The fastest way to get backlinks is to reclaim mentions you’ve already earned. That means unlinked brand mentions and broken links pointing at your site. Then run small, personalized outreach campaigns built around something worth citing.
That’s the short version of how to get backlinks in 2026. The longer version is about expectations.
Only 8.5% of outreach emails ever get a reply. The pages you’re chasing keep earning new links while you work. And half the tactics you’ll read about aren’t worth your hours.
We cover what to do first and the reply rates to expect at each step. We also share the 90-day sequence we run for clients at Ardoz Digital.
Key takeaways
- Backlinko and Pitchbox found only 8.5% of 12 million outreach emails got a reply. A single follow-up email lifts replies by 65.8%.
- Pages ranking #1 on Google add new referring domains at 5% to 14.5% per month. So the number of backlinks needed to compete keeps rising while you build.
- Ahrefs found that 96.55% of all web pages get zero traffic from Google. Pages with more referring domains consistently earn more search traffic.
- The easiest backlinks to get are already half-earned. Think unlinked brand mentions and old links to pages that now 404.
- Backlinks and brand mentions matter for AI answers too. They influence whether ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews cite a business.
Why do backlinks still matter in 2026?
A backlink is simply a link from someone else’s website to yours. Google treats each one as a rough vote of confidence.
The scale of the problem is bigger than most people realize. Ahrefs studied about 14 billion pages: 96.55% of them get zero traffic from Google. Zero.
The same team also looked at pages with no referring domains at all. A referring domain is a unique website that links to you. For those pages, the odds got brutal.
Their index held roughly 20 million no-backlink pages. Only 2,997 of them pulled more than 1,000 search visits a month. That’s about 1 in 6,671.
Fair warning on the data: correlation isn’t causation, and Ahrefs says so itself. Plenty of pages rank fine without links by targeting low-competition topics.
But for keywords worth real money, the top pages almost always have links. Nearly every practitioner’s day-to-day experience backs that up.
Start with the links you’ve already earned
Before you send a single cold email, collect the half-finished links that already exist. These convert at a far higher rate than any outreach campaign. The other site already decided to reference you.
Take an established business that’s never done deliberate link building. In the audits we run at Ardoz Digital, it usually has reclaimable links sitting untouched. Expect somewhere between a handful and a few dozen.
Reclaiming them is the cheapest month of link building you’ll ever do. There are two places to look.
Unlinked brand mentions
Search Google for “Your Brand Name” -site:yourdomain.com. Skim for articles, podcast show notes, and local news stories that name you without linking.
Send a short, friendly email: “Thanks for the mention. Would you mind linking our name to this page so readers can find us?” It gets a yes more often than any other pitch we send.
Broken backlinks
Run your domain through a backlink tool, such as Ahrefs’ free Backlink Checker. Look for links pointing at pages that now return a 404 error.
Redirect the dead page to its closest live equivalent. Or ask the linking site to update the URL.
How do you write outreach emails that actually get replies?
Build three habits into every campaign:
- Personalize the subject line and the body.
- Follow up at least once.
- Email more than one person at the target site.
Per the data, those three habits roughly double your results.
The benchmark numbers
The numbers below come from a Backlinko and Pitchbox analysis of 12 million outreach emails. They’re worth pinning above your desk:
- The average reply rate is 8.5%. Send 100 emails, hear back from 9, and you’re not failing, just average.
- A single follow-up message boosts replies by 65.8%. Sequences of three or more messages performed best overall.
- Emailing multiple contacts at the same site lifts replies by 93%. Add a follow-up sequence, and replies rise 160% over one email to one person.
- Personalized subject lines get 30.5% more replies, and personalized body copy gets 32.7% more. Subject lines of 36 to 50 characters performed best.
- Pitches about guest posts, roundups, and links earned above-average reply rates. Mass infographic pitches earned some of the worst.
Our take: most campaigns don’t die from a badly written email. They die because the list was lazy.
Fifty prospects who actually cover your topic will beat five hundred scraped contacts every time. You’ll spend less on tools doing it, too.
Which link building tactics are worth your time?
For most small and mid-sized businesses, three tactics bring the best returns:
- Reclaimed links
- Digital PR
- A short list of carefully chosen guest posts
Here’s how the common options compare once you account for the hours they eat:
Scroll sideways to read the full table.
| Tactic | Effort | Time to first link | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Unlinked mention reclamation | Low | Days | Any business with press or podcast history |
| Broken link fixes | Low | Days | Older sites that have restructured URLs |
| Local links (chambers, sponsorships, suppliers) | Low | 1 to 3 weeks | Local service businesses |
| Podcast guesting | Medium | 2 to 4 weeks | Founders with a story and a point of view |
| Guest posts | Medium | 2 to 6 weeks | Building topical relevance in a niche |
| Digital PR (data and story pitches) | High | 4 to 8 weeks | Businesses with original data or a strong local angle |
| Original research and free tools | High | 2 to 6 months | Sites playing the long game in a competitive niche |
Digital PR deserves a special note. A single hit can return 20 or 30 links from real news sites. No other tactic on this table can do that.
It also benefits most from existing relationships with journalists. That’s why it sits at the core of our digital PR service. The goal is coverage your future customers actually read.
A 90-day example: link building for a Tampa roofing company
Here’s the sequence we’d run for a local service business. We’ll use a Tampa roofer as the example.
The same skeleton works for HVAC, plumbing, or any trade. It’s the plan behind most of our home services marketing engagements.
Days 1 to 30: collect what’s owed
Reclaim unlinked mentions from local news storm coverage. Fix broken backlinks left over from the last site redesign. Then take the easy local wins:
- The Tampa Bay Chamber directory
- Manufacturer “find a contractor” pages, such as those from GAF and Owens Corning
- Any neighborhood association or youth sports team the owner already sponsors
Days 31 to 60: build one citable asset
Hurricane season starts June 1 in Florida. Local reporters write the same preparation stories every year.
A short, specific resource gives them something to cite. Try a roof inspection checklist with real cost ranges. Or write a plain-language explainer on what homeowners insurance actually covers after storm damage.
Days 61 to 90: pitch it properly
Email the reporters who covered last year’s storms. Personalize every note, and follow up once. Per the outreach data above, that follow-up alone should lift replies by about two thirds.
What the plan leaves out
Notice what’s missing from the plan:
- No paid guest post marketplaces
- No $40 link packages
- No directory spam
Say a local business lands 10 to 15 relevant local links in a quarter. It will usually outrank a competitor sitting on 40 junk links. Relevance beats volume.
How many backlinks do you need to outrank a competitor?
More than they’ll have when you catch up, not more than they have today. That distinction trips up almost everyone who sets a link target.
Ahrefs studied 200,000 top-ranking pages across 10,000 keywords. Pages ranking #1 keep adding followed referring domains at 5% to 14.5% per month.
Their example is a page ranking first with 55 referring domains. Within three months, it will likely have between 64 and 83. If your plan said “build 55 links,” you aimed where the target used to be.
Two nuances from the same study
First, the researchers couldn’t find a statistical connection between link pace and ranking changes. That suggests quality and relevance matter more than raw pace.
Second, lower-ranking pages gain links more slowly. That’s part of why positions one through three are so sticky.
The practical move: open Ahrefs’ Site Explorer and check the current #1’s referring domains graph. Note its monthly growth. Then budget to beat that number with better links rather than just more of them.
Do backlinks help you get cited by ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews?
They can. Even Semrush’s current guide to link building frames the work partly around AI citations. It points to ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews.
Unlinked mentions count for more here than they ever did in classic SEO. Picture your brand showing up again and again near Tampa, roof repair, and storm damage. Language models can then associate you with that category, even when nobody added a link.
So a digital PR placement that names you without linking isn’t a failure anymore. It’s a citation seed.
Linked and unlinked coverage are two halves of the same effort in our GEO work. We’d suggest measuring both when you report results.
GEO gives AI systems clearer, verifiable information about the business. That may improve its eligibility to appear in relevant answers. Third-party systems control citations and recommendations, so we cannot guarantee them.
Mistakes we keep seeing (and the fixes)
Buying cheap guest posts from marketplaces
Those $40 placements live on sites that publish anything. Google’s link spam systems quietly discount most of them. Fix: spend that budget on one real story pitch or one actually good guest post.
Exact-match anchor text everywhere
If half your links say “roof repair tampa,” no natural link profile looks like that. Fix: let the linking site choose the anchor. Brand-name anchors are fine, and safer.
Chasing authority scores instead of relevance
A DR 70 crypto blog linking to a plumber helps nobody. Fix: judge prospects by topic fit and real organic traffic of their own.
Sending one email and quitting
Per the data, a single follow-up lifts replies by 65.8%. Yet most people never send it. Fix: build the two-touch sequence before you launch, not after.
Ignoring the links you already have
Site redesigns quietly 404 old URLs and burn years of link equity. Fix: crawl your backlink profile after every migration. Redirect anything with links pointing at it.