End-to-end outreach workflow
Table of Contents
- The average price for a guest post from a typical vendor is $461.
- The average cost for a Top-Tier guest post is $7,209.
- 96.2% of guest post sites are Low Quality.
- 39.6% of sites have an average monthly organic traffic of 0.
- Only 1.37% of guest post sites are High Quality or Top Tier.
A year ago, I released an original BuzzStream study that analyzed 26,000+ guest-post sites and concluded the marketplace was mostly low-quality, high-priced junk.
This year I’ve expanded my dataset and scope, and I’m finding more of the same. (We’ve also done the same with our link insertion costs study.)
At nearly ten times the sample size, the marketplace outlook still isn’t great, with lower-quality sites on average and the same steep pricing for the rare good sites.
So, here’s a look at the cost of guest posts in 2026.
What’s changed:
Size: This year’s analysis covered a much larger marketplace of nearly 500,000 sites. Only about half had reliable data, so I pruned those out, leaving me with over 257k sites that appear on link vendor databases.
Prices: Before, I had to guess at the true cost when buying directly from a site by using the vendor dataset and then simply subtracting an assumed 75% markup.
This time, I had a little more insight into the dataset because I could see a range of prices from vendors for placement on the same site. I’m using the lowest vendor cost as the “direct” price in the study, although there is still some assumed markup. This gave me some more confidence in what the true markup was.
Categories: In the last study, I used the database’s categorization and then merged categories. This year I did the same, but it was a much more robust set of categories. This time I had 181 that I merged into 16 categories.
What hasn’t changed:
Quality filter: I used the same quality filter as last year with Domain Rating (DR) and estimated monthly organic traffic from Ahrefs as my two key metrics.
- Top Tier : DR ≥ 81 and traffic ≥ 100,000/month
- High Quality: DR 71–80 and traffic ≥ 50,000/month
- Mid Quality: DR 40–70 with 10,000–49,999 traffic
- Low Quality is everything that doesn’t fit the above.
These aren’t the only metrics for gauging quality, but they are widely accepted by clients and stakeholders, as shown by respondents in our State of Digital PR 2026 and Link Building Trends Report.
So, let’s start with the question that everyone is asking.
How Much Does a Guest Post Cost in 2026?
A guest post costs $295 on average if you buy directly from a site, while the average price a vendor charges is $461.
As I mentioned in the intro, this year’s dataset had more realistic numbers on how much a vendor charges vs the true cost of buying directly from a site. There may still be some markup on these direct-from-site costs, but I think they are a good approximation (and better than the estimated 75% markup I used in last year’s study).
Next, let’s look at pricing as it relates to DR, traffic, and industry.
Domain Rating Breakdown
The lowest you’d pay a vendor is about $200 for 0-9 DR, and the highest is about $3,000 for 80+ DR.
The cost seems to accelerate beyond the 60-69 range, primarily due to the scarcity of higher-DR sites in the database.
Next, let’s look at traffic.
Organic Traffic Breakdown
Similarly, you’d pay $229 from a vendor for a low-traffic site below 100 organic visits per month, but upwards of $3,210 for a higher-traffic site above 100k per month.
There is a steadier increase in price of a guest post as traffic increases, making it a better predictor of what you’ll pay.
(This makes sense to me since traffic is harder to fake than DR.)
Next we can look at industry breakdown.
Industry Cost Breakdown
Based on my category consolidation, Sports sites were the most expensive industry at $572 per guest post from a vendor, followed by News & Media sites at $567.
I, like you, may be asking where crypto, igaming, and CBD sites are in this breakdown.
Where is crypto?
Unfortunately, the dataset I had access to simply didn’t have anything categorized as such. Typically, these are hidden because they are the premium sites customers want.
So, I think it’s safe to lean on last year, where we found Crypto and Blockchain to be the most expensive at $517 per guest post.
That price range would rank near the top again if we slotted them into our new list.
Least Expensive Guest Post Industries
The least expensive industries were Health & Wellness at $352, Ecommerce at $341, and even Adult and Gambling sites at $238 per guest post.
The fact that gambling appeared at the bottom of the pricing list was most confusing and had me digging in further.
Why is gambling so cheap?
The gambling site inventory in this marketplace is overwhelming junk, with about 70% of the over 10k gambling sites having no organic traffic at all, and the average DR was 22.5.
Of the 108 high-quality gambling sites (DR 50+ and 10K+ traffic), the average cost of a guest post was $1,109, which is right in line with gambling’s reputation for being expensive.
We’ve touched on a lot of quality, but I haven’t shown the numbers yet.
How Quality Are These Guest Post Sites?
I assess quality by traffic and DR, then a mix of the two, so let’s start with traffic distribution.
More than three-quarters get less than 1k traffic per month
Only 3% of the sites clear 50,000 monthly visits, while about three-quarters, or 78%, see under 1,000 organic monthly visitors per month.
As we saw in last year’s study, the Helpful Content Update in 2024 (among a few other major updates) really put a hurting on a lot of guest post sites.
Add in AI’s impact on organic traffic and the dearth of traffic isn’t all that surprising.
For comparison, my original 26k study had roughly 19% of sites in the 0–100 range.
Of course, traffic is not the only way to gauge quality. Let’s look at Domain Rating next.
Almost 80% of guest posting sites are under DR 40
The average DR across the entire marketplace is just 24 (well below the original study’s average of 45).
And as you can see below, about one-third of the sites have a DR under 9.
Just over 4% account for genuinely authoritative domains above 70 DR.
With those in mind, we can combine our four-tier framework as the original study.
Only 1.4% are Truly High-Quality or Top-Tier Sites
Applying the same four-tier framework as the original study, the results actually found even fewer quality sites available than last time, with just 1.37% Top-Tier and High-Quality sites combined.
As a reminder, here is the quality breakdown:
- Top Tier (DR ≥ 81 & 100K+ traffic)
- High Quality (DR 71–80 & 50K+)
- Mid (DR 40–70 & 10K–49K)
- Low (everything else)
The original study found 4.6% in the High+Top Tier, meaning the good stuff is even rarer than we thought.
So, what does that mean for the cost?
What Does a High-Quality Guest Post Cost?
A high-quality guest post costs $3,130 on average through a vendor, and a top-tier site costs $6,018!
This blows last year’s framing out of the water, which was around $965 on average for a top-tier guest post.
I think there are two things at play here.
With an expanded marketplace dataset, we see a lot more sites added to this list, with some top-tier sites charging in the tens of thousands of dollars for a post.
The other is that pricing has no doubt increased, given the rise in demand and the scarcity of quality sites.
Before we wrap it up, I want to call out the news site problem.
The News Site Problem
News & Media is probably the category that matters most for anyone weighing guest posting against digital PR, because news coverage is precisely what digital PR sets out to earn rather than buy.
News sites are the single largest category in the marketplace, with 39,399 sites after removing duplicates and free blog-platform domains.
But we all know there are not 40,000 news sites.
When you dig into it, you can tell that there are phony news sites all over the web.
Heck, there’s even one called BuzzStream (I can assure you there’s no affiliation to us):
But, of the news sites with full metrics, only 4.2% qualify as High Quality or Top Tier (1.35% Top Tier, 2.82% High Quality).
The other ~91% are Low Quality, meaning the bulk of “news” placements for sale are low-traffic, low-DR sites that carry the label of news without the audience or authority behind it.
The genuinely premium news sites are priced accordingly.
Across all news sites, the average vendor price is $582.
But of the 413 Top-Tier news sites, the average ranges from $3,836 direct from the site and $7,209 through a typical vendor — with the most expensive single placement listed at over $125,000!
This is the heart of the digital-PR argument.
The premium news links brands most want are the ones that are both the rarest and the most expensive to buy.
Beth Nunnington, Global VP of Digital PR at Journey Further, helped me make sense of some of these price increases at the top tier level.
“LLMs use third-party sites to assess a brand’s trustworthiness and credibility, making PR and brand building more important than ever, so it’s not surprising that top-tier sites are charging considerably more for posts.
“But multiple studies have highlighted that it’s earned content from credible sources that LLMs are prioritizing, not sponsored posts. Flooding the web with low-quality placements simply won’t work, and Google’s own guidance is clear on this: mass, low-quality guest posting will not help brands get found.
“Digital PR remains the most powerful and cost-efficient tool for earning coverage and amplifying your brand message without paying a publisher fee.”
So, is Guest Posting Worth it?
Guest posting is worth it if you can fully control the quality and placement of your piece.
Just know, however, that Google can pull the rug out from under you at any time because it is fully against their spam policies.
My conclusion here mirrors last year’s: the vast majority of what is for sale on the web is low-traffic, and low-DR sites that exist just to place links.
The rare-quality sites are very expensive, and based on our digital PR cost survey.
For reference, we found the average monthly contract size was about $5,500, which is less expensive than a single top-tier guest post!
So, to me the answer is obvious: you get way more for your money (and higher quality) with digital PR than guest posting placements.
Methodology: 257,267 sites with complete Ahrefs DR, organic traffic, and price data drawn from a major link marketplace. Quality tiers use the original study’s thresholds.
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