Most link building proposals look about the same. A set number of links, a minimum authority requirement, content, outreach, reporting. The pricing shifts depending on the quality of the sites, but the shape barely changes from one agency to the next.
That makes it easy to compare on volume. It tells you almost nothing about strategy.
Because the part that matters isn’t how many links you’re getting. It’s whether it’s the right link, on the right site, pointing at the right page. And that’s the part most agencies skip, because it’s easier to sell you what’s already in their inventory than to figure out what your site actually needs.
Links don’t all do the same job anymore
This is the thing that gets glossed over, and it’s the thing everything else depends on.
A link used to have basically one purpose: pass authority, help a page rank. Now a placement can be doing any of several jobs, and they don’t all want the same link.
A link built for rankings cares about authority and relevance flowing to a specific page. A link built for citations cares less about the followed link and more about the mention, the context, how the brand gets described, whether that publication is one AI models already pull from. A link built for local visibility might be a chamber of commerce or a regional paper that would never clear a Domain Rating filter but is exactly right for a location page. A link built for referral traffic is judged on whether real people actually click it, which has almost nothing to do with its authority score.
Same tactic, four different definitions of a good placement.
So when an agency asks how many links you want before asking what those links are supposed to accomplish, they’ve skipped the question that decides everything else. You can’t pick the right site until you know which job it’s being hired for.
Buying links is easy. Knowing which to buy is the work.
Anyone can hand you a list. Filter a database by industry, Domain Rating, traffic, and price, and you’ll get a tidy set of sites that meet the requirements. That’s not strategy. That’s inventory with a spreadsheet in front of it.
The strategy starts one step earlier, with the questions the list can’t answer. What is this campaign supposed to fix, and where does the authority need to go to fix it. Once you start asking that, a few things surface that a placement list will never show you.
The authority is usually in the wrong place, not missing
Here’s something we see constantly on established sites: plenty of authority, pointed at the wrong pages.
The homepage has links. A few old blog posts have links. Maybe a tool or a research piece picked some up. Meanwhile the service pages, the category pages, the location pages, the ones that actually drive the business, are sitting there with almost nothing.
The instinct is to go build more. Often that’s not the problem. The authority is already in the building. It’s just not reaching the pages that need it.
Which is why we look at where authority already lives, and whether the internal structure is even passing it to the right places, before talking about a single new placement. Otherwise you’re paying to pour more water into a bucket that’s leaking somewhere else.
Build to a page that’s ready to use it
A link can help a page compete. It can’t fix a page that isn’t ready.
Wrong intent, thin content, poorly linked, hard to crawl, more authority won’t rescue any of that. You’ll have paid to strengthen a page that was never going to convert the attention.
Sometimes a page is genuinely close and authority is the missing ingredient. Sometimes it isn’t, and the honest call is to fix the page first or point the campaign somewhere better. The page on the other end of the link still has to earn it.
The list is a resource, not a plan
Real publisher relationships are worth something, and we use ours. The problem is when the inventory starts driving the campaign instead of the other way around.
The available list is easy to work from, so it quietly becomes the strategy, and you end up with links from wherever placements were easy, not from where they mattered. It should run the other direction. Start with the gap, figure out what would close it, then see what’s already in the network and what needs fresh outreach, digital PR, or original research to reach. The list serves the plan.
How to actually judge a placement
Once you know which pages need help and what job each link is doing, you still have to decide whether any given placement is worth taking. This is where a lot of programs get lazy, because two shortcuts are right there: is it paid, and what’s the score. Neither one answers the question.
Yes, we pay for placements. That was never the question.
Paid placements are part of link building. Publishers charge for contributed content, sponsored articles, editorial time, access to their audience. Agencies pay for placements. We pay for placements. Pretending otherwise isn’t honesty, it’s marketing.
The real question is whether a placement is worth paying for. And that takes more than a price. The publication has to make sense for the brand and the page it points to. The article around the link has to hold up, because a link on a strong domain is still weak if it’s been shoved into a paragraph that was clearly never written to hold it.
Metrics narrow the list. They don’t pick the winner.
Domain Rating and Domain Authority are useful. They let you screen a lot of options fast and compare relative strength. They’re a starting filter, not a verdict.
A site can post a high score and have nothing to do with your audience, or falling traffic, or no real editorial point of view. A smaller industry publication might score lower and be worth far more, because the people reading it are the people you’re trying to reach.
The metrics tell you where to look. You still have to look.
Where AI raises the stakes
Go back to those four jobs a link can do. AI is what turned that from a nuance into the whole point.
When rankings were the only goal, targeting on authority and relevance got you most of the way there. Now that citations are in play, a placement’s value depends on things a Domain Rating never captured: whether the publication is already a source AI models reach for, how it describes your brand, what it associates you with. Two placements with identical scores can be worth completely different amounts once that’s in the mix.
If the way an agency picks a site would look no different whether or not AI search existed, then nothing about the approach has actually adapted, whatever the pitch deck says. The tactic doesn’t change. The targeting does. That’s the whole game now.
Why our proposals don’t start with a list
Most of what we’ve talked about, which pages need help, whether they’re ready, where authority is leaking, which sites fit which job, none of it can be answered from a database. It comes out of actually looking at the site.
That’s why we don’t open with a placement list. It’s tempting to, because a list feels concrete and it’s what people expect a link building proposal to be. But handing you ten sites before we’ve studied where your authority sits and what your priority pages need would be guessing dressed up as a plan. The list is the last thing that should get decided, not the first.
So we start with the audit. Where authority already lives on your site and where it isn’t reaching. What your key pages have earned versus what they’re up against. Which pages are ready for links and which need work first. Where you’re already being mentioned, and where the gaps are in the places AI models actually pull from. That’s the part that determines whether any placement is worth building, and it’s the part most proposals skip straight past on the way to the number.
The links come after that. Because the link was always the easy part. Knowing why it belongs there is the work, and it’s the reason two campaigns at the same budget can produce completely different results.
If you want to see what that looks like for your site, we’ll run a free backlink audit, where your authority is concentrated, where it’s leaking, and an initial set of placements worth pursuing. No list of ten sites. Just a clear read on what your site actually needs.
