Do I have to buy backlinks for SEO?

It depends on your industry and needs. I do not deny that buying backlinks can sometimes help. But there are plenty of places to earn links for free, and AI-assisted automation offers more ways to do so. Unless a purchase involves news coverage or an industry partnership, it often offers little distinctive value.

Judge links by their quality

A relevant industry reference that helps readers find useful information has a clearer purpose than a large number of links on unrelated pages. Sites selling links often fall into the second group, so many of those links have little value.

For Google, spam links are not useful content. Good links may help rankings; paying for a link does not, by itself, make it good.

Good sources tend to share a few traits: they do not hand out links in bulk, they are highly relevant to your industry, and they actively maintain their content. Link-selling sites often lack these qualities. That is the main reason many purchased links fail to help.

What can I do without buying links?

At its core, a backlink is someone voluntarily sharing content. Make yours worth sharing: clear original data, practical processes, meaningful comparisons and useful tools can all give people a reason to reference you.

Reference: Google documentation