Four to six earned placements a month on domains that have real organic traffic and a real editor. Every target justified in writing before a single email goes out, and every third-party fee passed through at cost with the invoice attached.
Most link-building pitches avoid this number, so here it is. In 2026 the market rate for a genuinely useful editorial link sits at 370 to 510 USD. A digital-PR placement in a publication with real editorial standards runs 1,250 to 1,500 USD.
If someone offers you links at 50 USD, they are selling from an inventory list — which means they are selling the same domains to everyone, which is precisely why those links do nothing. The economics tell you what you are buying before you look at the domain.
Not a third-party authority score. A domain qualifies if it passes all four:
My title at work is AI-driven link building, so let me be precise about what that means, because the phrase is doing a lot of dishonest work in this industry.
AI does the research. Prospecting at scale, competitor link-gap analysis, clustering targets by the angle that would interest each one, pulling the editorial history of a publication, drafting the first version of a linkable asset. Work that used to take forty hours takes four.
AI does not do the relationship. Outreach is written by me, one message at a time. Editors can tell, and a generic pitch burns the contact permanently — you do not get a second attempt at the same publication. The leverage is in compressing the research, not in sending more email.
No private blog networks. No link farms or link exchanges. No paid placements presented as editorial. No comment or forum spam. No guest posts on sites that exist only to sell guest posts. If a tactic would embarrass you in a Google interview, it is not on the table — and it is the reason my placement counts are lower than the ones you will be quoted elsewhere.
Before any outreach, we establish what on your site is worth linking to. If the honest answer is nothing yet, we build one asset first — original data, a tool, or a genuinely better guide than what ranks.
20 to 40 domains with a written angle against each: why this publication, why this journalist, and what they get out of it. You approve the list before a single email goes out.
Written individually, sent in waves, tracked with follow-ups. Journalist-request platforms run in parallel — a fast, cheap source of genuinely earned mentions.
Placements won, placements lost and why, third-party fees at cost with invoices, and the effect on your link profile and rankings. Nothing rounded up.
Brands that already have something worth citing. Links amplify content that deserves to rank; they do not substitute for it. If your site has nothing worth linking to, the honest first step is an audit and a content plan — and I will say so on the call rather than take the retainer.
It works particularly well alongside international SEO, where each market needs its own local link profile and most agencies only build in English.
There is a second reason to care about this now. When ChatGPT or Perplexity answer a question about your category, they lean on third-party sources — review sites, trade publications, forums — far more than on vendor sites. Being present in those sources is what gets you cited. So the target list from an AI visibility audit and the target list for link building are increasingly the same list, which is a genuinely new thing about this work.
Where a publication charges a placement or contributor fee, it is billed to you at cost with the invoice attached — never marked up, never hidden inside the retainer.