Link building remains a substantial part of SEO work, but professionals disagree about how links, mentions, paid placements, and nofollow attributes affect visibility. Recent survey findings put the emphasis on cost, relevance, quality, and measurement.
Contents
- Current attitudes toward links
- Costs, budgets, and outsourcing
- Tactics and content formats
- Relevance and quality signals
- Tools and measurement
- Scaling challenges and campaign output
Current attitudes toward links
The most recent figures here come from a Search Engine Land survey reported on June 27, 2025. They show that link building is being evaluated in a wider search environment that includes AI-generated results.
- 73.2% of respondents said links influence visibility in AI search results such as Google AI Overviews and ChatGPT.
- 64.9% said a site can rank without links, while 80.9% believed unlinked brand mentions affect rankings.
- 78.8% believed nofollow links affect rankings.
- 91.9% of surveyed SEO professionals thought competitors buy links.
- 56% doubted that Google can reliably detect paid links.
- 80.9% expected link-building costs to keep rising over the next two to three years.
Longer-term expectations were also strong in Aira’s 2021 and 2022 State of Link Building reports. In the 2021 report, 85% said links would still be a Google ranking signal five years later. In the 2022 report, 94% thought links would still be a ranking factor in five years, and 73% thought they would remain a factor in 10 years.
The 2022 report also recorded a more positive view of paid links: 69% believed buying links positively influences rankings. That finding describes respondents’ belief, not an independently verified causal result. Together, the figures show a field that continues to treat links as important while debating which types of links and mentions matter.
Costs, budgets, and outsourcing
The 2025 Search Engine Land findings indicate a wide range of financial pressure. The monthly budget needed to compete in high-difficulty niches was reported as $8,406, while the average acceptable cost for one high-quality link was $508.95. These are survey findings, not universal rates or guarantees of performance.
Cost concerns appear in several other responses:
- 75.1% said premium links are too expensive.
- 67.2% struggled to scale link building without sacrificing quality.
- 55.2% considered link building the hardest part of SEO.
- 52.9% said measuring link-building return on investment is hard.
- 56% outsourced at least part of their link-building work.
The same survey found that in-house SEO teams spent 36.0% of their SEO budget on links, compared with 32.1% for agencies. Aira’s 2022 report gave a broader budget view: over 80% of in-house SEOs dedicated up to 50% of their SEO budget to link building. Among in-house respondents, 25% spent $10,000-$25,000 per month on external link-building suppliers, while 19% spent $2,500-$5,000 per month.
Budget expectations were not uniformly expansionary. In the 2022 report, 46% of in-house SEOs expected their link-building budget to increase the following year, and 43% expected it to stay the same. Around 43% said getting buy-in and budget was easy or leaning easy; 9% said getting buy-in was very hard.
Demand for services rose in both Aira survey periods, although the measurement dates differ. In 2022, 59% said demand had increased over the prior 12 months, 32% said it stayed the same, and 9% said it decreased. In the 2021 report, 69% of agencies and freelancers said demand had increased over the prior 12 months.
Tactics and content formats
Digital PR led the current tactic rankings in the Search Engine Land survey: 48.6% said it was the most effective link-building tactic at that time. The same survey found that 66.6% believed finding unique link opportunities beats copying competitors. This points toward original outreach and differentiated assets as common preferences among respondents.
The target page matters too. In 2025, 52.7% prioritized acquiring links to product or service pages. In Aira’s 2021 report, 51% said links to the target page were more valuable for ranking impact than links pointing only to the domain level.
Content format preferences in Aira’s 2022 report were as follows:
| Content format | Share saying it was most effective |
|---|---|
| Long-form, report-style content | 56% |
| Interactive content | 42% |
| Blog posts | 39% |
| Static infographics | 27% |
| Press releases | 27% |
The 2021 report produced the same top three percentages for long-form report-style content, interactive content, and blog posts: 56%, 42%, and 39%, respectively. In that report, 53% of content-led campaigns generated between one and nine links, while 29% received zero links. The 2022 report similarly found that 53% reported content-led campaigns generated fewer than 10 links in the previous year.
These results describe reported effectiveness and campaign output, not a guaranteed return from any format. They also suggest that content creation alone does not ensure that a campaign earns a link.
Relevance and quality signals
Relevance and editorial quality were prominent in the 2025 findings. A large majority, 89%, avoided sites with spammy outbound links, and 86.3% flagged low-quality content as a dealbreaker. At the same time, 63.1% were open to using sites that sell links if the quality was right. Those responses show that respondents distinguished between a site’s commercial model and their assessment of quality, even while many remained cautious about paid placements.
Aira’s 2022 report measured which relevance signals respondents valued most. Page relevance was selected by 62% as the most important factor in determining link relevance, while 52% selected domain relevance as the second most important factor. The emphasis on the linking page is consistent with the 2021 finding that links to the target page were seen as more valuable than domain-level links alone.
Some respondents also reported using disavow files: 51% said they used them in 2022. The statistic describes reported usage and does not establish how often a disavow file changed rankings or traffic.
The reports also reveal a persistent tension between quality and scale. In 2025, 67.2% said they struggled to scale without sacrificing quality. For ecommerce respondents in Aira’s 2021 report, 69% said scaling link building across many products and categories was their biggest challenge. Another 31% identified getting topically relevant links and producing topically relevant content as the next-biggest challenges.
Tools and measurement
Ahrefs was the most frequently reported link-building tool in both Aira surveys. In 2022, 82% used Ahrefs and 56% used SEMrush. In 2021, 81% used Ahrefs, 55% used Google Sheets, 48% used SEMrush, and 43% used Moz.
When asked which tool they would choose if they could use only one for link building, 51% selected Ahrefs in the 2022 report. For link-quality metrics, 67% favored Ahrefs’ Domain Rating as their top metric, while 42% favored Moz’s Domain Authority. In the 2021 report, 61% trusted Ahrefs most for link-data quality and quantity, compared with 17% for Google Search Console and 9% for Majestic.
Tool preference should not be confused with a universal measurement standard. The 2025 Search Engine Land survey found that 52.9% considered measuring link-building ROI difficult. In Aira’s 2021 report, 44% felt confident that link building had delivered results, and 39% felt fairly confident. The remaining respondents were not represented by those two confidence categories in the supplied findings.
Timing also varied by respondent. In 2021, 51% said it typically took one to three months to see link-building impact on rankings and traffic. That is a reported expectation, not a fixed timetable for every campaign, industry, or page.
Scaling challenges and campaign output
Operational choices differed between agencies, freelancers, and in-house teams. In Aira’s 2022 report, 45% of agencies and freelancers used a retainer-fee pricing model, while 8% used price-per-link pricing, the least common model listed. The report also said 84% did not provide performance-based pricing and 70% did not offer guarantees for link volumes or metrics. The 2022 report separately repeated the 45% retainer and 70% no-guarantee findings.
Targets were common but not universal: 57% of agencies and freelancers said they set link targets for clients or campaigns. The combination of targets, limited guarantees, and reported difficulty measuring ROI helps explain why link-building performance can be difficult to communicate as a single number.
The 2022 respondent profile provides important context for interpreting those percentages. The survey received responses from 31 countries. Forty-five percent of respondents were based in the United Kingdom and 16% in the United States. Thirty-four percent of in-house respondents’ companies were enterprises, while 29% were national businesses, 29% were funded startups, and 8% were local businesses. In addition, 34% of all respondents had worked in digital marketing for more than 10 years, and 49% were team leaders, heads of department, or seniors.
Use of external help changed between the two Aira reporting periods. In 2022, 64% of in-house respondents did not use external agencies, freelancers, or contractors for link building, compared with 56% in 2021. The figures are survey results from different report years, so they should be read as period-specific snapshots rather than a continuous trend series.
For blogging and online community publishers, the practical pattern across these statistics is clear: respondents place value on relevant pages, original content, and quality control, but they also report meaningful costs, uneven campaign output, and difficulty proving return. The figures support evaluating opportunities by relevance and quality alongside volume, while keeping each measurement period and survey population explicit.