brilliant. It's those semantics that's going to connect you back, that those third-party cooperative sources are going to be used to manipulate what AI is saying about you. If you say you are great on your own website, but it's not being echoed off your website, you're not going to get that AI visibility of what you want. You're not going to get that decision engine optimization at the 11th hour where you're comparing competitor A versus competitor B. You want to be the source that AI is recommending you. You want AI to be your 24-7 sales engine to help you in that work. Not just at discovery, but at bottom of the funnel when they're ready to place that order, you want to make certain that AI is saying that you are the choice.

This is where the book called Link Building in the Era of AI Search Engines talks about not just the PageRank and the Link Juice, but what sources you should be looking to try and get mentioned on, and how semantically you should be connecting that back to your brand. So if you're wanting to get a copy of it, it's on Amazon and it's also on Google Play Store. Make sure you go and do a search for Link Building in the Era of AI Search Engines. I'm biased because AI James Dooley is one of the authors, but I'm going to give it a five-star rating. It's definitely going to get five stars from me just because of the amazing authors that has co-authored it. They are legends in their own right. They all come with different walks of life and different GOs of how they've ranked within Google, and how now they are increasing AI visibility. But Paul, it's been an absolute pleasure. I hope you liked the episode on the review of Link Building in the Era of AI Search Engines. Thank you very much.