Do you need backlinks to rank? Honestly, it depends where
Half the internet says links are everything and half says content is king, and you have to choose where to spend a quarter.
Below roughly position 8, you do not
Completeness, structure, speed, schema and static delivery will take a page from nowhere into the 6 to 12 band on a query you have a right to. That is achievable alone, and it is where most of this site's traffic lives.
Above it, you do, and no amount of writing substitutes
The top three results are held by pages other people vouch for. On-page work stops being the variable under comparison. If your target is a top-three position on a contested query, links are not optional and there is no shortcut.
So the real question is which business you are in
Winning a lot of mid positions across many queries needs no links and scales with pages. Winning a few top positions needs links and scales with reputation. Both work. Picking neither and doing on-page work forever does not.
What ranking looked like at DR 22
This site reached 42,320 clicks and 100,542 users with a domain rating of 22 and 122 linking sites. That is a modest profile by any measure. It was enough, because the terms it competed on were terms where nobody with a strong profile was competing properly. Links did not become the constraint until it tried to move up.
You need some, not many
The useful framing is a threshold, not a race. Below a handful of real links you struggle to get crawled and trusted at all. Past that, additional links buy you access to harder terms, and the return curve is steep at the start and flat later. Getting from zero to twenty matters enormously. Getting from 122 to 200 matters far less than a week of work on the pages you already have.
Measured, not asserted
100,542 users at an average position of 9.07, with a Domain Rating of 22 from 122 linking sites, most of them directories that pass little authority. The traffic came from breadth, not from height.
Free tool for this: Internal Link Graph. No account, nothing uploaded.
Where this goes deeper
Every number on this page comes from one complete dataset: one product taken from zero to 100K+ users on search alone, with nothing spent on advertising. The full argument is Chapter 23 of the book. Five chapters are free to read.