An infographic condenses information or data into a single visual, combining charts, icons, and short text to make something that would take paragraphs to explain readable in a glance. Done well, it makes dense information faster to understand and easier to remember than the same content in plain prose.
They've earned a reputation as a reliable link-building format because they're genuinely shareable and citable in a way most written content isn't: a blogger writing about a topic can drop in someone else's infographic with a credit link far more easily than they'd rewrite someone else's prose. That link-earning potential depends entirely on the infographic actually being good, though, accurate, well-designed, and genuinely useful rather than a rehash of publicly available stats with a template slapped on. A generic infographic pieced together to bait links tends not to earn much of anything, while one built around a real data set or original research a site is uniquely positioned to share is what actually gets picked up and linked to.
