Arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF) can increase plant fitness under certain environmental conditions. Among the mechanisms that may drive this mutualism, the most studied is provisioning of nutrients by AMF in exchange for carbon from plant hosts. However, AMF may also provide a suite of non‐nutritional benefits to plants including improved water uptake, disease resistance, plant chemical defense, soil aggregation, and allelochemical transport and protection. Here, we use a meta‐analysis of 93 studies to assess the relative effect of AMF on nutritional and non‐nutritional factors that may influence plant fitness. We find that the positive effects of AMF on soil aggregation, water flow and disease resistance are equal to the effect of AMF on plant nitrogen and phosphorus uptake. However, AMF had no effect on the uptake of other nutrients, plant water content, allelopathic transport or production of chemical defense compounds. We suggest future research directions, including experimentally assessing the relative contribution on plant fitness of AMF interactions by untangling the independence of alternative benefits of AMF from an increase in nutrient uptake. This will lead to a more holistic view of the mycorrhizal‐plant association and a more accurate picture of the net impact on the plant or plant community in question.

Net pairwise plant–soil feedbacks (PSF) may be an important factor structuring plant communities, yet the influence of abiotic context on PSF is not yet understood. Abiotic factors such as light availability can alter plant–soil interactions, potentially resulting in strong context dependence of PSF. Here, we present an experiment in which we measured whole‐soil net pairwise feedbacks amongst six common forest understory species across a gradient of light availability. Light treatments were imposed throughout both phases (the conditioning phase and the response phase) of the feedback experiment. Across the plant community, PSF shifted from negative at high light availability to weakly positive under low light (P = 0.013). Differences in the biomass of plants during the conditioning phase did not fully explain light‐imposed differences in feedbacks, indicating that reduced light availability qualitatively changes the nature of PSF rather than simply weakening feedbacks by reducing plant growth. Results indicate that abiotic context can fundamentally alter the role of PSF in structuring plant communities.