A Reddit thread about a disavow file is not where you’d expect a big SEO debate to reignite. But that’s what happened in early September.
You’ve probably run into the argument yourself: are backlinks dead now that ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Google’s AI Mode are changing how people search? Plenty of content says yes. Plenty says no, just as loudly. Neither answer helps much when you’re the one deciding where to spend your time and budget.
So let’s slow down and look at what actually happened, and what it does and doesn’t prove.
Where This Conversation Restarted
SEO writer Ann Smarty covered this in her LinkedIn newsletter, Smarty’s Digest, in early September 2026. She opened with the questions she says she gets constantly: Do backlinks still help organic rankings? Do they help visibility in ChatGPT, Claude, and AI Mode? What happens if a business thinks it got penalized for bad link building?
Her answer to the first two was a flat “yes.” The more interesting part wasn’t the yes — it was what pushed her to write about it in the first place: a small, telling exchange involving Google’s John Mueller.
What Mueller Actually Said About the Disavow Tool
Here’s the short version, based on public reporting.
A site owner posted in a Reddit SEO thread saying their rankings dropped after uploading a disavow file — the tool you use to tell Google to ignore specific backlinks pointing at your site. Commenters piled on, several calling the Disavow tool outdated and pointless.
Then Mueller replied. According to a report from Search Engine Roundtable, published September 2, 2026, he reportedly said:
“There’s a lot of hate on the disavow tool here – but it has its place & time, it does have effects.”
That’s it. That’s the quote. Worth being precise here, because it’s easy to stretch a line like this further than it was meant to go.
What it confirms: the tool still does something. Upload a disavow file, and Google doesn’t just quietly ignore it.
What it doesn’t confirm: Mueller wasn’t talking about AI visibility. He wasn’t talking about ChatGPT or Generative Engine Optimization (GEO — the practice of optimizing content so AI tools cite it) at all. He was answering a narrow question about one tool, in response to one person’s ranking drop. By most accounts, he didn’t even confirm the disavow file caused that drop — he pointed the person toward other possible causes, like a broader spam update or a technical issue. And Google’s long-standing public position is still that most sites don’t need to touch the Disavow tool at all, and misusing it can do more harm than good.
So where does “backlinks still matter for AI visibility” actually come from? That’s Smarty’s own reasoning, not something Mueller said. Her logic: if backlinks were truly meaningless now, why would Google keep maintaining a tool built specifically to manage them? A tool that still “has effects” is a small signal, in her reading, that the thing it manages still counts for something.
That’s a reasonable inference. It’s just not the same as Google officially confirming backlinks drive AI visibility. Both can be true at once — a sound inference is still an inference. Worth naming that difference plainly instead of collapsing it into one big headline.
So, Do Backlinks Matter for AI Visibility? Our Honest Take
Yes. Just probably not in the way most people picture when they ask.
For years, “backlinks matter” meant one thing: get more of them, ideally from sites with a high Domain Rating or Domain Authority score. It became a numbers game. Link count went up, and plenty of SEOs treated that as the whole story.
That mindset doesn’t translate cleanly to how AI tools work. ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and AI Mode aren’t counting how many links point at a page. They’re trying to answer one specific question: can this source be trusted enough to reference in an answer? That’s a trust question, not a math question.
And this is where backlinks come back in. Links — especially from sites that are already trusted and cited — are one of the strongest trust signals we have. If credible websites link to you or mention your brand, that tells Google and AI tools you’re a real, established source, not a page that showed up yesterday. People sometimes call this “citability”: the more you’re referenced elsewhere, the more citable, and trustworthy, you look.
Independent data backs this up too, not just opinion. An Ahrefs study of roughly 75,000 brands found that brand mentions across the web correlated more strongly with AI visibility than backlinks alone did. That doesn’t mean backlinks stopped counting — a link is usually a mention too — it means the mention itself, with or without a clickable link attached, is doing more of the work than raw link counting ever could. Being talked about and referenced in trustworthy places — links, mentions, reviews, coverage — matters more than any single backlink count on its own.
So: backlinks still matter. They matter as one piece of a bigger trust signal, not as a standalone scoreboard.
Chasing a Score vs. Chasing Trust
A few things have genuinely changed here, and this part is worth understanding properly.
The old habit was chasing a number. A lot of link building became, in practice, about hitting a Domain Rating or Domain Authority target — almost as an end in itself. Links from high-DR sites counted as a win, whether or not a real person ever clicked one.
The new habit is chasing trust. AI tools care whether a source is genuinely recognized by other trustworthy sources — not whether it hit some third-party score. A mention in a well-known industry publication, a real citation in someone else’s research, a link from a site your own customers already know — these carry more weight than a stack of links from unrelated sites with an inflated number attached.
Quality over quantity was always good advice. The AI search era just raises the stakes on it. Spammy or purchased links carried ranking risk before. Now they also fail to build the kind of trust signal that gets a brand cited in an AI-generated answer. A handful of genuine mentions from sources people already trust will usually beat a pile of low-quality links, in both Google and AI tools.
The Penalty Fear Is Mostly Outdated
Some of the anxiety here traces back to Google’s Penguin update. Worth a quick, plain explanation, because a lot of businesses are still carrying fear that’s a decade old.
In 2016, Google folded Penguin into its core algorithm instead of running it as a separate, occasional update. One key change: Penguin got more granular. Rather than penalizing an entire site over some bad links, it started adjusting rankings based on specific spam signals — often touching only certain pages, not the whole domain.
In practice:
- Spammy links are less likely to tank your whole site than a lot of people assume.
- Low-quality links tend to simply stop passing value, rather than actively punishing you — unless you’ve received an actual manual penalty from Google, which is a specific, named action, not a vague dip.
- Rankings can shift with no public announcement at all, which is part of why so many site owners misread ordinary fluctuation as “we got penalized.”
When does disavowing actually make sense, then? Mostly if you’ve received a manual action notice specifically about unnatural links, or if you know for certain you built spammy links in the past — paid guest posts, low-quality directories — and want to clean it up proactively. If you’re not sure you have a link problem at all, disavowing as a guess usually isn’t the right move. It’s easy to accidentally disavow links that were actually helping you.
If rankings are slipping and the cause isn’t clear, the more useful question usually isn’t “what do I need to recover from?” It’s “what should I be doing differently going forward?” Chasing old link-building shortcuts rarely pays off for long anyway.
A Simple Filter for Every Link Opportunity
One question cuts through most of the confusion here:
Would a real person — and a real AI tool — already trust the place this link is coming from?
Yes, and the link or mention is doing real work for your visibility, in traditional search and in AI-generated answers. No — it’s a low-quality directory, an irrelevant site, a paid placement with no actual audience — and it’s probably not worth much. It was probably never worth as much as it looked on paper, either.
That single filter moves the conversation away from “how many links do I have” and toward “who is actually vouching for me, and would that vouching mean anything to a real reader or a careful AI tool.”
Frequently Asked Questions
Do backlinks help with ChatGPT and AI search visibility, or just Google rankings?
Based on current public discussion and available research, both. The mechanism is trust and citability rather than a direct ranking formula — backlinks and brand mentions from credible sources are among the trust signals both Google and AI tools use to decide what to reference.
What did John Mueller actually say about the Disavow tool?
Per a September 2026 report from Search Engine Roundtable, Mueller said the Disavow tool “has its place & time, it does have effects,” responding to a Reddit thread where users dismissed it as outdated. He was answering a question about the tool itself — not making a statement about AI search visibility.
Will I get penalized if I have spammy backlinks I didn’t build myself?
Not automatically. Since Google folded Penguin into its core algorithm in 2016, most spam signals get handled by devaluing specific links or pages, not penalizing an entire site. A true manual penalty is a distinct, named action from Google — different from a normal ranking dip.
Should I stop chasing high Domain Rating (DR) links?
You don’t need to ignore DR entirely, but it shouldn’t be the goal. A lower-DR link that’s genuinely relevant and trusted by real readers can matter more for AI visibility than a high-DR link from an unrelated, low-trust source.
What matters more now — the number of backlinks, or where they come from?
Where they come from. Per the Ahrefs research referenced above, source credibility and relevance outweigh raw backlink count.
The Bottom Line
Backlinks haven’t become irrelevant in the age of AI search. What’s changed is why they matter. It was never really about the number attached to a link — it’s about whether real, trustworthy sources are willing to mention and link to you. That’s the same signal Google has used for years, and it’s the one AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini are leaning on now too, as they decide which sources are worth citing.
The Disavow tool exchange sparked by Mueller’s comment doesn’t prove all of this by itself, and we’ve tried not to overstate what he actually said. But it fits a pattern that’s been building for a while: earning genuine trust and credibility online isn’t going away just because the way people search is changing. If anything, in a world with more AI-generated answers, being a source that’s actually worth citing matters more, not less.