Data & Research March 17, 2026 • Updated: 6 November 2026

Link building
statistics 2026

60+ verified link building figures and benchmarks. From backlinks and rankings, cost per link and outreach reply rates to digital PR, link rot, anchor text and industry data. Compiled from research by Ahrefs, Backlinko, Editorial.Link, BuzzStream, Hunter, Pew Research Center, HTTP Archive, WebFX and Google's own documentation.

94%

of 912 million blog posts analysed got zero external links (2019)

Source: Backlinko, 2019

3.8x

more backlinks for the #1 result in Google than for positions 2 to 10

Source: Backlinko, 2020

4.5%

average reply rate on cold email sequences (31 million emails, 2025)

Source: Hunter, 2026

$508.95

average price SEO professionals consider acceptable for one high-quality backlink

Source: Editorial.Link, 2026

Statistics overview

Links are still part of how Google ranks pages: Google states that PageRank remains one of its core ranking systems. At the same time, Google's Gary Illyes said in 2023 that links are no longer a top-3 ranking signal, and AI answers add a new layer to the search landscape. So how many backlinks do you actually need? What does it cost? And which strategies work best in 2026?

On this page you'll find 60+ verified link building statistics and benchmarks, compiled from research by Ahrefs, Backlinko, Editorial.Link, BuzzStream, Hunter, Pew Research Center, HTTP Archive, WebFX and Google's own documentation. Every figure links to the source it comes from. Whether you're building a business case for an SEO strategy with link building, or simply looking for the latest data on outreach, anchor text, and link decay: this page provides the figures you need.

Link building is the process of acquiring hyperlinks from other websites to your own website. Each link acts as a "vote" for your content: the more quality, relevant websites that link to you, the higher Google rates your authority and trustworthiness. In 2026, it's no longer the quantity but the quality of backlinks that makes the difference. A single link from a high-authority domain can have more impact than hundreds of links from low-quality websites.

The figures in this overview come from the most recent edition of each study we could verify; older measurements are shown with their year. We regularly update this page to provide the most current data. Want to understand the broader SEO context first? Check out our SEO statistics 2026 page, or discover how content marketing statistics relate to link building.

Section 1

Backlink impact on rankings

94%

of 912 million blog posts got zero external links (2019)

Backlinko, 2019

3.8x

more backlinks for the #1 result than for positions 2 to 10

Backlinko, 2020

96.55%

of pages in Ahrefs' index get zero traffic from Google

Ahrefs, 2023

1.74%

of newly published pages reached Google's top 10 within a year

Ahrefs, 2025

Backlinks and rankings

  • In Backlinko's 2019 content study, only 2.2% of content generated links from multiple websites (Backlinko, 2019)
  • Backlinko's analysis of 11.8 million search results found that the authority of the whole site (Ahrefs Domain Rating) correlates more strongly with rankings than the authority of the individual page (Backlinko, 2020)
  • According to Ahrefs' 2018 backlink growth study, most #1-ranking pages gained about 5% to 14.5% new followed referring domains per month (US, keywords with 2,000 to 5,000 monthly searches) (Ahrefs, 2018)
  • The average #1-ranking page is 5 years old, and 72.9% of pages in Google's top 10 are more than 3 years old (US, 1.3 million keywords) (Ahrefs, 2025)

What Google says about links

  • According to a report of PubCon 2023, Google's Gary Illyes said in September 2023 that links are not a top-3 ranking signal and have not been for some time (Search Engine Roundtable, 2023)
  • Google states that PageRank, one of its core ranking systems since launch, has evolved and is still part of its core ranking systems (Google Search Central, 2026)

Backlinks remain the engine behind organic growth. Want to learn more about how SEO works? Check out our complete SEO statistics page. For Dutch companies, how to become visible in AI answers: more on AI search visibility (in Dutch).

Section 2

Link building costs

$508.95

average price SEO professionals consider acceptable for one high-quality backlink

Editorial.Link, 2026

$361.44

average price of a link insertion when Ahrefs asked 450 sites

Ahrefs, 2024

$77.80

average price of a guest post when Ahrefs asked 180 sites

Ahrefs, 2024

32.1%

of agency SEO budgets goes to link building on average (in-house teams: 36.03%)

Editorial.Link, 2026

Budgets and prices

Most cost figures come from surveys of SEO and PR professionals, mainly in English-language markets. Treat them as indications, not as price lists.

  • According to Editorial.Link's 2026 survey of 518 SEO professionals, the average minimum monthly link building budget for highly competitive niches is about $8,406 (Editorial.Link, 2026)
  • Among digital PR professionals, the most common cost per link is $300 to $500 (19.6%), while 39.2% do not know their cost per link (BuzzStream, 2026)
  • 80.9% of surveyed link building specialists expect link building to become harder and more expensive in the next 2 to 3 years (Editorial.Link, 2026)

Paid links

  • 91.89% of surveyed SEO professionals believe their competitors buy links (Editorial.Link, 2026)
  • Google's spam policies list buying or selling links for ranking purposes as link spam; paid links are allowed when marked rel="nofollow" or rel="sponsored" (Google Search Central, 2026)

Curious about what a complete SEO strategy costs? Check out our page on outsourcing SEO.

Section 3

Outreach & response rates

8.5%

of 12 million outreach emails received a response (2019)

Backlinko, 2019

4.5%

average reply rate on cold email sequences (31 million emails, 2025)

Hunter, 2026

65.8%

more replies from just one additional follow-up email (2019)

Backlinko, 2019

+106%

more replies with three messages instead of one (6.8% vs 3.3%)

Hunter, 2026

Personalisation and targeting

Backlinko's study (with Pitchbox) analysed 12 million outreach emails in 2019. Hunter's 2026 report covers all cold outreach sent via its platform in 2025, not only link building.

  • Personalised subject lines boosted response rates by 30.5%, and personalised message bodies got 32.7% more replies (2019) (Backlinko, 2019)
  • Messages sent to several contacts at the same organisation got a 93% higher response rate than messages sent to one person (2019) (Backlinko, 2019)
  • According to Hunter, emails with two custom attributes saw a 56% higher reply rate than non-personalised emails (5.6% vs 3.6%) (Hunter, 2026)
  • According to Hunter, sequences with 21 to 50 recipients got 158% more replies than sequences with 500+ recipients (6.2% vs 2.4%) (Hunter, 2026)
Section 4

Guest posting & digital PR

48.6%

of surveyed SEO professionals see digital PR as the most effective link building tactic

Editorial.Link, 2026

95.9%

of digital PR professionals pitch data-led content

BuzzStream, 2026

25.8%

more referring domains for 'why' posts, 'what' posts and infographics than for how-to posts and videos (2019)

Backlinko, 2019

Guest posting

  • In Editorial.Link's 2026 survey, 16% named guest posting as the most effective tactic and 12% linkable assets, against 48.6% for digital PR (Editorial.Link, 2026)
  • Google does not discourage guest articles that inform users, but acts against articles whose main intent is building links at scale; such links should carry rel="nofollow" (Google Search Central, 2017)

Digital PR

BuzzStream surveyed 150+ digital PR professionals, mostly in the UK and the US.

  • 75% of digital PR professionals say digital PR is more challenging than a year ago, yet 68.2% say it is more effective (BuzzStream, 2026)
  • Only 48% of digital PR professionals always personalise their pitches to journalists (BuzzStream, 2026)
  • 66.2% of digital PR professionals cite getting mentioned in AI citations as an effective use of digital PR (BuzzStream, 2026)
  • 73.2% of surveyed SEO professionals believe backlinks influence the chance of appearing in AI search results (an opinion, not a measurement) (Editorial.Link, 2026)

Great content is the foundation of every link building strategy. Check out our content marketing statistics for more data on this topic.

Section 7

Nofollow vs dofollow

32.3%

of mobile pages use rel="nofollow" on at least one link (desktop: 30.8%)

HTTP Archive, 2025

0.5%

of pages use rel="sponsored", and about the same share rel="ugc"

HTTP Archive, 2025

2019

the year Google started treating nofollow, sponsored and ugc as hints

Google Search Central, 2019

The HTTP Archive figures are shares of pages that use an attribute at least once, not shares of all links.

  • On September 10, 2019 Google introduced rel="sponsored" and rel="ugc"; for crawling and indexing, nofollow became a hint as of March 1, 2020 (Google Search Central, 2019)
  • The nofollow attribute was introduced in 2005, nearly 15 years before the 2019 change (Google Search Central, 2019)
  • External links on all Wikimedia wikis are tagged rel="nofollow"; on English Wikipedia articles since January 20, 2007 (Wikimedia Meta-Wiki, 2007)
Section 8

Anchor text distribution

0.14

average correlation (Spearman) between exact-match anchors and rankings: weak (19,840 keywords)

Ahrefs, 2020

0.527

correlation of branded anchors with brand visibility in Google AI Overviews (75,000 brands)

Ahrefs, 2025

84.64%

of desktop home pages had descriptive link text in 2025 (mobile: 86.64%)

HTTP Archive, 2025

There is no public study that measures the share of each anchor type (branded, URL, exact match) across the web; the distributions often quoted for this could not be traced to a source. What has been measured:

  • In Ahrefs' study of 384,614 pages, exact-match anchors correlated at 0.1436 on average with rankings, phrase-match anchors at 0.1057 and random anchors at 0.0161 (Spearman) (Ahrefs, 2020)
  • Google lists links with optimised anchor text in articles, guest posts or press releases distributed on other sites as an example of link spam (Google Search Central, 2026)
  • For images used as links, Google uses the alt attribute of the image as anchor text (Google Search Central, 2026)
Section 9

Link building by industry

907

median referring domains of domains on page one (150 service keywords, 15 industries)

WebFX, 2026

3,027

median for finance and insurance, the highest of 15 industries

WebFX, 2026

76

median for apparel, the lowest of 15 industries

WebFX, 2026

48

new referring domains per month, on average, for page-one domains

WebFX, 2026

The only recent industry benchmark we could verify is a WebFX study (March 2026, US desktop results, Ahrefs data, 1,462 domains). It counts referring domains of the whole domain ranking on page one, not of the ranking page, and WebFX is an agency: treat the figures as indications.

  • After finance and insurance, real estate (about 2,032) and health (about 1,915) had the highest medians (WebFX, 2026)
  • Besides apparel, arts and entertainment (about 173) and dining and nightlife (about 235) were also low (WebFX, 2026)
  • Beauty and personal care page-one domains had a median of about 361 referring domains; home and garden about 461 (WebFX, 2026)
  • Measured over three months, finance and insurance domains gained about 101 new referring domains per month, apparel about 15 (WebFX, 2026)
Section 11

Frequently asked questions

How many backlinks do you need to rank in the top 10?

There is no fixed number. In a WebFX study (March 2026, US), domains ranking on page one for 150 service keywords across 15 industries had a median of about 907 referring domains, from about 76 in apparel to about 3,027 in finance and insurance. Note that this counts links to the whole domain, not to the ranking page. Backlinko found that the #1 result has on average 3.8x more backlinks than positions 2 to 10. Check out our SEO statistics for more ranking data.

What does a backlink cost on average?

When Ahrefs asked sites for prices, a link inserted in an existing article cost $361.44 on average and a guest post $77.80. In Editorial.Link's 2026 survey, SEO professionals consider about $508.95 an acceptable price for one high-quality backlink, and among digital PR professionals the most common cost per link is $300 to $500. Keep in mind that Google treats buying links for ranking purposes as link spam unless the link is marked rel="sponsored" or rel="nofollow". Consider outsourcing SEO for a complete approach.

What is a good outreach response rate for link building?

In Backlinko's 2019 analysis of 12 million outreach emails, 8.5% received a response. Hunter measured an average reply rate of 4.5% across 31 million cold emails sent in 2025 (all types of outreach). Follow-ups matter: one extra follow-up boosted replies by 65.8% in the Backlinko study, and three messages instead of one increased replies by 106% in Hunter's data (6.8% vs 3.3%). Personalised subject lines and small, targeted lists also lift reply rates.

Are nofollow links valuable for SEO?

Since September 2019, Google treats nofollow (and the newer sponsored and ugc attributes) as hints rather than strict directives; for crawling and indexing this applies from March 1, 2020. Nofollow is widely used: in 2025, 32.3% of mobile pages had at least one nofollow link. Nofollow links from news sites or Wikipedia can still bring referral traffic and brand awareness. Check out our content marketing statistics for related data.

How quickly do backlinks lose their value (link decay)?

Ahrefs found that 66.5% of the links pointing to a sample of 2,062,173 websites have disappeared since January 2013, mostly because the linking page was dropped (47.7%) or the link was removed (34.2%). Pew Research Center found that 38% of webpages that existed in 2013 were no longer accessible a decade later. Regular monitoring of your link profile is therefore essential.

What are toxic links and how do you identify them?

Toxic links are backlinks from spammy, irrelevant or manipulative websites, such as link farms, private blog networks or links with over-optimised anchor text. Google's spam policies explicitly list links with optimised anchor text in articles, guest posts or press releases as an example of link spam. Google says it can usually assess on its own which links to trust, and advises using the disavow tool only when you have many spammy links that caused or will likely cause a manual action. Need help? Check out our link building agency services.

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Ruud ten Have

Compiled by

Ruud ten Have

Ruud is a digital marketer with 10+ years of experience in online advertising and AI implementation. At Searchlab, he combines strategic thinking with hands-on AI tooling to deliver measurable results for businesses.

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