145 Link Building Statistics October 2026

Link building statistics from 2025 and 2026 tell one story. Links still matter, they cost more each year, and more of the work now goes into earning coverage than into placing links. Budgets keep growing, with 58% of SEO professionals raising their link building spend in 2026 and 14% cutting it (Reporter Outreach, Aug 2026). And 55.2% name link building the most challenging part of the job (Editorial.Link, May 2026).

Every number below links to the organisation that ran the study, survey or analysis, with the date of the data. A lot of this research comes from companies that sell SEO tools or link building services, and we say so where it does. Correlation studies are labelled as correlation. For the wider search picture, see our SEO statistics hub.

Do backlinks still affect Google rankings?

Yes, though less than they used to, and the ones you have won't all last. The correlation between links and rankings has weakened since 2019 and Google now neutralises unnatural links automatically, but on competitive queries you still need them. Plan for losing links as well as earning them.

How strong is the correlation between backlinks and rankings?

Across the top one million US keywords by search volume, the number of referring domains correlated 0.255 with top-20 ranking position, backlinks 0.248 and Domain Rating 0.131 (Ahrefs, Jan 2025).

• On comparable low-volume, non-branded queries, the referring domain correlation fell from 0.29 in 2019 to between 0.22 and 0.24 (Ahrefs, Jan 2025).
• In Backlinko's 2020 analysis of 11.8 million Google results, the #1 result had 3.8 times more backlinks than positions 2 to 10 (Backlinko, Apr 2025).
• The same analysis found a site's overall link authority correlated with rankings more strongly than the authority of the individual page (Backlinko, Apr 2025).
• Most #1 ranking pages gained followed links from new referring domains at +5% to +14.5% per month, in a 2018 study of 10,000 keywords (Ahrefs, Sep 2024).

Google still lists link analysis systems and PageRank among its ranking systems and says PageRank continues to be part of its core ranking systems (Google Search Central, Dec 2025).

Can a page rank without backlinks?

Rarely. Almost nothing on the web earns a link by itself, and pages without links seldom get search traffic outside low-competition topics.

• 96.55% of the 14 billion pages in Ahrefs' Content Explorer index get zero traffic from Google, and 1.94% get between one and ten visits a month (Ahrefs, Dec 2023).
• Of roughly 20 million pages with no referring domains, only 2,997 get more than 1,000 search visits a month, about one in 6,671 (Ahrefs, Dec 2023).
• Only 2.2% of content earned links from more than one website (Backlinko, Feb 2019).
• In B2B, 93% of content got no links from other websites and 3% was linked from more than one site (Backlinko, Feb 2019).
• About 95% of all pages in Backlinko's 11.8-million-result ranking dataset had zero backlinks (Backlinko, Apr 2025).
• Content over 3,000 words earned 77.2% more referring domain links than content under 1,000 words (Backlinko, Feb 2019).
• "Why" posts, "What" posts and infographics received 25.8% more referring domain links than how-to posts and videos (Backlinko, Feb 2019).

SEOs are more optimistic than that data suggests:

• 64.9% of 518 surveyed SEOs say a site can rank high on Google without backlinks (Editorial.Link, May 2026).
• 80.9% believe unlinked brand mentions affect organic rankings (Editorial.Link, May 2026).

For how often companies publish and what their posts earn, see the blogging statistics and content marketing statistics hubs.

How fast do backlinks disappear?

A quarter of all pages collected between 2013 and 2023 were no longer accessible in October 2023 (Pew Research Center, May 2024).

• 8% of pages that existed in 2023 were already inaccessible by October of that year (Pew Research Center, May 2024).
• 23% of news webpages and 21% of government webpages contain at least one broken link (Pew Research Center, May 2024).
• 5% of all links on news pages point to pages that no longer exist, and 32% redirect to a different URL (Pew Research Center, May 2024).
• 54% of English Wikipedia pages have at least one reference link that points to a page that no longer exists (Pew Research Center, May 2024).
• Traffic doesn't protect a site from broken links. They appear on 25% of pages on the top 20% of sites by traffic and 26% on the bottom 20% (Pew Research Center, May 2024).

Ahrefs found the same decay in backlinks:

• Counting temporary errors and links Google would not count, 74.5% of the links in the sample are lost for SEO purposes (Ahrefs, Feb 2024).
• 47.7% of lost links disappeared because the linking page was dropped, and 34.2% because the link was removed from a live page (Ahrefs, Feb 2024).
• A further 5.99% were lost to redirected pages and 4.11% to pages returning "not found" (Ahrefs, Feb 2024).

How much does a backlink cost in 2026?

Prices are rising, and buyers expect them to keep rising. A "link" can mean a cheap guest post or an expensive editorial placement, so one average price tells you very little about what you'll pay.

What does one link cost?

The largest price band is $500 to $1,000 per link, chosen by 31% of buyers, while only 6% still pay under $100 (Reporter Outreach, Aug 2026).

• The most common known cost per digital PR link is $300 to $500 (19.6% of teams), and the share paying $750 or more rose from 3% to 10.2% in a year (BuzzStream, Feb 2026).
• 39.2% of digital PR teams don't know their cost per link, an improvement on 51.4% the year before (BuzzStream, Feb 2026).
• When Ahrefs asked 450 sites in nine niches to sell a link on an existing page, the average price was $361.44 (Ahrefs, Jul 2024).
• Paid guest posts in the same experiment averaged $77.80, across 180 sites pitched (Ahrefs, Jul 2024).

How big are monthly link budgets?

Most buyers spend thousands of dollars a month, and budgets vary widely by niche.

• 64% of buyers spend $3,000 or more a month on link building, and 38% spend $6,000 or more (Reporter Outreach, Aug 2026).
• SEOs put the minimum monthly budget to compete in highly competitive niches at $8,406 on average (Editorial.Link, May 2026).
• Agencies spend 32.1% of their SEO budget on link building and in-house teams 36.03% (Editorial.Link, May 2026).
• About 60% of digital PR budgets are under $10,000 a month, and 25.7% are under $5,000 (BuzzStream, Feb 2026).
• 61% of SEOs say gambling needs the largest link building budgets of any industry (Editorial.Link, May 2026).

Where are link prices heading?

Up. Most buyers expect higher prices and a harder market, and many say budgets are hard to win.

• 80.9% of SEOs expect link building to get harder and more expensive over the next two to three years (Editorial.Link, May 2026).
• 75% of buyers expect prices to rise over the next two years, and 8% expect a fall (Reporter Outreach, Aug 2026).
• 75.1% name the high cost of premium backlinks as their biggest link building challenge (Editorial.Link, May 2026).
• 29% of link builders say link building budgets are easy to secure (BuzzStream, Apr 2025).
• 56% of organisations plan to spend more on link building in the next 12 months, and 9% plan to spend less (BuzzStream, Apr 2025).

Which link building tactics work best?

Digital PR has pulled ahead in the 2025 and 2026 surveys. Guest posts and link exchanges are used about as widely, yet few practitioners call either one their best channel. That looks like teams running them out of habit.

Which tactics do SEOs rate highest?

48.6% of SEOs call digital PR the most effective link building tactic for 2026, far ahead of guest posting at 16% and linkable assets at 12% (Editorial.Link, May 2026).

• 45.6% of SEOs use digital PR and 42.4% use guest posts (Reporter Outreach, Aug 2026).
• 43.8% still run link exchanges. Not one respondent named them their best-performing tactic (Reporter Outreach, Aug 2026).

Buying placements is still part of the mix for many teams, less so in digital PR:

• 63.1% would place links on sites listed on link marketplaces if the quality were right (Editorial.Link, May 2026).
• About 80% of digital PR professionals never buy links, down from 87.3% in 2025 (BuzzStream, Feb 2026).

How do teams run link building?

Most teams outsource part of the work, few follow a documented process, and results are expected fast.

• 56% of SEOs outsource at least part of their link building (Editorial.Link, May 2026).
• 61% of in-house organisations manage link building entirely in-house (BuzzStream, Apr 2025).
• 32% follow a documented, repeatable link building process (BuzzStream, Apr 2025).
• Fewer still, 29%, consider their link building efforts successful (BuzzStream, Apr 2025).
• 75% get six months or less to prove the value of link building (BuzzStream, Apr 2025).
• Expectations run shorter than that: 57.1% of SEOs expect to see results within one to three months (Editorial.Link, May 2026).
• 68% of organisations build links to improve rankings and 68% to grow organic traffic, but only 48% to increase revenue (BuzzStream, Apr 2025).

On which pages to point links at, the survey answers and the practice differ:

• 52.7% of SEOs say service and product pages matter most for link acquisition, ahead of blog posts at 38.4% (Editorial.Link, May 2026).
• In practice, 68% of in-house teams prioritise links to blog posts and 41% to product pages (BuzzStream, Apr 2025).
• 41.7% prefer partial-match anchor text, 25.1% exact-match and 20.5% branded anchors (Editorial.Link, May 2026).
• 53% of buyers target sites between DR 40 and 60, and only 9% target DR 70 and above (Reporter Outreach, Aug 2026).
• 62% prioritise link quality over volume, and 9% still chase volume (Reporter Outreach, Aug 2026).
• 89.0% see spammy outbound links as the biggest red flag when assessing a site for a placement (Editorial.Link, May 2026).

How do digital PR teams earn links?

95.9% of digital PR professionals pitch data-led content, the most common tactic in the field (BuzzStream, Feb 2026).

• 59.5% convert unlinked brand mentions into links as part of their digital PR work (BuzzStream, Feb 2026).
• More of them now send press releases: 79.1%, against 68.8% the year before (BuzzStream, Feb 2026).
• 53.4% of digital PR practitioners work most closely with the SEO team (BuzzStream, Feb 2026).
• 85.8% say building backlinks is the most effective use of digital PR (BuzzStream, Feb 2026).
• 81% secure first coverage within a week of pitching (BuzzStream, Feb 2026).
• 85.2% see measurable results within six months (BuzzStream, Feb 2026).
• 32.5% say a single team member averages more than 30 links (BuzzStream, Feb 2026).
• 68.2% believe digital PR is more effective than it was 12 months ago (BuzzStream, Feb 2026).
• Travel is the easiest industry to earn links in (46.6%) and finance the hardest (23.6%) (BuzzStream, Feb 2026).

What slows them down is mostly finding the right journalist:

• 60.8% say finding relevant journalists got harder in the past 12 months (BuzzStream, Feb 2026).
• 62.8% say outdated or incorrect journalist data is the main problem with their media list tools (BuzzStream, Feb 2026).
• Fewer than half, 48%, always personalise their pitches (BuzzStream, Feb 2026).
• 55.4% follow up with a journalist once, and 33.1% twice (BuzzStream, Feb 2026).

Cision permanently shut down Connectively, the renamed HARO, on December 9, 2024 (Cision, Dec 2024). It then sold HARO to Featured.com on April 15, 2025 (Cision, Apr 2025).

What reply rates does link outreach get?

Most outreach is ignored. The accounts that do best send fewer, better-matched emails, write to more than one person at a site and follow up. Blasting a list makes results worse.

How many outreach emails get a reply?

Across 12,000 campaigns from 2,000 BuzzStream accounts, the median reply rate was about 12%, the top 5% of accounts got 40% or more, and the bottom 25% got under 7% (BuzzStream, Aug 2024).

• In BuzzStream's 2025 reply-time data, the overall reply rate was 3.59% for link builders and under 1% for digital PR (BuzzStream, May 2025).
• 57% of link building replies arrive within six hours and almost 90% within two days (BuzzStream, May 2025).
• Paying doesn't guarantee a yes either: 12.6% of sites Ahrefs approached were willing to sell a link at all (Ahrefs, Jul 2024).

What raises outreach reply rates?

Following up and writing to more people at the site did more for replies than personalisation did.

Sending more pitches does the opposite. Bigger digital PR campaigns got lower reply rates and less coverage.

• In 31 million digital PR emails, reply rates fell from 1.15% for campaigns of 1 to 50 emails to 0.37% for campaigns of 1,001 to 5,000 (BuzzStream, Apr 2025).
• Campaigns of more than 1,000 emails earned 70% fewer pieces of coverage than campaigns of 51 to 100 (BuzzStream, Apr 2025).
• The average digital PR pitch open rate was 33.79% (BuzzStream, Apr 2025).

For reply rates on sales outreach rather than link outreach, see the cold email statistics hub.

What makes a journalist use a PR pitch?

Relevance to their beat, above all. Journalists still rely on pitches, but they discard anything that misses their audience.

• 86% of journalists say at least some of their stories started with a PR pitch (Muck Rack, Mar 2026).
• Nearly half of journalists say they seldom receive pitches that match their coverage (Muck Rack, Mar 2026).
• 86% will reject a pitch that isn't relevant to their audience or beat, and 79% are more likely to engage with one that is (Cision, May 2026).
• 47% say the ideal pitch includes compelling data, and 45% want embargoed or early access (Cision, May 2026).
• 84% say an introductory email, even without a story, is the best way to start a relationship (Cision, May 2026).
• 72% of journalists call press releases the most useful resource PR teams can offer (Cision, May 2025).

There are also fewer of them to pitch each year:

• US employment of news analysts, reporters and journalists is projected to fall 6% between 2025 and 2035 (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Aug 2026).
• Employment of public relations specialists is projected to grow 2% over the same decade (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Aug 2026).
• In Cision's 2026 survey of more than 1,800 reporters, 50% named misinformation their biggest challenge, 49% resource constraints and 43% the impact of AI (Cision, May 2026).

Most use AI themselves, and most object when PR teams do.

• 82% of journalists use at least one AI tool, and 47% use ChatGPT (Muck Rack, Mar 2026).
• 53% of journalists oppose PR professionals using AI, and 21% are in favour (Cision, May 2026).
• 72% worry about factual errors in AI-generated PR content (Cision, May 2025).

How does Google treat nofollow, paid and spammy links?

Google has spent seven years making paid and manipulative links worth less, and it now neutralises many of them automatically. Plenty of SEOs still buy links anyway. They are betting that detection fails.

How common are nofollow, sponsored and UGC links?

Nofollow is routine. The more precise sponsored and ugc labels are rare.

Since September 2019, Google treats nofollow, sponsored and ugc as hints about which links to count rather than as strict instructions (Google Search Central, Sep 2019).

• nofollow appeared on 32.7% of pages in 2024, up from 29.5% in 2022 (HTTP Archive, Dec 2024).
• The median page links to 6 external sites and, on desktop, 43 pages on its own site (HTTP Archive, Jan 2026).
• 78.8% of SEOs think nofollow links affect rankings (Editorial.Link, May 2026).

How does Google catch link spam?

Automatically, for the most part. Google's systems now find both buyers and sellers of links and cancel the credit those links pass.

• Since the December 2022 link spam update, SpamBrain detects both sites that buy links and sites used to pass outgoing links, and neutralises the credit those links pass (Google Search Central, Dec 2022).
• In 2022, SpamBrain detected five times more spam sites than in 2021 and 200 times more than at launch (Google Search Central, Apr 2023).
• Google says more than 99% of visits from Search were spam-free in 2022 (Google Search Central, Apr 2023).
• Google's spam policies define link spam as creating links to or from a site primarily to manipulate search rankings (Google Search Central, Aug 2026).
• The March 2024 update added a spam policy against expired domains bought and repurposed to rank low-quality content (Google, Mar 2024).
• After the March 2024 changes, Google reported 45% less low-quality, unoriginal content in results, against the 40% it expected (Google, Apr 2024).
• In November 2024 Google clarified that no amount of first-party involvement makes third-party content exempt from its site reputation abuse policy (Google Search Central, Nov 2024).
• From August 30, 2026, Google adjusted how it enforces the site reputation policy in the European Economic Area, following discussions with the European Commission (Google Search Central, Aug 2026).

Many SEOs doubt it works:

• 56.0% of SEOs don't believe Google can identify and discount paid links effectively (Editorial.Link, May 2026).
• 39.0% still use Google's disavow tool (Editorial.Link, May 2026).

Do backlinks help a brand get cited by AI assistants?

Links matter for AI answers, mostly through the brand signals they build. Mentions of a brand across the web track AI visibility more closely than backlink counts do, and AI engines almost never cite paid placements. Earned coverage helps on both counts.

How do backlinks and brand mentions compare?

Among link metrics, Domain Rating correlated 0.326 with AI Overview brand visibility and referring domains 0.295 (Ahrefs, May 2025).

• YouTube mentions showed the strongest correlation with AI visibility, about 0.737 across ChatGPT, AI Mode and AI Overviews (Ahrefs, Dec 2025).
• Branded anchor text correlated 0.628 with brand mentions in Google's AI Mode (Ahrefs, Dec 2025).
• 26% of the 75,000 brands studied had zero mentions in AI Overviews (Ahrefs, May 2025).
• Brands in the top quarter for web mentions averaged 169 AI Overview mentions, against 14 for the next quarter down (Ahrefs, May 2025).

Which sites do AI engines cite?

Mostly large, well-linked sites and journalism. Ranking on Google's first page predicts an AI Overview citation far less than it did eight months earlier.

• Sites with more than 32,000 referring domains are 3.5 times more likely to be cited by ChatGPT than sites with up to 200 (SE Ranking, Nov 2025).
• Sites with more than 350,000 referring domains averaged 8.4 ChatGPT citations, against 1.6 to 1.8 for sites with up to 2,500 (SE Ranking, Nov 2025).
• In July 2025, 76.1% of pages cited in AI Overviews also ranked in Google's top 10 (Ahrefs, Jul 2025).
• By March 2026, that overlap had fallen to 38% across 863,000 SERPs (Ahrefs, Mar 2026).
• Journalism makes up 27% of AI citations, corporate blogs and content 24% and owned media 13.7% (Muck Rack, May 2026).
• ChatGPT includes citations in 96% of responses, Gemini in 82% and Claude in 55% (Muck Rack, May 2026).

For AI referral traffic and AI Overview click data, see the AI search statistics hub.

How are link builders responding to AI search?

• 73.2% of SEOs believe backlinks influence the chance of appearing in AI search results (Editorial.Link, May 2026).
• 74% believe backlinks affect AI visibility, but only 24% track it and 19% have changed how they build links (Reporter Outreach, Aug 2026).
• 66.2% of digital PR professionals now use digital PR to get mentioned in AI citations (BuzzStream, Feb 2026).
• About 40% of digital PR professionals have a repeatable way of getting clients cited by AI (BuzzStream, Feb 2026).
• Link builders are further behind, with 11% claiming a repeatable, reliable process for AI citations (BuzzStream, Apr 2025).
• 62% of organisations say appearing in AI-generated citations is very or extremely important (BuzzStream, Apr 2025).

Methodology and Sources

Every statistic on this page was traced to the organisation that produced it: a government agency, Google itself, an independent research body, or the company that ran the survey or crawl. We fetched every URL, confirmed the number appears on the page and recorded the date of the data. Roundups that republish other people's numbers were not used as sources. Much of the link building research comes from vendors (Ahrefs, Backlinko, BuzzStream, Editorial.Link, Reporter Outreach and SE Ranking all sell SEO software or services), so treat survey opinions as practitioner sentiment and correlation studies as correlation, not cause. Older studies (Backlinko 2019, Ahrefs 2018) are kept only where nothing newer measures the same thing, and are labelled with their year. This page is refreshed monthly.

Sources

• Ahrefs: Google Says Links Matter Less: We Looked at 1,000,000 SERPs
• Ahrefs: How Many New Backlinks Do Top-Ranking Pages Get Over Time
• Ahrefs: 96.55% of Content Gets No Traffic From Google
• Ahrefs: Link Rot Study
• Ahrefs: Should You Buy Backlinks?
• Ahrefs: An Analysis of AI Overview Brand Visibility Factors (75K Brands)
• Ahrefs: Top Brand Visibility Factors in ChatGPT, AI Mode and AI Overviews
• Ahrefs: 76% of AI Overview Citations Pull From the Top 10
• Ahrefs: Update: 38% of AI Overview Citations Pull From the Top 10
• Backlinko: We Analyzed 11.8 Million Google Search Results
• Backlinko: We Analyzed 912 Million Blog Posts
• Backlinko: We Analyzed 12 Million Outreach Emails
• BuzzStream: State of Digital PR Report 2026
• BuzzStream and Citation Labs: Link Building Trends Report 2025
• BuzzStream: Outreach Tactics From Analyzing 12,000 Campaigns
• BuzzStream: How Long Does It Take to Get Email Outreach Replies?
• BuzzStream: How Effective Is Spray and Pray in PR? (31M Emails)
• Cision: 2026 State of the Media Report, PR Lessons
• Cision: 2025 State of the Media Report press release
• Cision: Connectively Has Been Discontinued
• Cision: Sale of Help A Reporter Out (HARO) to Featured.com
• Editorial.Link: Link Building Statistics Based on a Survey of 518 SEO Experts
• Google: New Ways We're Tackling Spammy, Low-Quality Content on Search
• Google Search Central: A Guide to Google Search Ranking Systems
• Google Search Central: Spam Policies for Google Web Search
• Google Search Central: Evolving Nofollow
• Google Search Central: December 2022 Link Spam Update
• Google Search Central: Webspam Report 2022
• Google Search Central: Updating Our Site Reputation Abuse Policy
• Google Search Central: Update to the Site Reputation Policy
• HTTP Archive: Web Almanac 2025, SEO
• HTTP Archive: Web Almanac 2024, SEO
• Muck Rack: State of Journalism 2026 press release
• Muck Rack: How AI Citations Have Changed in the Last 6 Months
• Pew Research Center: When Online Content Disappears
• Reporter Outreach: State of Link Building 2026
• SE Ranking: How to Optimize for ChatGPT (129,000-Domain Study)
• U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics: Public Relations Specialists
• U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics: News Analysts, Reporters, and Journalists

Glossary

• Backlink: a link from another website to yours.
• Referring domain: a unique website linking to you. Ten links from one site count as one referring domain.
• DR / UR: Ahrefs' Domain Rating and URL Rating, 0 to 100 scores for the strength of a site's or page's backlink profile.
• Digital PR: earning coverage and links from news and media sites, usually with data, research or expert comment.
• HARO: Help A Reporter Out, a service matching journalists with expert sources. Renamed Connectively, shut down in 2024 and sold to Featured.com in 2025.
• Niche edit: a link added to an existing article on another site, often paid.
• nofollow, sponsored, ugc: rel attributes that tell Google a link is not an editorial endorsement, is paid, or was added by users.
• Link rot: links that stop working because the page they point to, or the page they sit on, is removed or moved.
• SpamBrain: Google's AI-based spam detection system, used since 2022 to neutralise link spam.
• AI Overviews / AI Mode: Google's AI-generated answers shown in or alongside search results.
• Spearman correlation: a measure from -1 to 1 of how consistently two rankings move together. It does not show cause.