Barry Andrews: June 2026

A sharp selloff in tech stocks this week reveals a growing Wall Street worry: the AI gold rush might be more hype than payoff.

The Nasdaq has tumbled nearly 5% as investors question whether the trillions of dollars being poured into artificial intelligence will ever generate the profits needed to justify the cost. Goldman Sachs estimates tech giants will spend a staggering $7.6 trillion through 2031 on new data centers alone.

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The Problem: Spending Like Crazy, Earning Like... Not So Much

The "hyperscalers"—Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, and Oracle—are borrowing heavily to build AI infrastructure. But the returns aren't matching the outlay.

No consumer demand: Americans are using AI more, but few are willing to pay for it.
Worker skepticism: Many employees are wary of AI, with a Pew Research poll showing 40% of adults think AI will be a negative force for society over the next two decades, versus only 16% who see it as positive.
Business ROI is shaky: A May study from Gartner found that companies replacing workers with AI agents often fail to generate a return on investment.

Kate Brennan of the AI Now research institute put it bluntly: "The returns are not coming in, and the claims that are being made, in terms of efficiency or productivity numbers, are not netting out."

She added that the push for AI adoption is being driven by the financial incentives of AI firms themselves—not genuine demand: "No matter whether the demand is there or if customers want it or not."

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Is This the Dotcom Bubble All Over Again?

Wall Street is nervously eyeing parallels to the late 1990s. Back then, many internet companies flamed out, but a few—like Amazon and Google—eventually became giants.

Economists at Vanguard warn investors to "expect a bumpy ride." Some AI firms will emerge profitable; others will find their businesses obsolete.

Meanwhile, Capital Economics predicts AI stocks could drop sharply in 2027.

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The 'Capex Payback Test'

Economist Ed Yardeni has run the numbers on whether the AI ecosystem can actually pay for itself. He looked at revenue forecasts for OpenAI and Anthropic to see if they're growing fast enough to cover their massive spending commitments.

His conclusion: Not yet, but it could work by 2030—if current growth forecasts hold and AI revenues continue to scale.

That's a big "if."

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Backlinks have always been a cornerstone of SEO. The general advice remains the same: earn links from authoritative sites, improve your domain rating, and watch your rankings climb. That math, however, stopped working a while ago.

Google has fundamentally changed how it reads links. Tactics that used to be safe bets now do nothing, and some can quietly hold your site back . The goal is no longer simply "more links." It is fewer links from places that would link to you whether you asked or not .

Why the Old Volume-First Approach Fails

The traditional method treated link building like a numbers game. High-volume keywords and a large number of backlinks were the primary targets. That approach no longer delivers results.

Google now reassesses a site's link profile continuously with machine learning rather than reacting to spam after the fact . In practice, a weak or manipulative link rarely earns a penalty anymore. It simply gets ignored, meaning the time and budget spent acquiring it returns nothing .

Two major spam updates reset the rules. The December 2024 link spam update targeted link networks that had operated undetected for years. The October 2025 spam update went further, naming AI-generated guest-post farms and sites publishing thin machine-written content only to embed paid links as their own violation category . If a tactic scales cheaply and anyone can buy it, Google has probably already learned to discount it .

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What Still Matters: Quality and Relevance

High-quality backlinks still signal trust and relevance. They play a key role in how Google evaluates which brands earn visibility and can increase the chances of a source being cited or surfaced in AI-generated answers .

Quality backlinks check three boxes :

Relevance: The linking site is topically related to yours. Backlinks from respected industry blogs carry significant weight.
Authority: The linking domain has strong credibility. Think of industry publications or top-ranking competitors.
Natural placement: You have earned this link editorially. No one paid for it or jammed it into a comment thread.

A good backlink comes from a site with solid authority, consistent organic traffic, and content that is trustworthy and relevant to the client . A poor backlink opportunity usually comes from sites with little to no traffic, low authority, or content that feels spammy or off-topic .

Tactics That Still Work in 2026

The tactics that survive share one trait: they earn links from people who chose to link because the thing you made was worth citing .

Digital PR and Original Data

The strongest link earner is something genuinely new: a survey, a benchmark, a piece of proprietary data, or a strong point of view tied to a current event . Journalists and bloggers link to sources, so you need to give them a source . For eCommerce brands, this can be conversion benchmarks from your category, a pricing study, or seasonal demand data. One original chart can earn more authoritative links than months of outreach for generic content .

Guest Posting with a Purpose

Guest posting is not dead, but the version that scaled is . A single, genuinely useful article on a respected, niche-relevant publication still carries weight. A subscription to a network that places the same article on 40 thin sites is now a liability . Pitch publications you would read yourself, and treat the link as a byproduct of the audience, not the point .

Expert Sourcing

With the discontinuation of HARO, the free press-query service that built thousands of links for SEO teams, demand moved to platforms like Featured.com and Qwoted . The mechanic is the same: answer a reporter's question well enough to be quoted, and earn a link from a domain you could never pitch cold . Quality of answer is everything, since editors now filter hard for substance .

Unlinked Brand Mentions

Discovering instances where your brand is mentioned online without a backlink provides valuable opportunities . You can locate these mentions using tools like Ahrefs, Semrush, or Google Alerts to filter out mentions of your brand that do not include your domain . Upon finding an unlinked mention, express gratitude and kindly ask if they could add a link to your website .

The Shift to AI Visibility

Search is no longer a simple act of "Googling" something. It has evolved into a far more fragmented landscape that spans Google, Reddit, LLMs, and social platforms such as TikTok and YouTube . A recent Adobe report found that 24% of Americans now start their search journey on ChatGPT .

AI engines work differently from traditional search algorithms. Where Google's classic algorithm asks "which page best matches this query?", AI engines ask "what does the web collectively say about this topic, and which brands keep coming up?" .

The mechanism is consensus. AI engines parse content from authoritative sites across the web. The brands that appear consistently across these reputable sources are the ones the AI cites in its answer . This is why a single backlink, however high in authority, often does nothing for AI visibility. What moves the needle instead are listicle mentions on industry publications, review platform listings, and editorial mentions in trusted content .

The Bottom Line

High DA placements are not dead, but they are not enough on their own anymore. The teams winning visibility in 2026 are the ones earning structured mentions on content that already ranks and gets cited by answer engines . Every tactic that still works has the same shape: make something worth citing, then make sure the right people see it .

Barry Andrews

Thursday, 18 June 2026

The AI Spending Frenzy: Big Tech Is Betting Trillions. Investors Want Proof

The Problem: Spending Like Crazy, Earning Like... Not So Much

Is This the Dotcom Bubble All Over Again?

The 'Capex Payback Test'

Saturday, 13 June 2026

How to Build Backlinks That Actually Work in 2026

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