A couple of years ago, Google’s Gary Illyes said something that link builders are still misquoting to justify bad decisions. He remarked that links ‘haven’t been in the top three’ ranking factors ‘for some time,’ and that Google needs ‘very few links’ to rank pages. Half the industry read that as an obituary: links are dead, stop buying them, the game has changed. And the buyers who took it at face value quietly pulled back their link spend, convinced they’d dodged a dying tactic. Here’s the problem — that’s a serious misreading of what he actually said, and the data since has made the misreading expensive. Read against what buyers actually did and what the studies actually show, Illyes’ comment wasn’t a eulogy for links. It was a shot at one specific kind of link building — and the people who understood the difference quietly gained ground on the ones who panicked.

What He Actually Said — And Didn’t

Precision matters here, because the misquote does the damage. Illyes did not say links don’t matter, or that Google ignores them, or that you shouldn’t build them. He said they’re not in the top three factors, and that Google needs very few links to rank a page. Both statements are almost certainly true — and neither means what the panicked reading assumes.

‘Not in the top three’ still leaves links as a major ranking factor; fourth or fifth out of hundreds of signals is enormously powerful. And ‘needs very few links to rank a page’ is true in a specific, limited sense: for a page with little or no competition, a handful of links — or occasionally none — can be enough. That says nothing about the competitive commercial keywords most buyers actually care about, where the top results all carry substantial link profiles. Read literally and carefully, Illyes described links as a still-powerful factor that you don’t need in huge volume for easy queries. Read carelessly, that became ‘links are dead.’ The gap between those two readings is where buyers lose money.

What The Data Did Next

The most useful way to interpret an ambiguous Google statement is to watch what actually happened afterwards — both in the market and in the rankings. On both counts, the ‘links are dead’ reading falls apart.

The Market Moved The Opposite Way

If links were dying, you’d expect the industry to pull back. It did the opposite. Through 2026, a majority of teams — around 58% — actually raised their link-building budgets, and per-link prices climbed 20–40% from a few years earlier. The professionals with the most data and the most at stake responded to Illyes’ comment by investing more in links, not less. That’s not what an industry does when a tactic is genuinely dying; it’s what an industry does when links remain decisive and quality is getting more valuable.

The Rankings Still Run On Links

The ranking data tells the same story. Analyses through 2026 keep finding that the overwhelming majority of top-ranking pages — upwards of 92% of the top 100 — have backlinks, and that referring-domain strength still correlates strongly with position. Google’s own leaked documentation confirmed PageRank-style link signals remain in active use. Whatever ‘not in the top three’ means precisely, links are demonstrably still doing heavy lifting in exactly the competitive SERPs buyers care about. This is why powerful homepage PBN links and other strong placements keep moving rankings regardless of the soundbite — the evidence on the ground didn’t change just because a sentence got misquoted.

What He Was Actually Taking Aim At

So if links still matter this much, what was Illyes really getting at? The most sensible reading is that he was taking a shot at volume-obsessed link building — the mindset that says ‘more links equals better,’ that chases raw quantity, that treats a thousand cheap links as a strategy. That approach genuinely has been devalued, and ‘you need very few links’ is a direct rebuke to it.

Seen that way, the comment isn’t anti-link — it’s anti-spam. It’s Google saying, in effect, ‘you don’t need mountains of links; you need the right ones.’ That’s entirely consistent with a market that raised budgets while moving decisively toward quality — the cheap-and-bulk end of link buying has shrunk to a small fraction of the market, while spend on genuinely strong links rose. The lesson for a buyer isn’t ‘stop buying links’; it’s ‘stop buying junk links and buy fewer, better ones,’ which is exactly what best backlinks for SEO of genuinely high-quality placements is about — power and relevance over raw count.

Why The Buyers Who Panicked Lost Ground

Here’s the practical sting. Every buyer who read ‘links aren’t in the top three’ as ‘stop building links’ and pulled back handed an advantage to the competitors who read it correctly and kept investing in quality. In a competitive SERP, link authority is relative — if your rivals keep building strong links and you stop, you don’t stay level, you fall behind. The misreading didn’t just cost the panickers nothing; it cost them position.

This is the quiet way soundbites move markets. A misunderstood Google comment convinces a chunk of the field to under-invest, which is precisely the opening the diligent operators exploit. The buyers who understood that Illyes was criticising volume, not links, kept building genuine authority and climbed past the ones who’d talked themselves out of the game. Being right about what the comment meant was a direct competitive edge.

What A Buyer Should Actually Do

Cutting through the noise, the correct response to ‘links aren’t in the top three’ is straightforward:

• Keep building links — but quality ones. The comment is a reason to abandon cheap volume, not links themselves. Fewer, stronger, relevant links is the strategy the data and the market both endorse.
• Don’t panic-pull your spend. Cutting link investment because of a misread soundbite hands ground to competitors who kept going. In a relative game, standing still while rivals build is falling behind.
• Match links to competition. ‘Very few links’ is true for easy queries and false for competitive ones. Buy to the difficulty of your actual keywords, not to a general statement about easy pages.
• Prioritise strength and relevance. If quantity is out and quality is in, every link should earn its place on authority and relevance. That’s the profile that survives whatever the next soundbite says.

Do that and you position yourself with the 58% who read the comment correctly and invested, rather than the panickers who read it as an excuse to quit. For agencies especially, where clients may wave the ‘links are dead’ headline around, link building for SEO agencies is built on exactly this reality — quality link building that keeps delivering because the evidence, not the soundbite, is what rankings actually respond to. And if you’re unsure how to read your own situation, free SEO and link building advice can help you separate what Google says from what Google’s rankings actually reward.

The Bottom Line

Gary Illyes saying links ‘aren’t in the top three’ and that Google needs ‘very few links’ was never the obituary the industry read it as. ‘Not in the top three’ still leaves links a major factor among hundreds; ‘very few links’ is true only for uncompetitive pages. And what happened next settles it — budgets rose 58%, per-link prices climbed, 92% of top-100 pages have backlinks, and PageRank-style signals remain confirmed. He was taking aim at volume-obsessed, cheap link building, not links themselves; the message was ‘buy the right ones, not mountains of junk.’ The buyers who understood that kept investing in quality and gained ground on the ones who panicked and pulled back. So don’t misread the soundbite: keep building genuine, relevant authority. buy PBN backlinks that actually count, and let the competitors who quit hand you their rankings.