Link Building Trends Report (2025)

“Brands and marketers need a link building wake-up call and this report delivers it. You need a process that’s not just a rigid checklist, but a living, breathing strategy that can dance with unpredictable shifts. I’ve seen too many teams treat their link building like a static spreadsheet—and spoiler alert: that’s why they’re stuck at the bottom of the results page.

The Link Building Trends Report dropped a truth bomb: only 29% of teams are actually crushing their link building efforts. Why? Because they’re trapped between two deadly extremes—total chaos or complete stagnation. I think the best link building teams strive to find a balance between scalable processes and flexibility. “

“Having a documented process definitely helps with training a team and ensuring consistency, but it shouldn’t ever be so tight that it limits creativity.

I often think of these as frameworks, rather than tight processes. Something that a team can work within yet still have the flexibility to adjust things to the campaign being worked on.

For example, repeatable processes are a must for end-to-end campaign production, in terms of the steps that should be followed.

Yet ideation, for example, should be more a case of strong guidance, in my opinion. No two people ideate the same, so here having a strict process will limit the output. You absolutely do need to have frameworks here though; guidance on different ways to ideate.

It’s all about striking a balance between creativity and processes, but about keeping things flexible enough to deviate from the ‘norm’ as and when it is needed.

And a lot of the time, how much these robust processes should be adhered to depends on the seniority of the person working on the campaign; for juniors, they’re a lot more useful to follow almost step-by-step, than an experienced marketer who knows when (and why) to deviate and pivot.”

“This strategy is nuanced, so my quote represents the depth of the challenge and potential solutions: When earning links from authoritative sources, journalists and publishers prioritize content that educates, entertains, or provides “breaking news” in the form of fresh, relevant, and actionable data their audience values — think original data studies, interactive tools, expert commentary on trending news, or thought leadership addressing industry FAQs.

Ultimately, earning links and brand coverage is about creating content worth citing.

Unfortunately, most teams struggle to earn high-quality links to sales-focused pages because those pages rarely offer significant value beyond the brand’s conversion goal. Few reputable sites will link to an advertorial page without payment.

However, there are ways to improve your odds of earning links to these “money pages,” such as incorporating robust FAQs featuring subject matter experts, proprietary industry research, and other strategies that enhance the perceived value of the page. When done right, this style of conversion-focused content can increase your chances of earning links from relevant mid-tier publishers in your niche, as well as from .edu and .gov resource pages.

Still, SEOs often (and understandably) prioritize UX and conversion optimization over earned media enhancements on key money pages. But you don’t always need to kill two birds with one stone.

We’ve repeatedly seen that earning links to top-funnel or mid-funnel assets — like newsworthy data journalism campaigns or robust evergreen guides — naturally attracts and scales backlinks from authoritative publishers.

This strengthens a brand’s citations, trust signals, and Domain Authority, lifting rankings across the entire site, while preserving the unique intent of these two distinct strategies.”

“Sometimes it can be hard for a link builder – in whatever shape that looks like – to properly communicate value.

Impact on revenue is always the goal. It has to be. But there are two sides to impacting revenue when it comes to link building programs; direct and indirect conversions.

Direct conversions are more straight forward to measure, but typically the links capable of driving direct conversions are a small part of a link profile. Here we’re talking having your product or service featured in a ‘top 10’ or ‘best x’ list from sites dominating informational search or a platform people use to find products or services in your industry. Building and then maintaining relationships with those who write and update these lists is key, and measuring the impact of your link is extremely straight forward with any basic traffic analytics tool.

Indirect conversions are where 80%+ of a link builders focus will be, and this sits firmly within the realms of SEO. Therefore, the primary goal becomes rankings-based, which can be at a domain-wide level or if can be more specific to individual pages.

Links, along with other trust and authority based metrics, are and will continue to be a huge element of any search based algorithm. However, the value of a link is hard to measure especially as a site can suffer from technical SEO issues or content quality management that is often out of your control.

My recommendation would be to focus both at a domain-level for tracking keyword performance, and also on a group of key pages you’re buildings link to directly or funnelling equity towards. This should ideally be a few pages – not one. Otherwise you’re value proposition is at risk from any tech SEO hiccups or product teams redesigning the key page in way search engines don’t like.

Measure rankings and other sources of traffic before your link building program starts. Do so continuously throughout your link building efforts, and a final wrap up towards the end. You want to measure the change in traffic to the page and, most importantly, the change in transactional value overall.

We did this years ago for a global travel client and through tracking 5 key pages and using our tracked keyword performance and conversion values in GA, we could communicate our impact as an increase equalling a 2,160% ROI from the 6 figure sum they’d invested in us – over £2m in increased revenue directly to those 5 pages.”

“Every single link-building team goes through struggles. Why? Because at the end of the day, humans are placing the links.

Whether you’re asking for it, paying for it, or creating some bad-ass linkable asset or PR campaign, an editor is making the call on whether that link lands.

This human aspect brings unpredictability and a lack of control to the table.

Ask any link builder if they’ve ever struggled, and they’ll buy you a beer and cry on your shoulder. But this? This is exactly what separates the winners from the losers.

The teams that win aren’t the ones who never screw up—they’re the ones who screw up, learn from it, and adapt. They take the hit, tweak the strategy, and try again. They just. keep. going.

So bear that in mind, next time your campaign sucks. :)”

“I think that a boost in rankings for the target page is the simplest and fastest way to see the impact of a single backlink.

For me, relying on domain-wide signals like domain authority just isn’t realistic for a single backlink.

If your target page is a product page or specific article rather than the homepage, you can easily narrow it down and see if that page has grown in visibility from your link-building efforts.
In the following few weeks, I’d also check for an increase in traffic to that page.

Growth in organic traffic (from the improved rankings) and referral traffic (users arriving directly via that link) is usually the next step in the success of a link-building campaign.”

“As an agency, we always emphasize that the value of link building can’t be measured by any one metric. The KPIs we monitor depend on the client’s goals, but a few always indicate a meaningful impact.

First, we look at growth in organic traffic to the pages we’re building links to. It’s one of the clearest indicators that links are doing their job and driving visibility where we want it. Keyword rank gains—especially for commercial or bottom-of-funnel terms—are another significant indicator we track. They help confirm the value of the links to SEO over the long term.

We also closely monitor referring domain quality and relevance over quantity. A few high-authority, well-placed links are better dozens of spammy ones. And if they’re also driving engagement-referral traffic, that’s all the better—proof that the link adds value beyond search engines.

Where possible, we also consider the conversions or revenue generated by the target pages. Making those connections is not always straightforward, but assigning links to business outcomes is how we maintain stakeholders’ trust.

One metric I don’t see teams leveraging as much as they could is benchmarking. Comparing performance between unlinked and linked pages is one of the most effective ways to show impact—however, as the report shows, only a quarter of organizations are leveraging it.

And finally, as AI continues to advance, we’re starting to try and check if content we’re pointing to is being quoted in AI-powered results. It’s a new KPI, but I believe it will become more and more important in the future.”

“1. Website tech spend: One metric to get additional insights about a link is the website’s tech spend.

Builtwith tells you approximately how much a site is spending on its technology stack.

We can use website tech spend as a proxy for how much money they are spending on their site’s content and links.

2. Website traffic value: I like to report about the site’s Traffic value (Both aHrefs and Semrush report this metric)

A Link from a site with a higher STV is better than a site with a lower STV (Considering DR and monthly traffic are the same for both the sites).

3. Majestic’s Topical Trust flow: Majestic looks at a website’s entire link profile and categorizes each link according to the industry/niche it belongs to.

You might think getting a link from a site with decent DR, traffic and niche relevance is enough but sometimes under the hood, the site itself mostly has links from non relevant industries.

4. Fake DR: I report if the link opportunity has a manipulated DR or not.

5. Fake Traffic: Some webmasters are using bots to search for their Site’s brand name and clicking on the results.

SEO tools like aHrefs and semrush pick up these clicks (unbeknownst to the fact that these are not real clicks) and report it in their traffic metric.

So I also like to report if a site has fake traffic or not.”

Garrett and the team found that benchmarking is often missing from many reports to help show the clear impact of links on pages, so we asked directly in the next question.

“We choose what sites to get links from by looking at these 4 factors:

1. Is the link indexed?
2. Is it followed?
3. Can you manipulate the anchor text?
4. How many pages rank on Google on the site you’re getting a link from?

As far as how we measure the impact the links have, we isolate link building from other SEO work and do it in stages so that it’s easier to tell what is actually impacting ranking.”

“Personally I walk through this with a few steps:

1. First establishing their goals and budget for an engagement. We’re usually working as a general SEO / SEM vendor, so the client’s goals are typically driving more qualified leads and sales at an acceptable ROI.

2. From there, we’ll map the deliverables to the budget and give them a general sense of expected growth (and returns). This can vary significantly as a new site needs something completely different than a larger site, etc.

3. If there’s a gap at this point between the budget and the desired / expected results, I find showing specific metrics can be helpful. For example: here are the volume and quality of links your competitors – direct company competitors or broader SERP competitors – have versus what you have.

For visuals a quick comparison chart(s) can be great here, or even a call / Loom where you walk through the search results, use a tool like Ahrefs or SEM Rush, and really show them the difference between the sites they’re competing with and their site.

Increasingly, for companies showing an interest, we’ll also communicate the benefit of outreach, citations, and link building in getting higher visibility in LLMs as well.”

“I think more resources should be allocated to link building in 2025.

But I also think we need a major shift in how we’re thinking about links.

More resources should be deployed building links from sites with overlapping audiences.

We should prioritize links that generate business.

We should prioritize links that generate relevant traffic.

Generally speaking, we should ignore traditional link metrics (i.e. DA, nofollow, etc).

We need new metrics to measure link quality.”

“Definitely increase. We already know links help with search, but right now brands are focused on LLMs.

I think companies are waking up and realizing that they need to be part of all the conversations if they want to be in the output of LLMs.

Web mentions (sometimes linked), stats from studies shared through digital PR, quotes in blogs, social media mentions, and more all influence what is included in the output of LLMs.”

“I do! It’s not just about net-new linking domains though.. it’s about citable elements on sales pages: first-party data, frameworks, quotable insights, answers to frequently UNASKED questions, expert-backed breakdowns.

Links – and us folks who build them – are how brands win distribution for those elements. Link Building’s how you get your content into the training data, and how you start showing up across the network of resources that LLMs reference most often.

With our LLM Growth services we’re targeting LLM-cited resources (the publishers, pages, and formats that show up in actual AI-generated answers). Then we work to earn mentions, citations, and links from those sources.

So yes links impact generative results… But it’s where you earn them – and how – that’s evolving at a dizzying pace.”

“Definitely. The AI models have knowledge cut-off dates, so they rely heavily on real-time web search to stay current and accurate. Given that authoritative links have remained a huge search ranking factor for 20+ years, I can’t see a future where they won’t play a big role in AI answers.

Other factors may grow in importance (e.g., structured data, semantic relevance), but links will continue to be essential for brands aiming to show up in AI-generated results.”

“We’ve been playing around with increasing visibility for clients on LLMs for over a year and have developed some tactics that work very well. At the core of our approach is a concept we call “Context Wrapping”, ensuring that every mention of a brand, whether on its own site or in external publications, is wrapped with the sentiment we want LLMs to recognise.

For example, if your brand is Shai’s Pizzas, you’d want it associated with words like tasty, great, authentic, fresh ingredients. A well-crafted mention helps reinforce this perception in LLMs, a bit like this: “This great pizza tip was supplied by the authentic Italian pizza restaurant, Shai’s Pizzas, who use only the freshest ingredients”.

And the best way to achieve this? Digital PR with a slight difference. We basically take our learnings from the above and use it to slightly modify the way we write or press releases where we gently include some of the sentiment we want LLMs to consume. We call this AiPR.”