As a smart marketer trying to make your brand/business rank in 2025, you have seen it all. Cold outreach, ghosted emails, and innumerable backlink exchanges that felt like bad dates. Spreadsheets with 300 rows of “opportunities” that never replied.
And now in 2025, we’ve got a new twist: Google’s AI Overview.
No more 10 blue links. Now it’s a neat little box, generated by AI, summarizing the best content—and probably not featuring you. 😅
If you’re wondering why your hard-earned backlinks aren’t moving the needle, or why your brand doesn’t show up in Google’s fancy AI-powered answers, let’s clear that up.
Key Takeaways
- Precision over Volume: Old-school “spray-and-pray” outreach is dead. Relevance and E-E-A-T are the new gold standards.
- AI as an Assistant, Not a Pilot: Use AI for grunt work (prospecting, filtering) while humans handle strategy and relationships.
- AI Overview Optimization: Winning in 2025 means getting cited in a way that surfaces your brand in Google’s AI-generated summaries.
Why old-school link building doesn’t cut it anymore
SEO isn’t what it used to be. The bar has been raised sky-high. It’s not just about backlinks anymore; it’s about getting cited in a way that tells Google: “Hey, this site? They know their stuff. They’re worth featuring in an AI-generated summary.”
| What used to work | What works now |
|---|---|
| High DA guest posts (even if off-topic) | Contextual, relevant, E-E-A-T-rich links |
| Mass email templates | Clean, structured content that machines understand |
| Directory dumps | Backlinks from pages already ranking in AI Overviews |
| Link-for-link exchanges | Strategic citations from topical authorities |
How AI actually fits into our link building process
We’re not the type to slap “AI” on every process just to sound cutting edge. But we do use AI where it makes a measurable difference.
What AI is good for:
- Filtering thousands of domains to find real opportunities.
- Matching topical trust to brand niche.
- Writing first-draft outreach copy that doesn’t sound robotic.
- Finding contact info with context, not just a scraped email.
What AI doesn’t touch:
- Strategy: The “Why” behind the campaign.
- Final prospect review: Ensuring the site is actually a good fit.
- Relationship building: Real humans talk to real editors.
- Negotiations: Handling editorial fees and placement details.
Smarter outreach starts with sharper tools
Where most people use link building automation to spam faster, we use it to scale relevance. This is what our core stack looks like:
- BuzzStream: Handles contact management and tracks relationships.
- Pitchbox: Does the heavy lifting on prospect discovery with AI link prospecting.
- Hunter.io / Apollo.io: Enriches emails with job titles and social profiles so outreach is never “cold.”
Instead of sending 200 half-hearted emails, our team sends 75 high-context pitches that actually get opened and answered. Not more volume, just better aim.
Prospecting: From spray-and-pray to sniper precision
With AI link prospecting, we’ve ditched the “export everything from Ahrefs” approach. Now we focus on:
- Topical Trust Flow: Using Majestic to ensure the site is an industry authority.
- Existing Link Neighborhoods: Who links to whom?
- Traffic Trends: Is the site active and growing?
- AI Overview Visibility: Is the domain already featured in Google’s AI snapshots?
Reverse-engineering competitor wins with AI audits
If your competitors are winning links, they’ve given you a roadmap. Our AI backlink audit process is simple:
- Step 1: Use Ahrefs’ Link Intersect to find domains linking to competitors but not you.
- Step 2: Cross-reference with Moz to weed out spam and check Domain Authority.
- Step 3: Overlay Majestic’s Topical Trust Flow to ensure industry alignment.
- Step 4: Build a shortlist of active sites that are ready for new contributions.
Content & anchors: The invisible advantage
Bad anchor strategy is a quiet killer. We map anchor text to search intent (informational, navigational, transactional) and use SurferSEO to optimize phrases based on top-ranking content.
The Golden Rule: If the paragraph around the link doesn’t feel natural, we rewrite it. No exceptions. Because AI doesn’t just look at the link; it reads the room.
AI Overview visibility: The new frontier
Google pulls its summaries from sources that are linked to by other credible sources and use structured, fact-first content. When we build links in 2025, we ask:
- Will this backlink help Google connect us to this topic?
- Is this domain already featured in the AI snapshot?
- Does this page use schema and structured headers?
The right link in the right place can land you in Google’s summary box. That visibility is more powerful than ranking #1 on the traditional SERPs.
Before vs After AI: The Mavlers Impact
| Metric | Before AI Integration | After AI Integration |
|---|---|---|
| Prospecting Time | 15+ hours / week | 4 hours / week |
| Outreach Personalization | Basic / Template-heavy | High-context / AI-assisted |
| Response Rates | 2% - 5% | 12% - 18% |
| Team Capacity | 50 prospects / day | 150+ prospects / day |
Wrapping up
The road ahead for link building is paved with data and driven by AI, but it’s still powered by human relationships. At Mavlers, we help brands craft stories journalists want to tell—stories that build links, visibility, and long-term SEO growth in the age of AI.