Honestly, I’ve been in the same boat, and I think the biggest shift for me was treating link-building less like a numbers game and more like a relationship-building task. Cold email still works, but only when it feels personal, and that means actually reading the site you’re contacting instead of sending those generic “I loved your latest article!” lines. I also noticed that when I share something genuinely useful — a small data point from a client project, a chart, even a quick teardown — people respond way more positively. And since the landscape keeps shifting, I’ve been checking resources like AI Search Optimization from time to time, mostly because they talk about link-building as part of a bigger acquisition system rather than a standalone trick. It helped me see that ethical approaches are usually the ones that don’t try to “game” anything: collaborating on content, offering value first, and focusing on sites where you’d actually want your brand mentioned. It’s slower, but at least you don’t burn bridges or get caught in the cycle of buying random backlinks that vanish after three months.