Our newest episode is a quick one — barely three minutes, three sharp minds on what actually makes link building work now. We pulled the best link insights from Bradley Benner, Rob Bonham, and Justin Oberman into one short listen. Here’s the expanded version, with a link to each full interview.
Bradley Benner: relevance beats every metric
Benner flips the old link-buying checklist on its head. Stop chasing Domain Authority, Domain Rating, and trust flow — those are third-party scores, not signals Google actually passes. What decides a link’s worth is relevance: does this page, on this site, in this context, genuinely relate to yours? His bigger point for anyone building a service is that the job isn’t pushing metrics — it’s creating and strengthening the entity associations that teach the algorithms (and the AI models) what you’re about.
→ Hear the full conversation: Bradley Benner on relevance, entity associations & the future of link building.
Rob Bonham: the biggest footprint wins
Bonham zooms out from the single link to the whole picture. Links, mentions, citations, reviews — they add up to a footprint, and the size and positivity of that footprint is what ultimately wins the SERPs. It reframes “link building” as reputation building at scale: the more of the web that talks about you in a good way, the more both Google and the AI answer engines treat you as the obvious answer.
“Whoever has the bigger footprint and the more people talking about them across the web in a positive way — that is the ultimate be-all and end-all of winning and dominating the SERPs.”
Rob Bonham · Unscripted SEO→ Hear the full conversation: Rob Bonham on SEO in the agentic age.
Justin Oberman: the worst thing is to be ignored
Oberman comes at links from the attention side. AI search, he argues, is a consensus engine — it surfaces what the ecosystem already says about you. So the goal isn’t persuasion, it’s being talked about at all. It’s easier to move someone from hate to love than from indifference, because indifference means you’re invisible. Links and mentions are how you stop being invisible.
→ Hear the full conversation: Justin Oberman: all marketing is showmanship and AI search is a consensus engine.
The through-line: relevant links = a footprint search and AI both trust
Three lenses, one conclusion. Benner says make it relevant. Bonham says make it big and positive. Oberman says make sure you’re talked about at all. Put them together and that’s the modern link-building brief: earn relevant mentions across the web, and you build the footprint that Google ranks and the AI models cite.
Want links that are relevant, positive, and everywhere that matters?
That’s exactly the brief the three of them describe — and exactly what we build. Relevant, editorial links that grow your footprint across the web and the AI answer engines.
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