Backlinks, explained
A backlink is a link from another website to yours. Since the earliest days of Google, links have been one of the main ways search engines discover pages and judge which ones are trusted. A link from a respected, relevant source works like a reference: it suggests the page is worth reading. "Link equity" is the shorthand for the value a link passes to the page it points at.
Not all links are equal. A single link from a leading publication or professional body in your field usually counts for more than many from unrelated or low-quality sites. Google's spam policies treat buying links, private blog networks, large-scale link exchanges and undisclosed paid placements as link spam, and it increasingly ignores such links or penalizes the sites involved. Sponsored and user-generated links should be marked as such.
The durable approach is to earn links rather than build them: expertise worth citing, original data, expert commentary and genuine partnerships, usually through digital PR. The same coverage matters for AI search, because assistants lean on publications and industry sources when they describe and recommend businesses, often with an AI citation to the source.