The role of internal links in answer engine optimization is two fold.
First, answer engine optimization, often called GEO or AISEO, still sits under the umbrella of SEO. Internal linking remains vital because it helps distribute authority across your site, strengthens PageRank flow, and makes it easier for search engines to crawl and understand your content. If your pages are not being discovered, indexed, and ranking in search results, LLMs will have far fewer consistent opportunities to find and reference them. Internal links help your most important pages become stronger and more visible in traditional SERPs, which is still the main gateway for many AI answers.
Second, internal links can influence what an LLM ends up citing once it lands on your content. If an AI system references one of your pages, it may also follow the context of that page and pull supporting information from the pages you link to. For example, if an LLM cites a product listing, it might also cite related products or supporting pages linked within that listing. Internal links expand the footprint of content that is connected to the page being surfaced.
Internal links are crucial for answer engine optimization, and they always have been crucial for SEO.