Backlinks for AEO, GEO & SEO: Which Websites Actually Influence AI Answers

A few years ago, a backlink had one job: help you rank higher in Google. Today the same link is being graded in three different exams at once. One is the old one - showing up in Google's list of blue links. One is winning the answer box at the top of the page. And one is getting named inside ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google's AI when someone asks them a question.

Those three exams have names: SEO, AEO, and GEO. Most guides treat them as the same thing. They are not. A link that is nearly useless for one can be genuinely powerful for another - and if you do not know which is which, you will spend effort in the wrong place. This post explains all three in plain English, and then names the exact websites that move each one, with the data behind every claim.

Key takeaways

• SEO, AEO, and GEO reward different things. SEO rewards links that pass authority. AEO rewards being the clearest answer. GEO rewards being present on the sites AI engines trust and cite.
• Most free backlinks do almost nothing for SEO - they are nofollow, so they pass no ranking power. That is not a flaw; it is the point being misunderstood.
• The real modern value of those same links is GEO. Being present on Reddit, LinkedIn, or Quora is not a ranking trick - it is showing up where AI answers are built from.
• A handful of platforms do the heavy lifting. Reddit, YouTube, LinkedIn, Quora, Medium, GitHub, and Stack Overflow are the free platforms AI engines actually cite. Everything else is filler.
• Being cited is not the same as being named. You can help an AI's answer without it ever saying your brand - so presence is the start, not the finish.

SEO, AEO, GEO in plain English

Let us make these real with one search: "best CRM for a small team."

SEO - rank in the blue links. This is the game everyone knows. Google shows a list of ten results, and you want to be near the top. Backlinks that pass authority (dofollow links from trusted sites) are how you climb. When people say "link building," this is usually what they mean.

AEO - be the answer. Above those blue links, Google now shows boxes: a featured snippet, a "People also ask" list, and an AI Overview that writes a short answer right there. AEO, or Answer Engine Optimization, is about being the source those boxes pull from. You are not just ranking - you are the sentence Google reads out loud. A clear, well-structured comparison page is what wins here.

GEO - be named by the AI. Now the person skips Google and asks ChatGPT the same question. The AI writes a paragraph and maybe names three tools. GEO, or Generative Engine Optimization, is about being one of those named tools - or being on the websites the AI leaned on to write its answer. This is the newest game, and backlinks play a very different role in it.

Same search, three completely different ways to win. Now here is where backlinks fit - and where most advice goes wrong.

The uncomfortable truth about free links and SEO

Here is the part nobody wants to say out loud: most of the free backlinks people chase do almost nothing for SEO.

When you create a profile on a directory, drop a link in a forum signature, or publish on a free article site, that link is almost always nofollow - a tag that tells Google "do not pass ranking power through this link." We even measured this on our own placements: across the free links we built and tracked, the link type was a mix, and the classic ranking value was low by design. (If you want the durability data, we re-checked 3,790 of them months later.)

So if your goal is purely to rank in the blue links, a pile of free profile and directory links is not going to move the needle much. That is just true, and pretending otherwise is how people waste months. As Rand Fishkin's team at SparkToro has documented, the search world has shifted so far that in early 2026 roughly 68% of US Google searches ended without a click to anywhere - the results page, and increasingly the AI answer, is the destination now.

But "low SEO value" is not the same as "no value." It just means you are being graded on the wrong exam. Look at the same links through the AEO and GEO lens and the picture flips.

Where the value actually went: AEO and GEO

Think about how an AI answer is built. When you ask ChatGPT or Perplexity "best CRM for a small team," it does not invent an answer from nothing. It leans on content from websites it has learned to trust - and increasingly, content it is paying to access. The websites in that trusted set are the ones that shape the answer.

This is why a profile on the right platform matters now, even when the link is nofollow. You are not buying ranking power. You are putting your brand, in a consistent form, on a website that AI engines read when they build answers about your category. That is the entire GEO play, and it has nothing to do with the old link-equity math.

There is a catch worth understanding, and the SEO expert Kevin Indig named it well. In his research on what he calls "ghost citations," he showed that a large share of AI citations link to a source without ever naming the brand in the answer - being cited (the AI used your content) and being mentioned (the AI said your name) are two different things. So presence on a trusted site is the price of entry, not a guarantee your name shows up. You still have to earn the mention with genuinely useful, quotable content.

Which websites actually influence AEO and GEO

This is the question you came for. Not "which sites are good" in the abstract - which specific free platforms do AI engines demonstrably cite? We compiled the numbers from the large public studies (Semrush, Ahrefs, Peec, Profound) in our post on the websites that influence AI answers. Here are the ones that keep winning:

Reddit is the clearest example. It was the most-cited domain in Google's AI Overviews and Perplexity across late-2024 to mid-2025, and Google signed a content deal reportedly worth about $60M a year to access it. When a company pays nine figures for a website's content, that website is, by definition, shaping AI answers. A genuine presence in the subreddits about your category is one of the strongest GEO moves available - and it is free.

YouTube is the single most-cited domain in Google AI Overviews at about 20.9% of citations. One honest product-walkthrough video per major use case is a search asset, not a "social post."

LinkedIn leads Google's AI Mode and is the top-cited domain for professional and B2B questions. For a SaaS company, a consistent company page and active founder profile is table stakes.

Quora and Medium show up repeatedly in AI Overview and ChatGPT citations - question-and-answer content and clear explainer posts are formats AI loves to pull from. GitHub and Stack Overflow dominate developer and technical questions; if you sell a dev tool, presence there is non-negotiable.

Notice what these have in common: they are all places where real people publish real content, which is exactly what AI engines are trained to trust. That matches what Aleyda Solís, one of the most respected voices in international SEO, describes as the core of the work - she frames modern brand authority as:

"aligning community management, digital PR and link building efforts in those third-party platforms where citations are coming from... that facilitate entity recognition and establish 'on-brand' authority."

In plain terms: go be genuinely present on the sites AI already cites. That is the job.

A worked example: what a Reddit profile actually does

Say you run a small project-management SaaS. You create a Reddit account and, over a few weeks, genuinely answer questions in r/projectmanagement - mentioning your tool only where it honestly fits.

• SEO score: near zero. Your Reddit links are nofollow. Google will not rank your site higher because of them.
• AEO score: medium. If your helpful answer gets upvoted and becomes the top reply, it can feed Google's answer box for "best tool for X" queries that surface Reddit threads.
• GEO score: high. Reddit is the #1 domain AI engines cite. When someone asks ChatGPT "what do people recommend for small-team project management," your genuinely helpful, upvoted answer is exactly the kind of content that gets pulled into the reply.

Same activity, three totally different grades. If you judged that Reddit effort by SEO alone, you would quit. Judged by GEO, it is one of the best free things you can do.

The second tier: entity-trust platforms

Below the AI-cited platforms sits a second group that works differently: the registries and review sites - Crunchbase, G2, Capterra, and Wikipedia-grade sources. These rarely show up as the visible citation in an AI answer, but they do something quieter and important: they teach engines who you are. When an AI needs to confirm that "Acme CRM" is a real company in the CRM space, these are the sources it cross-checks. This is called entity recognition, and it is why we tell every SaaS to lock down its foundational profiles early. They are the floor, not the lever.

The third tier: be honest and skip it

Then there is the filler: random classified-ad sites, low-quality article-submission farms, forum-signature links on dead boards. These are neither cited by AI nor useful for entity recognition, and they pass no SEO value either. They exist because "get 500 backlinks for $10" services need something to deliver. In the SEO/AEO/GEO framework, they score near zero on all three. Building them is not risky so much as pointless - time you could have spent on one good Reddit answer.

What to actually do

Here is the plain playbook, in priority order:

1. Stop judging free links by SEO. Accept that their ranking power is low, and measure them by GEO instead - presence on cited sites.
2. Pick the Tier-1 platforms that fit you. Every SaaS: Reddit + LinkedIn + YouTube. Dev tools: add GitHub and Stack Overflow. Answer-heavy niches: add Quora and Medium.
3. Be genuinely useful, not promotional. AI engines and communities both punish spam. The content that gets cited is the content that would earn an upvote on its own. As Lily Ray put it, the winners are the sites housing something completely unique: "Original research and data and also... user generated content... authentic conversations... not just repurposing what everybody else has already said."
4. Lock down entity trust. Claim and keep consistent your foundational profiles - same name, URL, and description everywhere - so engines resolve your brand correctly.
5. Earn the real links separately. GEO presence is not a substitute for editorial links that pass authority - you need both, because links still decide who gets cited once you are visible.
6. Don't confuse cited with named. Track whether AI answers actually mention your brand, not just whether they used your content.

The shift is simple to state: the backlink did not die, its job changed. For classic rankings, most free links were never the answer. For the AI answers your buyers now read first, presence on the right sites is one of the highest-leverage free moves you have - as long as you show up where it counts and actually say something worth quoting.