Original Research · Updated October 16, 2026
Link building outreach in 2026: what 235 real pitches got back.
In October 2026 we pitched 235 websites on behalf of a young review site we run, and kept every answer. This page is the raw result: how many people replied, what they asked for, what we paid, and what the cheap link packages we audited along the way actually delivered.
Method
How the data was collected.
The site is a six-month-old product-review site in the home-energy niche. In mid-October it had a Semrush Authority Score of 6 and about 180 referring domains, every one of them link-seller spam it never asked for. In other words, a typical new site with no real links.
Every pitch went from the site’s own address, one email per site, written for that site, with no follow-ups. Each one offered something specific: a sourced appliance-wattage guide, a power-outage tracker built from U.S. Energy Information Administration tables, or a review that matched a page the site already had. Targets were niche blogs and magazines, more than 25 newsrooms, emergency-preparedness pages at agencies and universities, eight product brands, and a shortlist of publishers found on a link marketplace.
Counts come from the sent folder and the replies to it. A “reply” is a human answer; auto-replies and bounces are excluded. Many pitches were only a few days old on October 16, so the reply rate will rise. We will update this page in mid-November 2026.
Finding 01
About 1 in 10 replied, and most of them wanted money.
25 of 235 pitches got a human reply (about 11%), and 10 bounced (about 4%). Newsrooms were the quietest group: more than 25 got a pitch with their own state’s outage figures, and none answered. Of the eight product brands, two replied.
Of the 21 sites that answered the actual request, 14 quoted a price. Three answered without one, and all three were answering a pitch built on data they could use: a home-reference site added a citation to our appliance guide (live within four days), a state solar society agreed to list a guide (not up yet), and a county emergency group passed it to its technology lead (no answer yet). So far that is one free, editorial link from 235 pitches.
| Answer | Sites | What it looked like |
|---|---|---|
| Asked for payment | 14 | A post fee, a link-insertion fee, or a rate card |
| Answered without a price | 3 | A citation (live), a listing (promised) and a forward; all three were data pitches |
| Said no | 4 | "We don't do links", "no thanks", one rewrote its own page instead of linking |
| Total that answered the request | 21 | Plus a few forwards and partnership replies |
Finding 02
Every price we were quoted, and what we paid.
Fifteen sites put a number on it. The first asks ran from $12 to $4,000, with a median of $150. Counter-offers worked more often than not: four sites agreed to 30% to 60% less than their first ask (one by switching from a new post to an insertion). Sites are described by type rather than named, since these quotes were sent to us privately.
Authority Score is Semrush’s 0 to 100 measure. Traffic is Semrush’s estimate of monthly U.S. visits from Google, read on October 14, 2026.
| Site type | Authority Score | U.S. Google visits / mo | First ask | Outcome |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Environmental news site | 40 | 3.7K | $150 to insert into an existing guide | Paid $100 (countered), live, followed |
| Home-improvement section, sold through a link broker | 31 | 2.4K | $140 post | Paid $60 (countered), live, followed |
| Luxury lifestyle magazine | 31 | 5.3K | $25 post or insert | Paid $25, live, followed |
| Parenting blog | 28 | 0.2K | $12 insert | Paid $12, live, followed |
| General news site, through a reseller | 31 | 0.7K | $80 post | Agreed $50, prepay required |
| Sustainability magazine | 35 | 2.4K | EUR 199 post (EUR 399 standard) | Agreed EUR 90 insert, publishes after payment |
| Pop-culture site | 39 | 6.3K (down ~80% in a year) | $100 post, $150 insert; $60 "final" | Declined: the same site was $25.50 on a marketplace |
| Tech news site | 42 | 19.8K | $200 to $300 | Declined: every outbound link on the site is nofollow |
| Outdoors and camping site | 34 | 8.1K | $200, no negotiation, human-written only | Declined |
| Tiny-home site network | 33 | 4.7K | $150 insert, $200 post; later $120 | Declined |
| Men's lifestyle site | 36 | 5.0K | $257 to $377 | Declined |
| UK family blog | 33 | 2.7K | GBP 120 (about $160) | Declined |
| Sustainability magazine (small) | 28 | 0.6K | $150 co-written article | Declined |
| Green news site | n/a | n/a | $350 | No action |
| Gadget deals site, via its ad agency | 38 | 19K (US down 76%) | $2,000 post to $4,000 bundle | Declined: ad pricing on falling traffic |
Price had almost nothing to do with value. The two most expensive asks came from sites whose U.S. traffic had fallen by three quarters, and the tech site at $200 nofollows every outbound link, so its links pass no ranking credit at all.
Finding 03
Direct quotes ran up to 9x the marketplace price for the same site.
Several sites that quoted us directly also sell placements on a link marketplace, and a reseller sent a priced spreadsheet that included three of them. Same site, same kind of placement:
| Site | Quoted to us | Marketplace price | Markup |
|---|---|---|---|
| Luxury lifestyle magazine | $25 | $19.50 to $37.50 | about 1x |
| General news site | $80 | $49.50 | 1.6x |
| Pop-culture site | $100 | $25.50 | 4x |
| Tech news site | $200 | $22.50 | 9x |
| Pop-culture site, on a reseller's spreadsheet | $390 | $29.50 | 13x |
| Sustainability magazine, on a reseller's spreadsheet | $890 | $202.49 | 4.4x |
| Outdoors site, on a reseller's spreadsheet | $420 | $299.99 | 1.4x |
The marketplace also holds payment until the link is live. Whatever a publisher quotes, look the site up on a marketplace before answering.
Finding 04
What the cheap link packages actually delivered.
Alongside the outreach, we read the delivery reports and samples of eight link sellers, mostly on Fiverr, and checked every link ourselves: is the page live, does it carry the link, is the link followed, is the page indexable, and is it in Google.
| Package | What we found | Where the links lived |
|---|---|---|
| 200 "dofollow" links plus one article (about US$75) | 115 URLs on 112 domains. 111 live, 94 carried the link, 83 followed, 78 followed and indexable. | Nearly all one-post subdomains of a throwaway blog network with spun text and no audience. |
| 1,785-link tiered package (another buyer's delivery report) | 143 links sampled across 8 tabs. None of the 9 delivered pages checked was in Google four days after posting. | A mass free-blog network, bookmark clones, link directories and comments on abandoned blogs. One whole network domain showed 0 pages in Google. |
| Guest posts on the seller's "own DA 86 magazine" | The magazine is a network of ten sites sharing one template and the same client articles. | Three of the ten have about one page left in Google. The newest posts include casino, escort and payday-loan pieces, which the gig said it refuses. |
| 19-link "web 2.0" sample, every row labelled do-follow | 1 link was followed and in Google. | Five were dead, two sat behind logins, three were nofollow or noindex, the rest were not indexed. |
| "Foundational backlinks" (a Fiverr Pro seller's own three samples) | 0 of 3 passed. | One page noindex, one header noindex/nofollow, one returned 401. |
| Vendor list of 3,153 "guest post" sites (median $110) | 36 of the domains (1.1%) are in the Tranco top million. | 254 domain names carry adult, piracy, APK or gambling words; several are brand lookalikes. |
The pattern repeated across sellers: the “DA 50 to 98” in the listing is the platform’s own score (Medium, TED, Tumblr), not the page your link sits on. A new profile page on a big platform starts with no authority of its own, and most of those platforms nofollow or noindex new users anyway. We tested the free ones ourselves: which free platforms still pass a followed link.
Finding 05
The niche leader's edge was about 20 links, not 500.
We also broke down the backlink profile of the site that ranks first in this niche. Semrush counts 515 referring domains, but 430 of them (84%) sit at Authority Score 0 to 10: the same link-seller spam every site in the niche receives. Only 22 domains score 40 or higher, and its two “Authority Score 100” links were a Yahoo search-results page and a nofollow Wikipedia citation that has since been removed.
What actually separates it is about 15 to 20 editorial links, and the best of them cite a specific product review: a tech site’s roundup, a foreign-language test of the same product, a review aggregator listing it as a source. The rest are a handful of posts on blogs that typically sell placements.
What We Do With This
Our rules for whether a link is worth paying for.
These are the checks we now apply before money changes hands. They sit on top of our placement standards.
Real Google traffic
Thousands of monthly organic visits, and not collapsing. A falling traffic line usually means Google has already demoted the site.
The article, not just the domain
The exact page is in Google, on topic, and carries fewer than about 10 outbound links, none to casino, CBD or loan sites.
Who else they sell to
Read the last 100 headlines. A site that publishes casino, escort and crypto posts next to home-improvement advice sells to anyone.
Followed links
Open the HTML of a recent post. Some well-known sites nofollow every outbound link, which makes a paid link worthless for rankings.
An aged article over a new post
An insertion into an indexed, established article counts sooner than a new guest post, which on link-selling sites often never gets indexed.
A price ceiling
Roughly $30 per 1,000 monthly U.S. Google visits, and never more than the same site's marketplace price.
A note on policy: Google’s spam policies treat links bought to pass ranking credit as link spam, and its guidance on qualifying outbound links asks for paid links to carry rel=“sponsored”. The free, earned links in this study came from data pages, which is why we build those first.
FAQ
Questions this data answers.
What reply rate should I expect from link building outreach?
In our October 2026 campaign, 25 of 235 one-off pitches (about 11%) got a human reply within 16 days, and about 4% bounced. Newsrooms answered least: more than 25 were pitched and none replied. Most replies came from niche blogs and magazines.
How much do site owners charge for a backlink in 2026?
The 15 prices quoted to us ran from $12 to $4,000, with a median first ask of $150. Four sites agreed to 30% to 60% less than their first ask; the prices we actually paid or agreed ran from $12 to about $105.
Is it cheaper to buy a link directly or through a marketplace?
For the same site, direct quotes were 1x to 9x the marketplace price, and a reseller's spreadsheet marked one site up 13x. Marketplaces also hold payment until the link is live. Check the marketplace price before answering a direct quote.
Do cheap bulk backlink packages work?
Every bulk package we audited was built on throwaway blog networks, profile pages and directories. In one delivery, 78 of 115 links were technically followed and indexable, but nearly all sat on one-post subdomains of a spun-content network, and the pages from a second package were not in Google days after posting.
Does Google allow paid links?
Google's spam policies treat links bought to pass ranking credit as link spam, and its guidance asks for paid links to carry rel="sponsored" (or nofollow). The usual outcome for unqualified paid links is that Google ignores them; the worst case is a manual action on the site.
Cite This Data
Using these numbers? Please link the source.
You are welcome to quote any figure on this page. Please cite it as: AnchorApe, “Link Building Outreach Data 2026”, updated October 16, 2026, https://anchorape.com/research/link-building-outreach-2026. Questions about the method go to info@anchorape.com.