any way to make copied paste links automatically udate to the current years spreadsheet

You can do it all in one hit
Use search and replace, replacing all

replace:
'aaa2016'!
with:
'aaa2017'!

Hi, welcome to the forum

1st, are you saying that you have each ear's data on a new sheet? If so, have you considered using 1 sheet for ALL data, then just referencing that instead?

If that is not an option, maybe you could use INDIRECT() to add teh year to a formula, but that can become resource-heavy if used extensively

Can you upload a small (clean) sample workbook (not a pic) of what you are working with, and what your expected outcome would look like.

Select multiple sheets and replace just the tail as follows:

replace:
2016'!
with:
2017'!

We are all guilty at times of not planning workbooks properly or we adapt them later and use them in ways we never intended originally. It is the little inconsistencies that cause such problems when we want to make adjustments that sound so simple.

How about amending your worksheet names so that they ALL end with a consistent last few characters??
Your formulas would all re-reference automatically. My previous suggestion would work.
But BEWARE - it would cause you a few (many??) headaches if the file contains macros - they will not automatically re-reference!

An alternative would be to create a macro to do the work instead.
But then you need to write out exactly what needs to be replaced by what.
And BEWARE if the text strings do not contain any special characters, then it is possible to inadvertently replace something you do not want to replace.
I would suggest making the macro write a "table of replacements" to a worksheet for checking first!

My preference (unless there are macros!) would be to re-name worksheets to make them consistent and keep things simple

Hi MavEx
In response to your PM:

The reference within any workbook would be automatically re-referenced correctly within that workbook whenever you amend a sheet name within that workbook.
However any external links would need modifying separately if a lower level workbook's sheet was renamed. And, using "search and replace",t could be easily achieved globally by macro.
eg
to amend this link
='D:\Documents\ABC\[FileName.xlsx]2013XX'!$B$5
to
='D:\Documents\ABC\[FileName.xlsx]YY2013'!$B$5

Loop through the workbook and
replace this string
[FileName.xlsx]2013XX'!
with this string
[FileName.xlsx]YY2013'!

It's a bit difficult to comment when I cannot see what's involved.

But in principle it would be possible to write a macro that

1. loops through all the lower level workbooks in a single folder and amend sheet names based on a table (if name = X, rename it Y) - I would expect everything to still function correctly in those workbooks
2. loops through all sheets in Top Level workbook containing the links and "search and replace" those links based on the same table