12 Ways to Use ChatGPT for Link Building (With Real Examples)

ChatGPT from OpenAI, has made waves across the SEO industry (and many others) since the release of GPT-3.5 in November 2022. 

AI is proving to be a very useful piece of tech, in areas ranging from data analysis, creating human-like responses, reasoning and doing market research or other strategic tasks which require a lot of research. 

When it comes to ChatGPT for SEO – a lot of the use cases have been accelerating quickly, and there are SaaS solutions being built around this – be it content creation, keyword research, and much more. When it comes to ChatGPT for link building, that is also starting to pick up, but it is also a relatively new area. 

Link building being such a complex part of SEO, the industry is still trying to fully get to grips on where to utilize it to best effect. And you have very likely landed here because you’re thinking “How do you use ChatGPT to build links?” – well luckily for you, we’ll outline some of that here!

In this article, I’ll run through how ChatGPT is being used for link building, its limitations and what the near future looks like, for the role of artificial intelligence on link building, and the implications for the SEO industry.

An Overview of ChatGPT

ChatGPT, developed by OpenAI, is rapidly changing the way we approach many digital marketing tasks – and link building is no exception. When it was released back in November 2022, the platform exploded onto the scene, amassing over 1 million users in just five days. What makes ChatGPT particularly valuable for link building is its ability to process large datasets while maintaining context from previous interactions. It’s essentially a sophisticated language model that can help streamline your link building workflow, allowing you to accomplish tasks more efficiently and at scale.

In the early days, ChatGPT had some notable limitations – its knowledge was frozen in time (pre-September 2021), and it couldn’t access the internet. OpenAI has since addressed these issues, with the model now having web browsing capabilities and access to more current information.

The models available via ChatGPT have improved with time, which impacts the scope of tasks, and the quality of the outputs:

• GPT-2 (2019): OpenAI eventually open-sourced this 1.5B-parameter model. This helped with link building, as it could probably produce rough drafts for basic guest posts, offering basic keyword grouping for SEO planning, and reducing workload for brainstorming link-building angles with its improved text coherence.
• GPT-3 (2020): Available through OpenAI’s API with 175B parameters, introducing few-shot and zero-shot learning. This had the ability to provide more extensive keyword ideas and competitor insights and generating varied outreach email templates.
• InstructGPT (2021-2022): A GPT-3 variant with improved instruction-following capabilities. Could help with refining outreach templates, and summarizing link-building progress into actionable items.
• GPT-3.5 (ChatGPT, 2022-2023): This was when it started to become more mainstream, with improved conversational interface and context handling. This enabled quick crafting of personalized email messages, facilitating real-time content brainstorming, and helping with team communication through meeting notes and progress summaries.
• GPT-4 (2023+): Available via ChatGPT Plus subscriptions with advanced reasoning and fewer hallucinations. This could help with refining keywords by niche and user intent, analyzing data to identify content gaps, polishing link-worthy content, and doing deeper interpretation of complex campaign metrics, to optimize link strategy.

As I’ll explain later, even with the more advanced models, ChatGPT won’t completely replace human judgment in your link building strategy – but it can significantly enhance your productivity and help you scale your efforts in ways that weren’t previously possible without a large team.

Of course, I also need to address the elephant in the room here – ChatGPT did massively disrupt content as well, and not all of it was positive. The Helpful Content update in 2023, and subsequent updates, could have at least partly been due to the impact of AI on the SERPs, and the sheer amount of “junk content” out there – the ability for the masses to access ChatGPT inevitably would have contributed to that. So the use of ChatGPT and AI tools has this asterisk – it’s useful as a content & research assistant, it’s not going to do the job of a good writer for you.

Why Use ChatGPT for Link Building

ChatGPT has this ability to create ideas with such precision and speed, that it is without a doubt, a useful tool for any link builder worth their salt. As I explained earlier, each jump in model, brings with it more natural and context-aware outputs, it becomes more user-friendly, and better factual grounding and style-flexibility.

Overall, the benefits of using ChatGPT for link building include:

• Speed: it just accelerates the ability to perform tasks faster, be it seeding ideas, or consolidating and understanding information.
• Cost-efficiency: as a direct result of increased speed, and just having better output than a human with no assistance, your company/team can do things with less manpower, which is often the biggest cost to a company.
• Results: a little discussed benefit, but with better quality output and efficiency, comes better links. Building better quality links, making less mistakes and the ability to do the same with more speed – inevitably is going to impact your projects and mean you can drive better, more consistent SEO results.

We’ll touch on the specifics in more detail – but use-cases range from the ability to create content ideas, research crossover industries, rephrasing text, or rewriting email templates.

At The Links Guy, we use it for these areas, and a lot more. We’ve built our own GPTs to:

• Brainstorm content ideas.
• Craft link insert suggestions.
• Creating effective link building strategies based on audience relevance.
• Prioritize campaigns based on industry seasonality.
• Tweak email templates.
• Content enhancement and research.
• Develop keyword ideas for data prospecting.
• Categorize websites for outreach segmentation.
• And much more.

Now, despite all these use cases, it comes with a huge caveat – an unskilled or bad link builder won’t suddenly become good because they’re using ChatGPT…

… It helps a good link builder become great – and at TLG this is exactly the lens through which we view AI tools.

12 Ways to Use ChatGPT for Link Building

Now let’s dive into the 11 main areas where ChatGPT is going to help you take your AI link building to the next level.

1. Data Prospecting

During the link prospecting stage, there are a few ways in which AI can help. 

At a basic level, it can help you with brainstorming website targets – which you can then extract, and reach out to. Here’s an example where I wanted to collect all the websites which do “Business awards” in the state of Oklahoma.

I used the o1 model in order to really do deep research and I asked it to be placed in a table for easy use. 

The same principle applies to collecting websites from other industries, if you wanted to collect a list of relevant industry events, influencers or podcasts. The 4o model will likely work in most cases, but depending on how deep you need to go, you may need to revert to o1, especially if let’s say you’re going to the depth of trying to collect micro-influencers or very niche sites. Now this won’t be suitable if you need to extract very large lists.

For most cases, you’ll want to scrape lists from Google Search, Google Maps or by extracting lists of backlinks from Ahrefs/Semrush. However, ChatGPT can also help with brainstorming more strategies centered around a topic or a website type, you are trying to extract out of Google.

For example, in this prompt where I am trying to get more ways of finding blogs from a specific sector:

Or if I want to take a strategy a step further, ChatGPT is also really good at taking that initial seed, and letting me go into a rabbit hole, so I can find other sites which won’t use the same keyword, but allows me to speed up the prospecting, and find other relevant keywords.

2. Keyword Research

While not a keyword research tool at its core, ChatGPT has this innate ability to turn seed ideas into more ideas, and can brainstorm new insights and related entities.

Through this, it can be really good at trying to develop potential keyword ideas – which you can take forward and validate through other methods.

So a few areas where it can help:

• Brainstorming new topics or sectors: In the section earlier about data prospecting, we talked about how it can generate new topical or industry-related keywords – which means you can keep collecting websites to reach out to. Much faster than trying to use a bog-standard keyword planner tool.
• Expanding a keyword or keyword group: if you’re trying to actually rank for a keyword with a linkable asset, it can take a keyword, and turn it into bigger keyword lists. That helps you with topical coverage and “information gain”.
• Keyword evaluation: Its all very well creating keywords and topics, but what if you need to run analysis on very large keyword lists, or analyze the sentiment or intent behind them? It can be good for this – especially if you want to understand if you target a topical keyword, if it’ll actually drive commercial value. For example, look what it told me about this article you’re reading now!

• Keyword selection: If you are dealing with large keyword seats, ChatGPT can be fed lists which you can categorize and sort according to what you deem your target audience. This might often be your Serviceable available market (SAM) or Serviceable obtainable market (SOM). However, you will need to ultimately extract raw keyword or competitor analysis from tools like Semrush/Ahrefs/Majestic, to get link building metrics like domain metrics, or search volume – since ChatGPT doesn’t have that information. ChatGPT may have a tendency to pick out keywords which don’t have adequate search volume.

3. Link Strategy & Market Research

ChatGPT can come in handy when you need to delve into an industry, and understand crossover sectors, or audiences that have some sort of crossover.

Now this has use cases outside of SEO – but for link building, this comes in highly useful when you need to develop link building strategies – i.e. ideating the type of sectors you should be reaching out, and could be relevant to your content, or where there is a logical “linkable audience”. By doing this, you can then build relevant links, brainstorm new content creation strategies and expand the pool of websites you can reach out to.

For example, we created our own in-house GPT which creates strategies in a 2-step sequence:

• Gather info about the core business/service and the problems it solves, or audiences it serves.
• Identify niches and crossover niches that could benefit from those solutions.

This is particularly useful when you’re doing guest post outreach.

For example, here’s an output we got when we tried to build links for a company in the smart home automation space:

You can also follow a similar process, by feeding it info about the content you’ve already written, and then asking for the types of topics that could potentially crossover with it. That then allows you to create resource link strategies.

This is really useful when you are struggling to create strategy ideas and need inspiration, and especially for very complex or “boring” niches.

However, I would always recommend to pair this with your bog standard competitor backlink analysis – since at least those are validated backlink strategy ideas.

4. Outreach Templates

Constructing an entire outreach email is one of the first use-cases people will think about for link building outreach. One thing is for sure – it certainly has reduced the common pattern of the “dear sir” link building emails with poor spelling and grammar.

However, this does also come with a caveat. If you ask ChatGPT to just straight up, give you an email template with minimal context , it will give you something pretty generic. The reason is that its taking information about email templates that already exist out there on the net – and basically gives you a regurgitation of that data. In other words – everyone using ChatGPT to write templates from scratch, has emails which sound the same.

Ideally, you need to feed it as much context as you can, and preferably – train a GPT on email templates that you have already written, and in the style you like to use – and create the templates accordingly.

For example, we created our own GPT and it can produce templates like below:

It’s probably still going to need refinement (never use outreach templates until there’s been some sort of human vetting), but its better than a lot of “I loved your content” generic templates out there.

So, when its fed the right context about the audience/content/project, it’ll embed these nuances into the email which helps your outreach stand out.

ChatGPT is also really good as a brainstorming tool,  for coming up with ideas for subject lines or PS lines.

5. Reply Management

Once you do outreach and are getting replies, inbox management and being able to turn conversations into links, can be an art unto itself.

You still need to know the essence of what you want to achieve, reply to emails on time, etc.

Where ChatGPT can come in useful is in a few areas:

• Let’s say you want to approach your conversations with certain industry nuances, etiquette or lingo in mind, then it will help here.
• You have a bunch of link magnet ideas that you could show them, but you want to pick the one that is most relevant to their piece- a prompt can help speed up your selection process.
• You pitched a content idea or content theme, and the editor/journalist needs more context about the idea or what it could cover. Rather than spend all that time creating a piece of content or content outlines, simply feed ChatGPT the gist of your idea, give it the context of the target website/audience, and it can give you a paragraph about what it’ll be about.

• Creating a set of canned responses, which you can use for all of your replies. Useful for 90% plus of cases, where targets tend to ask the same questions to your outreach.

However, don’t make the mistake of being lazy and putting all of your email threads in ChatGPT and copy-pasting the output verbatim into your replies. That’s one surefire way of making mistakes, and potentially losing leads who get put off by “weird sounding” email replies.

6. Personalization (kind of)

The concept of using AI to personalize emails isn’t new, and there have been many attempts to create SaaS solutions around this. Some that I remember include Quicklines, Lyne.ai – although there are new tools on the market now like Smartwriter.ai

ChatGPT, like other AI tools, may be helpful here as an assistant, when you need to look at some piece of content, or some information about some relevant influencers, and you want to relate it to a point you want to discuss, or you find important.

That would be the right way to use it. Here’s an example of how to pick out part of an article, and then prompt it, to pull out a personalization, but still relate it to something that you want.

This probably still could do with a bit of editing, but this gives you an idea – of course when it comes to ChatGPT prompts, the more detailed and specific it is, the better the output.

It is the personalization which is going to be a key factor in making for compelling outreach emails – so don’t risk leaning on AI too heavily, or allowing it to affect your outreach in a negative way. Email psychology rules still apply.

When you do get it right, the personalization makes it clear you’ve done your homework, and you’ll wake up to happy replies like this and a backlink (even though you’ve leveraged a bit of AI):

7. Content Ideation

ChatGPT, if given enough context, can also be really good at creating content ideas, which you can pitch to relevant websites.

For instance, let’s say you’re working on a project in a niche, and you’re trying to rack your brains for guest post ideas, which you can pitch to other editors or journalists – it can speed up the creative process, or just bring back some ideas which you can select from.

However, without enough context it will give you some ideas which are a bit flimsy.

For example, this kind of approach can give you a bit more context, to get the kind of output you want.

Take it a step further, and add your/your clients’ expertise and product knowledge into a GPT, and you can get even more nuanced content ideas:

You can also use ChatGPT with creating linkable assets – and especially for ideating new content themes or repurposing into new formats. ChatGPT will churn out a lot of ideas, if you keep prompting it for ideas – but it may suggest creating whitepapers, industry reports, relevant case studies or even calculators.

Calculators can work very well for picking up links naturally as well – here’s a good video from Stacey MacNaught where she talks about using ChatGPT (and other AI tools) for creating linkable calculators.

8. Content Generation & Enhancement

The concept of creating content with ChatGPT isn’t new – and is somewhat of a bugbear in the industry!

Everyone knows about “the SEO heist”, where an SEO pumped their site full of AI content, rode a temporary wave of traffic, and then got penalized. (This isn’t what we’re talking about here.)

But, what we cannot deny, is that AI-augmented or AI-assisted content is here to stay – and the game is now about using AI so that we can think more strategically about our content and content strategy, spend that time writing high-quality content, or producing it in different formats to enhance our overall SEO strategy or our link building process.

We discussed the ideation of content themes – which can help if you’re creating content for your own site, or pitching guest post ideas – but ChatGPT can also help in other areas:

• Creating content briefs/article outlines: give it enough context and input, and it’ll create the content brief, so you can give it to an experienced writer to flesh out into a full piece.
• Pulling together research on very specific topics: It can take a long time when you’re writing an article, to pinpoint the specific facts or ideas you want to explore. But AI can help disseminate your idea, and fetch the info you need. Here’s an example where I needed something very quickly researched, and needed ChatGPT to do the correlation for me. I put in a large list of cities in California and asked it to get specific information.

• Link insertions/niche edits and creating context for search engines: Sometimes when you are writing a piece of content, or you have to suggest a link insert and anchor text during outreach, you can leverage AI to speed up the process. Just give it the paragraph, the context you need, and then some idea of what anchor text options you’d like, and it’ll do the rest. Sometimes you’ll need to re-prompt to make sure the anchor text usage isn’t too forced, or you can just decide to refine it later at the end.
• Deep research: When it comes to doing research, Perplexity is actually better than most models. However, I’ve personally found ChatGPT’s Deep research with o1 pro, one of the most powerful systems for doing deeper research, and is unmatched by others. For example, I wanted to explore all the Google Maps scraper options out there, and it went and did all the research much faster than I could do manually. This is very useful, if you are creating roundup/listicle posts, or you are doing articles which are deep, technical breakdowns of services, tools or SaaS in your industry for example.

It will then go away and do the research, but will give you a very detailed and in depth breakdown, according to your criteria, and will even record the sources of info.

9. Link Building Team Management

Beyond just what an individual can do, ChatGPT can also help with the management of the team doing link building as well, be it link prospectors, outreach specialists, or generalist link builders.

A few particular use-cases:

• Analysis and creation of link building OKRs: Setting OKRs for your link building process, each team, and even the company in general is important to ensure you reach your SEO and organic growth goals. This will inevitably involve tracking the work everyone is doing, and ensure every team member and every department is pulling their weight and hitting KPIs- after all, a team is only as strong as its weakest link. ChatGPT can help with this, and knowing things like the conversion rates you expect from outreach, the size of your team, what is a reasonable level of output from team members – you can set your OKRs and also develop reasonable KPIs for the team and/or departments.
• Data analysis of user efficiency reports: Sometimes there is a lot of data in those reports, or there is some ambiguity – for instance someone may be building less links, but they are all very high quality, or a prospector is collecting more than someone else, but their bounce rate is higher indicating an issue with collection or validation technique. By uploading the reports (CSV works best), you can then prompt ChatGPT to go through it, and slice up the data in different ways and get more granular insights. ChatGPT’s reasoning means it can accumulate everything its seeing across the data, and then make some observations via advanced data analysis.

You can even use it for basic analysis – for instance, I did a small pop quiz for 2 departments and wanted to analyze any common themes that were seen. The observations were highly valuable and I could benchmark where the team is, and where there could be potential training gaps or old habits picked up from previous experience.

• Summarize team meetings: There are AI-driven tools, which will join team meetings and take notes. ChatGPT, can be useful, at taking those transcripts, summarizing them, and then applying some reasoning according to what you want to pull out. This is ideal if you are running a lot of meetings, or there are long meetings and discussions about link strategy. Especially when its a brainstorming session – it can be hard to remember everything, and discard any fluff  – that’s where ChatGPT can consolidate everything.

10. Campaign Performance Tracking

It’s easy to get so caught up in the final result of building backlinks, that you forget to stop and think about what is driving most of the results – be it the campaigns which are driving most of the results, or are driving the most high-quality or high-authority backlinks.

So ChatGPT can help with deeper insight like:

• Analyzing your campaign data to determine which types of sectors or industries are leading to the most links.
• Analyzing your list of target websites (i.e. link prospects), to understand if the links from certain campaigns are coming from certain practices, like the job titles you’re collecting – for example: you may find particular nuances where universities, local government, tend to garner more responses/links from certain departments.
• Analyzing outreach emails: Tools like Pitchbox and Buzzstream make it easy to record all this information. Once you have that raw data, you can then run AI data analysis on them – whether its the subject lines, or the complete emails, to try to understand any common patterns leading to success. AI’s ability to understand language means it comes in very handy here. Once you can identify what is working best for those sectors/industries, you can then send compelling email pitches more consistently.
• Real-time analysis through automation: if you have access to ChatGPT Operator, you can also create the above tasks which will run on a regular basis. You can use this to ensure you have continuous analysis of the link building process and results. You could also use this for any of the other steps we mentioned above, such as discovering new potential link-building opportunities or podcast interview opportunities or being able to catch patterns within your process in real-time. For instance, maybe broken link building is working really well, but guest post outreach is experiencing low response rates.

11. Efficiency Gains

As if it wasn’t already obvious – being able to effectively use ChatGPT can lead to much better productivity of your team and more stringent control over what is actually working in your link building process.

There are also a lot of more specialized SEO tools which may incorporate AI as well – but they also aren’t cheap! Being able to improve efficiency, means you can not only build more links, or better links – but you can do so with a relatively lean team, and reduce as much wasteful, or non-value adding resources as you can.

Better efficiency = better profitability. And ultimately if your business can be more profitable or produce results which are more fruitful, you can re-invest that in your team and business.

12. Maximize Link Building & SEO Impact

Link building results don’t just stop once you’ve secured those live links – you also want to measure other areas, to make sure you’re getting the maximum impact from the link building and SEO work you’re doing.

For instance you can also look at:

• Internal link structure. You can input your content strategy or content briefs into ChatGPT, and if it has a knowledge base of your existing content and site structure, it can suggest internal links you should be inserting. This has implications for ensuring your link authority/equity flows through pages effectively.

• AI-augmented or assisted content: We are now entering a content revolution, where everyone has the ability to generate vast amounts of content. The goal now is to not to plough further into AI-generated content for volume sake – but to augment what you’re writing. You can now spend time on ensuring yes, it is SEO-optimized – but it is also highly insightful, original content, that other brands won’t be able to easily replicate. If you can do this, you can essentially create a ‘content moat’, which is instrumental in helping you strengthen and differentiate your brand.
• Backlink auditing: When running a backlink audit, you can also streamline certain activities much faster with ChatGPT. For instance, if you want to reverse engineer your competitors’ backlink profile and understand the context of how they got links, ChatGPT can analyze the target URLs/referring page URLs in bulk. You can also use it to look at the anchor text distribution of your link profile, in comparison to your competitors. This ensures that you are using effective anchor texts, and are not overly optimized, in comparison to SERP competitors.
• Link building ROI: You can of course use it for segmenting keyword lists, and running some analysis on results gained from link building – which will have implications for driving tangible business outcomes.

The Drawbacks of ChatGPT & How NOT to Use It

We’ve talked about the amazing things you can do with ChatGPT – but as with all things, it comes with its cons as well. Here are a few of the things you need to watch out for, if you’re going to be using it within your link building process.

Inaccuracies & Hallucinations

ChatGPT will sometimes make things up, or give inaccurate outputs.

Now, this can happen because of prompting – so just make sure your prompts are as robust as possible and there’s no room for it to misinterpret something.

However, ChatGPT can also hallucinate information. It can make something up, and make assumptions, without telling you that it has made it up. The hallucinations are not as bad or frequent as previous models, but make sure to follow best practices to prevent them happening too frequently. This is again, going to come down to good prompting, and verifying the outputs and asking it to double check, or provide sources for certain crucial information.

Inability to Scrape & Extract

A lot of people jump into AI tools without considering this (highly crucial) part. If you ask it to research a website/page/URL it can’t actually scrape the extract information from it. It lacks the ability to, and the only knowledge it has, is trained data, or the data you provide it, within the chat interface. If it seems to be saying that its reading the URL, its just making assumptions based on the text you provided or the text inside the URL – it’s not actually accessing it!

That’s where if you want your AI to be able to access webpages in real-time, you would instead have to build an automation (perhaps with N8N or a python script), and connect it to the OpenAI API.

Risk of ‘Sameness’

You know that thing you notice when someone has written a social media post or an email template, and you can just tell its written with AI, and it doesn’t sound natural?

Often its because it just sounds highly generic and the same as a hundred other things you read – and those are all examples of AI just giving very similar info, to all the other people using ChatGPT.

In fact, when we try to recruit a link builder at TLG, we can tell when someone’s written the email with AI – because all those applicants have emails which are structured and look almost the exact same!

Bad User + ChatGPT = More Bad Output

Another harsh reality for people who think AI is going to job for them and magically turn them into a good SEO or link builder… it won’t.

Someone who cannot write good emails/content/personalization won’t suddenly become good just because they’ve been armed with ChatGPT – they’ll just simply be good at producing even more bad output.

Sure, it’ll probably be free of spelling or grammar errors – but someone who doesn’t know (or care) about good quality work, won’t be able to recognise when the output hits the right mark or not.

A motto we use at TLG is “Use the AI, don’t let the AI use you”.

Ready to Supercharge Your Link Building with AI + Expert Strategy?

ChatGPT can be an instrumental tool if you want to maximize your link building performance. You can work more efficiently, build more links, better links, and eventually raise your domain authority – but its also not a magic bullet.

Be it someone writing SEO-optimized content, writing personalized outreach emails or data prospecting – it is only effective if used by the right person or team behind it.

The best results come when you combine AI with expert-driven link-building strategies. If you want to maximize your results, let’s talk about how we can help

ChatGPT for Link Building FAQs

Can ChatGPT generate backlinks on its own?

ChatGPT can help streamline, and make the process of backlink building more productive – but it cannot actually build any links on its own.

How has link building changed with the rise of AI and machine learning?

There is an uptick in people and companies using AI tools in an attempt to streamline their link building process – and most link building tools are now trying to incorporate some sort of AI feature to keep up with demand. However, the implications on the role that content plays is particularly being disrupted. Content quality, with unique insights and expertise behind it, is even more important than ever. This means if you want to build links, you also need to be leveraging highly useful content.

Are links a ranking factor to appear in ChatGPT results?

Links will not directly act as a ranking factor for ChatGPT results or other LLM tools. However, it could indirectly impact your visibility in ChatGPT – as the more prevalent you are in the search results of Google and Bing, the higher your chances are of being picked up by ChatGPT. Plus, the more your brand is mentioned on plenty of other website – the better this is for your visibility on ChatGPT.

There is a common misconception that being mentioned on large media publications, is a ChatGPT ranking factor – however, there is no such direct correlation between PR links and ChatGPT visibility.