What link building strategies actually work in 2026 for Google rankings, AI overviews and LLM visibility? In this discussion, James Dooley and Charles Flo break down the link building tactics that are delivering results right now. The conversation covers consensus based link building, branded mentions, entity reinforcement, digital PR, guest posts, niche edits, press releases, contextual tier two links, PBNs, aged domains, 301 redirects, canonicals and local citations. Charles explains why off page SEO signals now matter more than ever because AI search engines and large language models rely on third party corroboration, trust signals and repeated mentions across relevant sources. They also discuss why confidence, clarity and rankings matter more than raw DR metrics, and how businesses can use topical authority, semantic relevance and link placements on trusted domains to improve both SEO performance and AI recommendations in 2026.