多得 AI？我的網站開始從意想不到的渠道獲得外部連結

I opened the Links report in Search Console for a site I run.
It showed 799 external links in total.

Most of them pointed to the home page, and they were old ones from Hatena and Yahoo! Japan.
But when I looked only at the links pointing to blog posts, a different pattern showed up.
My posts were listed in the "References" section at the end of articles written by people I had never heard of.

I traced every linking page to see what kind of articles were linking to me, and how.

How I traced them

In Search Console's Links report, I went in this order:

・Listed every page under "Top linked pages" that has external links (98 pages)
・For the blog posts among them (68 posts), listed the linking sites one by one
・For links coming from note (a large Japanese blogging platform), went one level deeper and listed the URL of each linking article

Search Console shows only 25 rows per page.
I paged through all of them using the pager at the bottom of the table.

For the note articles, I pulled the publish date and body text through note's public API, and read the text around each link to my site.

Where the links to blog posts come from

68 blog posts had external links, 125 links in total.
They came from 36 sites.

・note: 19 posts
・Hatena Blog: 5 posts
・Yahoo! Japan: 3 posts
・33 other sites: 1 to 6 posts each

Each number is how many of my blog posts that site linked to.

Links to the home page were mostly from Hatena and Yahoo! Japan.
Links to blog posts were mostly from note and personal blogs.

The note links came from 31 articles

Tracing the note links further, they came from 31 articles.
By publish date:

・2020 and 2022: 2 articles
・2026: 29 articles

The 2 older ones mentioned my site as part of the writer's own experience.
The 29 from 2026 looked completely different.

20 of the 29 had a "sources" section

20 of the 29 articles from 2026 had a section after the main text titled "References", "Sources", "Information sources" or "Cited from", and my posts were in it.

Here is the kind of format I found (titles hidden):

References
[1] (My site). "2026 edition | (post title)"
[2] Cabinet Office. (2023). Annual Report on the Ageing Society 2023 (full version).
[3] (My site). (March 26, 2026). (post title)

[Information sources]
・(post title) (https://(URL of my post))
・(post title) (https://...)

Numbering each entry and listing site name, date and title in that order is how academic papers cite references.
Some of them also had markers like "[1, 2]" in the main text.

You rarely see a personal note article list its sources this carefully.
On the other hand, when you ask an AI to research something, it often returns text with exactly this kind of source list.
Whether these articles were written with AI can't be confirmed from the outside.
But the format looks very similar.

Sometimes the same writer cited my site in several articles.
One writer linked to me from 8 different articles.

By month, it is growing

I counted the 29 articles from 2026 by the month they were published.

・March: 2
・April: 1
・May: 1
・June: 2
・July: 9
・August: 5
・September: 9

It jumped in July.

A company site was inserting references automatically

Outside note, a company's owned media site in the IT space had 11 links to 6 of my posts.
On this site, I could see a bit more of how it worked.

At the end of each article there was a row of "References" cards, and my posts were among them.
In the page data, these cards were tagged "source":"injected".
It looks like the system that builds the articles picks related external articles automatically and inserts them afterwards.

The site had 65,176 reference cards in total.
My site wasn't singled out.
Other sites covering similar topics were listed the same way.

What these links actually are

A note on counting:

・Links inside note articles carry rel="nofollow"
・All 11 reference-card links on the company site were also nofollow
・Search Console still counts nofollow links as external links

For the company site, I also checked Google Analytics.
Over a little more than six months, zero visitors came from it.
Having a link and getting visitors through it are two different things.

Is there any effect on search?

Did these links change how the posts perform in search?
For the 19 blog posts cited from note articles, I compared Search Console numbers for the 21 days before and after each post was first cited.

To filter out site-wide swings, I compared each post against the growth in impressions for the whole blog.

・Posts whose impressions grew faster than the blog overall: 2 (both had fewer than 60 impressions in 21 days)
・Posts that grew slower: 17
・Average position: some went up, some went down, with no clear direction

No post visibly rose in search after being cited.
For now, I see no effect on search.
That fits with the links being nofollow.

One more thing stood out when I lined up the numbers.
All 19 posts already had an average position between 4 and 8 in the 21 days before they were cited.
In other words, posts that were already on the first page of search results got cited later.
They didn't rise because they were cited.
They were cited because they were already ranking.

Summary

・Links to my blog posts came mainly from note and personal blogs
・29 of the 31 linking note articles were from 2026, and 20 of those linked to me from a sources section at the end
・The sources sections were numbered and listed site name, date and title, like an academic paper
・Articles like this have been increasing since July 2026
・A company site was inserting references automatically with its article-building system
・The cited posts did not gain in search, so there is no visible search effect so far
・The posts that got cited were already on the first page of search results

So far, there has been no visible result.
Still, the fact that AI seems to pick up my site as a source when it researches something makes me see possibilities ahead.

Is your site listed in the sources section of someone else's article?
Try tracing it once in the Links report in Search Console.