87 Link Building Statistics and Trends to Know for 2027

Referring domains correlate 0.255 with Google ranking position across 1 million US keywords, the strongest of the link metrics Ahrefs tested. Backlinks come in at 0.248 and Domain Rating at 0.131.

For local-intent queries, links and referring domains correlate 0.33 with rankings, higher than the overall average.

Ahrefs’ referring-domain correlation fell from 0.29 in its 2019 study to roughly 0.22 to 0.24 in 2024. Links matter less than they did, and they still matter.

of domains that ranked in Google’s top 100 for all 13 months of Semrush’s 28,000-domain study had at least one backlink.

of new domains that never reached the top 10 had no backlinks at all.

More than 96% of sites ranking in the top 10 for 200 commercial-intent keywords had over 1,000 referring domains. Only 0.3% had fewer than 100.

The first result on Google has 3.8x more backlinks than positions 2 to 10. This is 2016 data that has never been re-run, so treat it as directional.

of SEOs say backlinks have a big impact on search engine rankings; 30% say moderate and only 2.5% say low.

expect backlinks to have more impact on rankings in the next few years, while 35.5% expect the same impact.

Google’s Gary Illyes said at PubCon Pro in 2023 that links “are not a top 3 ranking factor, and have not been for some time.”

of all pages in Ahrefs’ 14-billion-page index get zero traffic from Google. Only 1.94% get between 1 and 10 monthly visits.

Of roughly 20 million pages with zero referring domains, only 2,997 get more than 1,000 monthly search visits.

of pages have zero backlinks, and another 26.29% have links from three or fewer websites (1 billion pages, 2020).

of blog posts have zero external links, and only 2.2% of content earns links from multiple websites (912 million posts).

SERPs where every top-10 page had a backlink from a page with traffic. About a fifth of SERPs had no top-ranking page with a traffic-generating backlink.

Pages with more referring domains get more organic traffic and rank for more keywords. Ahrefs notes this is correlation, not proof of causation.

is the average acceptable cost per high-quality backlink, according to 518 SEO professionals.

per month is the minimum link building budget SEOs say a highly competitive niche needs.

of SEO budget goes to link building at agencies. In-house teams allocate 36.0%.

of SEOs expect link building costs to rise over the next two to three years.

name the high cost of premium backlinks as their biggest link building challenge.

is the average digital PR cost per link, with an average monthly contract of $5,458.

Agencies average $663 per link versus $416 for freelancers. US providers average $350 per link; UK providers $818.

is the average price of a guest post bought directly from a site. Through a vendor it rises to about $461. Link insertions average $179.

of sites in a 500,000-site guest post vendor database met a DR/DA 65+ and 10,000+ monthly traffic bar. About 98% of the link insertion database was low quality.

per link is the typical range, approaching $2,000 in competitive niches, with campaign budgets of $3,000 to $25,000 per month.

of SEOs spend $5,000 to $10,000 a month on link building. 35.5% spend $1,000 to $5,000 and 18% spend $10,000 or more.

is what high-authority, contextual backlinks (links that appear naturally in the body of an article) typically cost per link.

of digital PR pros now report an average cost per link of $750 or more, up from 3% a year earlier. 60% run monthly budgets under $10,000.

of link building outreach emails get a reply, about 1 in 28, across 51 million emails. Digital PR pitches to journalists get under 1%.

is the average time to get a reply. 57% of replies arrive within 6 hours and about 90% within two days.

higher reply rate for campaigns that send follow-ups. The first follow-up earns a 1.74% reply rate; the second only 0.59%.

of journalists say one follow-up is ideal. 98 of 100 PR pros surveyed use follow-ups.

is the median reply rate across 12,000+ campaigns. The top 5% of accounts get 40% or more; the bottom 5% get under 3%.

Contextually relevant personalization lifted reply rate by 10.7 points over a template. “Fake” personalization (name and site only) lowered it by 1.3 points.

of outreach emails got a reply in Backlinko’s 2019 study of 12 million emails. Emailing multiple contacts lifted replies 93% and a single follow-up 65.8%.

of digital PR pros always personalize pitches, up from 41.6% a year earlier. 55.4% follow up once and 33.1% twice.

of SEOs rate digital PR as the most effective link building tactic. 66.6% prefer finding unique opportunities over replicating competitor links.

Digital PR ranks first for strongest results in uSERP’s survey of 800+ SEOs, followed by content marketing (18%), guest posting (12%) and unclaimed mentions (12%).

of SEOs outsource link building to agencies, freelancers or contractors. 29% keep it entirely in-house and 11% do both.

of SEOs outsource at least part of their link building.

of link builders use content marketing, the most used tactic, followed by competitor analysis (54%), guest posting (47%) and reactive PR (45%).

of link builders use paid links, and 69% believe paid links positively influence rankings.

of in-house marketers consider their link building successful. 66% struggle to identify the best tactics and only 32% follow a documented, repeatable process.

of companies manage link building entirely in-house, and only 30% of those using agencies feel confident in the results.

of digital PR practitioners use data-driven content. 85.8% use digital PR primarily to build backlinks and about 80% say they never buy links.

of SEOs reject sites with spammy outbound links when vetting link sources, and 86.3% treat low-quality content as a dealbreaker.

Cision shut down HARO (Connectively), the largest journalist-request platform used for link building.

more referring domains for content over 3,000 words compared with content under 1,000 words.

more links for “why” posts, “what” posts and infographics than for videos and how-to posts. List posts rank last for links despite high shares.

of ChatGPT’s 1,000 most-cited pages were updated in 2025, and 76.4% within the previous six months. Fresh content earns citations.

of links pointing to 2 million sampled websites since 2013 have rotted. Including crawl errors and other issues, 74.5% of links are lost.

of lost links died because the linking page was dropped; 34.2% because the link was removed; 6.45% to crawl errors.

of all backlinks to the top 110,000 sites are nofollow. Only 0.44% of referring domains use rel=“ugc” and 0.01% use rel=“sponsored”.

of SEOs believe nofollow links improve authority and/or rankings. 34% say maybe and 12% say no.

of SEOs believe nofollow links affect rankings, and 80.9% believe unlinked brand mentions affect rankings.

of link builders report nofollow links to clients, and 62% count them toward link targets.

of 140,592 domains have reciprocal links, and 43.7% of 112,440 top-ranking pages have some reciprocal links.

of SEOs use domain scores (DR, DA, AS) as their main backlink quality metric. 30% use site traffic and 13.5% niche relevance.

Google treats nofollow, sponsored and UGC attributes as hints about which links to consider rather than directives to ignore them.

is the correlation between branded web mentions and AI Overview visibility across 75,000 brands, versus 0.326 for Domain Rating, 0.295 for referring domains and 0.218 for backlinks.

Brands in the top quartile for web mentions average 169 AI Overview mentions versus 14 for the next quartile. 26% of brands get zero AI Overview mentions.

YouTube mentions correlate 0.737 with AI visibility across ChatGPT, AI Mode and AI Overviews, and Domain Rating only 0.266 to 0.326. ChatGPT shows the weakest link to traditional authority metrics.

Being mentioned on highly linked pages correlates 0.70 with AI Overview mentions, 0.40 with Perplexity and just 0.12 with ChatGPT.

Page-one Google rankings correlate about 0.65 with brand mentions in ChatGPT answers across 10,000 finance and SaaS questions, while backlinks showed little to no direct impact.

Nofollow links correlate with AI mentions (0.509) about as strongly as followed links (0.504) across 1,000 domains. Semrush Authority Score correlates 0.65.

is the median Domain Rating of ChatGPT’s 1,000 most-cited pages. 65.3% have DR 81+, the median page has 70 referring domains, and Wikipedia alone takes 29.7% of citations.

of AI Overview citations came from Google’s top 10 results in March 2026, down from 76.1% in July 2025.

of SEOs believe backlinks influence visibility in AI search results.

of marketers believe link building will become more important because of AI, but only 11% have a repeatable process for earning AI citations.

of digital PR teams now track AI visibility for clients, and 66.2% target AI citations with their work.

of SEOs call link building the most challenging part of SEO. 67.2% struggle to scale it without losing quality and 52.9% find ROI hard to measure.

of SEOs expect to see results from new links within one to three months.

of in-house marketers get six months or less to prove link building’s value. Only 29% find it easy to secure budget; 56% expected a budget increase.

of digital PR pros see results within six months, and 51.4% land first coverage in three to six months. 75% say digital PR got harder over the past year.

of link builders see ranking impact within one to three months of earning a link. 32% spend one to two hours per link; 24% spend three to five.

per month is how fast top-ranking pages gain new followed referring domains. Top-3 results acquire links faster than the rest of page one.

of newly published pages rank in Google’s top 10 within a year, down from 5.7% in 2017. 72.9% of top-10 pages are more than three years old.

of new domains reached and held a top-10 ranking by month six. Only 4.2% held at least one top-10 ranking for the full 13-month study.

of SEOs use Google Search Console for link building, measuring and reporting, followed by Semrush (21%) and Ahrefs (15%).

of 310 SEO and marketing experts preferred Semrush as their favorite SEO tool over Ahrefs.

reduction in low-quality, unoriginal content in search results after Google’s March 2024 core and spam updates, up from an initial 40% projection.

SpamBrain detected 50 times more link spam sites after the December 2022 link spam update than after the July 2021 update, and 200 times more than at its 2018 launch.

The December 2022 link spam update rolled out over 29 days and was the first time SpamBrain targeted both sites buying links and sites built to sell them.

Google’s March 2024 spam policy update added expired domain abuse, scaled content abuse and site reputation abuse (enforced from May 5, 2024).

of link builders maintain a disavow file.

of SEOs doubt Google can reliably detect paid links. 91.9% believe their competitors buy backlinks and 63.1% are open to buying links from quality sites.