How much does link building cost in 2026?

A paid link insertion costs $179 on average and a paid guest post $461. That is what BuzzStream found in August 2026 when it analysed 421,259 sites in a link marketplace database (source). Agencies that build the links for you charge more.

Those are the prices on the invoice. The real cost per link is higher, because some of the links you pay for stop working. This article covers both numbers.

What a single link costs

BuzzStream's data is the largest current sample we know of, so it is a good baseline. Of the 421,259 sites, 62,916 (14.9%) offered link insertions.

An older Ahrefs study took the other route: it wrote to 450 sites in nine niches and asked. 12.6% were willing to sell, and the average quote for a link insertion was $361.44 (source, last updated July 2024). A marketplace lists the sites that already sell, so the two figures are not the same measurement. Expect to pay more when you approach a site that does not advertise a price.

Price by domain rating

In the BuzzStream data, insertion prices rise with the site's DR, but not in a straight line. A site in the 30s costs more on average than one in the 40s or 50s.

Traffic moves the price more predictably than DR does. Sites with under 100 monthly organic visits average $137 per insertion. Sites with over 100,000 visits average $510.

One more number from the same study is worth keeping in mind. Of the sites that sell insertions, BuzzStream rated 97.5% as low quality. Only 143 sites were both high quality and selling. A low price is often low for a reason.

What agencies and in-house teams cost

If you do not want to do the outreach yourself, you pay for the work as well as the placement. Editorial.Link, itself a link building agency, keeps a roundup of published rates (source, updated March 2026):

• Per link: Editorial.Link from $350 with no minimum contract, Digital Olympus $500 to $900 with a minimum contract from $40,000, uSERP $500 to $1,000 with a three-month minimum.
• Per month: typical campaign budgets range from $5,000 to $20,000.
• Digital PR: a campaign usually costs between $6,000 and $20,000 and brings 10 to 40 editorial mentions, according to its January 2024 survey of 12 digital PR agencies.
• In-house: a link building specialist in the US costs roughly $7,300 a month with benefits and overhead, before tools.

These are the agencies' own list prices, collected by a competitor of theirs. Treat them as a range, and ask for a quote.

The cost nobody budgets for: links that stop working

Every figure above assumes the link stays where you paid for it. Many do not.

Ahrefs sampled 2,062,173 websites and found that 66.5% of the links pointing to them since January 2013 had rotted (study, updated February 2024). The two biggest reasons: the linking page was dropped from Ahrefs' index (47.7%), or the link was removed from a page that still exists (34.2%). That study covers all links, not only paid ones, and it spans more than ten years. Nobody publishes a rot rate for paid links, which is the reason to measure your own.

Paid links can fail in the same ways, plus a few of their own:

• The publisher removes the link in an edit or a cleanup.
• The publisher adds rel="nofollow" or rel="sponsored" to every paid link at once.
• The site is redesigned and old articles redirect to the home page.
• The page is set to noindex.
• The 12 months you paid for run out and nobody renews.

None of these send you an email. Why backlinks disappear goes through each of them.

What rot does to your cost per link

A worked example makes the effect clear. The survival rates are illustrative: replace them with your own.

Say you buy 100 link insertions at the $179 average. You spend $17,900.

At 80% survival, you paid $224 for each link that still does anything. Your budget did not change. Your cost per link went up 25%.

Noticing early is the cheap part. A link that was removed last week is one email to a vendor who still remembers the deal. A year later you have less to stand on: Linkody's case study on monitoring notes that PayPal's guarantee lasts only 180 days, while site owners tend to guarantee a bought link for a year (source).

How to budget for link building

1. Set a price ceiling per link by DR and traffic. The tables above are a starting point.
2. Record what you paid for every link, in the currency you paid in, with the vendor and the date.
3. Add a line for checking. Look at each link at least once a month: is the page live, is the link there, is it still followed.
4. Track the rot rate per vendor. A vendor at $120 per link who loses 30% of them costs you $171 per working link. That is more than a vendor at $160 who loses none.

Steps 2 to 4 fit in a spreadsheet. Our free backlink tracker template is built for exactly that: 25 links, three checks, one number for the money at risk.

If you would rather not do the checks by hand, LinkRot.io runs them every day and tells you what the broken links cost. It does not find or build links for you: it watches the ones you bought. You can check five of your links free, with no signup.

Sources

All figures were read on the linked pages on 9 November 2026.

• BuzzStream: link insertion costs (updated 18 August 2026)
• Ahrefs: buying backlinks, what 450 sites quoted (updated 18 July 2024)
• Editorial.Link: link building pricing (updated 6 March 2026)
• Ahrefs: link rot study (updated 2 February 2024)
• Linkody: how to monitor backlinks and save a month's budget in a year

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