I'm not sure what you think PageRank is, but it doesn't produce links between documents as output; it requires them as input.
I would consider PageRank as a quite successful example of machine learning. Am I wrong?
It started out that way, anyway.
The definition of what counts as ML/AI can be fuzzy, but I don't think the original PageRank algorithm would qualify as ML/AI under any definition: http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html