Do Backlinks Still Matter for AI Search? 108 ChatGPT Visitors vs 1,791 From Google on My Sites

I run a pile of small sites: launch platforms, a directory, some tools, and a few editorial press sites. I also sell backlinks. So I keep getting the same question, and I keep asking it myself: if people are moving to ChatGPT and AI Overviews, does a link on someone else's page still do anything?

I don't have access to anyone's ranking system. What I do have is my own analytics, two pages of documentation, and curl. So this post sticks to what I could actually observe this week, and it says plainly where the observable part runs out.

The numbers from my own sites

I self-host a small analytics tool on all my sites. It has only been recording since Oct 28, so this is roughly 16 days of data, pulled on Nov 12 with its "last 30 days" breakdown by source. Visitors are counted per site, so one person who visited two of my sites counts twice.

Across every site, by source:

Everything else was direct traffic, launch boards and the usual social stuff, 26,079 visitors in total.

So ChatGPT sent about 6% of what Google sent. Perplexity and Claude sent nobody. That surprised me, I expected Perplexity to show up at least once.

The more interesting part was where the ChatGPT visitors landed. On most sites it was the homepage. On my directory site it was the opposite of Google: 47 visitors from ChatGPT vs 28 from Google, and they landed on single-purpose tool pages, like an email DNS checker, a DKIM checker and a BIMI checker. Pages that answer one narrow question.

That's one site and 16 days, so I'm not drawing a law from it. But it told me which pages to look at.

What the docs actually say

Google's AI features (AI Overviews and AI Mode) are not a separate system you optimise for. From Google's own page on AI features and your website:

To be eligible to be shown as a supporting link in AI Overviews or AI Mode, a page must be indexed and eligible to be shown in Google Search with a snippet, fulfilling the Search technical requirements. There are no additional technical requirements.

It also says the normal SEO basics stay relevant, and there's no special file or schema you need. And Google's link best practices doc still opens with: "Google uses links as a signal when determining the relevancy of pages and to find new pages to crawl."

So for Google's AI answers, the honest answer is boring: links matter in the same way they matter for regular Search, because it's the same index. Nobody outside Google can tell you by how much.

ChatGPT search is less documented. The OpenAI help page on ChatGPT search says two things that matter here:

1. To be eligible, you allow OAI-SearchBot to crawl your site, and your host or CDN has to let OpenAI's published searchbot IPs through.
2. ChatGPT search "sometimes partners with other search providers", rewrites your question into one or more search queries and sends those to them. The page links Microsoft's privacy statement among those providers.

It says ChatGPT ranks results "using multiple factors" and that placement is not guaranteed. It does not say whether links are one of those factors. So anyone telling you exactly how backlinks affect ChatGPT citations is guessing, me included.

What you can take from point 2: if part of the pipeline is a regular search engine, then being in that search engine's index is part of being findable. Which is a very old, very unglamorous SEO problem.

What a backlink can do that you can actually check

Here's where I landed. I can't observe "does this link make ChatGPT cite me". I can observe three narrower things, and they're all about the page the link sits on, not the link:

1. Is the page indexed? If the page with your link isn't in Google's index, it can't be a supporting link in AI Overviews, by Google's own rule. Run a site: search for the exact URL, or ask the site owner for a Search Console inspection.
2. Can the AI crawlers fetch it? Check its robots.txt for OAI-SearchBot and Googlebot, and fetch it with a crawler user agent to see if the CDN blocks you. I wrote up the three kinds of AI crawlers and what robots.txt rule hits which last month, because blocking GPTBot and blocking ChatGPT search are not the same thing.
3. Is there a sentence about you around the link? A logo row in a directory gives an answer engine nothing to quote. A paragraph saying what your product does and who it's for does.

A quick script for 1 and 2 on any placement URL:

URL="https://example.com/the-page-with-your-link"

# status + robots meta + canonical, as Googlebot and as OAI-SearchBot
for UA in "Googlebot/2.1" "OAI-SearchBot/1.0"; do
  echo "== $UA"
  curl -s -o /tmp/p.html -w "status %{http_code}\n" -A "$UA" "$URL"
  grep -io '<meta[^>]*robots[^>]*>' /tmp/p.html
  grep -io '<link[^>]*canonical[^>]*>' /tmp/p.html
done

# what robots.txt says about the AI search crawler
curl -s "$(echo "$URL" | cut -d/ -f1-3)/robots.txt" | grep -i -A3 "oai-searchbot"

A 403 for one user agent and 200 for the other is the thing to look for. A noindex or a canonical pointing somewhere else means the page you paid for isn't the page that counts.

Measuring AI referrals on your own site

Most analytics tools now label ChatGPT, but it's worth knowing how, because the referrer header is often missing. On one of my sites, 24 visitors arrived with utm_source=chatgpt.com already in the URL, which is how they got counted at all. If you parse your own logs, check both:

const AI_HOSTS = {
  "chatgpt.com": "ChatGPT", "chat.openai.com": "ChatGPT",
  "perplexity.ai": "Perplexity", "www.perplexity.ai": "Perplexity",
  "gemini.google.com": "Gemini", "claude.ai": "Claude",
  "copilot.microsoft.com": "Copilot", "l.meta.ai": "Meta AI",
};

function aiSource(referrer, pageUrl) {
  const utm = new URL(pageUrl).searchParams.get("utm_source");
  if (utm && AI_HOSTS[utm]) return AI_HOSTS[utm];
  if (!referrer) return null;
  try { return AI_HOSTS[new URL(referrer).hostname] ?? null; }
  catch { return null; }
}

aiSource("", "https://site.com/tool?utm_source=chatgpt.com"); // "ChatGPT"
aiSource("https://www.perplexity.ai/", "https://site.com/");  // "Perplexity"

Then look at entry pages per AI source, not totals. Totals were the least useful thing I looked at. The entry pages are what told me ChatGPT liked my narrow tool pages.

So, do backlinks still matter?

What I can defend from the evidence:

• For Google's AI features, a page has to be indexed and snippet-eligible, and Google still says links are a signal for Search. Same game, same index.
• For ChatGPT, you need OAI-SearchBot access, and part of the pipeline is other search providers. How links weigh in is not published.
• On my sites, AI chat traffic is real but small, about 6% of Google's, and it landed on specific answer-shaped pages.

What I'd actually do with that: stop buying links on pages that hold nothing but the link. A placement is worth checking only if the page is indexed, fetchable by the crawlers, and has a real sentence about you in it. That's the reasoning behind Piece Press, a site I run that publishes one-decision explainers with the product link inside a sentence. It's free if your site links back, or $29. Its own page says the domain rating is 0 and that it doesn't promise rankings or AI citations, which is the honest version, so run the script above on it like you would on anything else.

If you've looked at your own AI referral numbers, I'd like to know whether Perplexity shows up for you. Zero in 16 days across all my sites feels low.