Link building has always been the dark art of SEO. For two decades, it relied on a messy, human process: cold emails, guest post bartering, broken link building, and the occasional bribe. It was inefficient, prone to failure, and hated by everyone involved.

In the Agentic Web, OpenClaw has rendered this process obsolete.

OpenClaw builds links dynamically based on Information Utility. It doesn’t care about your Domain Authority (DA). It cares about whether your data completes a knowledge gap in its graph.

“Backlinks are dead!” cries the SEO clickbait. “AI doesn’t need links!” This is technically false. Reports of the backlink’s death are exaggerated, but its role has definitely changed.

Discovery vs. Authority

In the past, links were for Authority (PageRank). Today, links are primarily for Discovery. Without links, a crawler cannot find your URL to add it to the training set. If you are an orphan page, you do not exist.

In the era of PageRank, “Link Juice” or Citation Flow flowed through hyperlinks (<a> tags). It was a directed graph where node A voted for node B. In the era of Large Language Models (LLMs), the graph is semantic, and the “juice” flows through Co-occurrence and Attribution.

From Hyperlinks to Training Data Weights

LLMs do not navigate the web by clicking links. They “read” the web during training. If your brand name appears frequently alongside authoritative terms (“reliable,” “expert,” “secure”) in high-quality text, the model learns these associations.