Backlink and link building statistics 2026

How many pages have backlinks

• 96.55% of all pages in Ahrefs' index get zero traffic from Google. (Ahrefs, 2023)
• 1.94% of pages get between one and ten visits a month from Google. (Ahrefs, 2023)
• Only 3.45% of pages get any Google traffic at all. (Ahrefs, 2023)
• The study covered around 14 billion pages. (Ahrefs, 2023)
• Ahrefs found ~20 million pages with no referring domains that still get some search traffic, but only 2,997 of them get more than 1,000 visits a month. (Ahrefs, 2023)
• That's roughly 1 in every 6,671 pages with no backlinks. (Ahrefs, 2023)
• Approximately 95% of all pages have zero backlinks. (Backlinko, 2020, updated 2025)
• A Backlinko and BuzzSumo analysis of 912 million blog posts found 94% of content has zero backlinks. (Backlinko, 2020, updated 2025)

Backlinks and rankings

• The #1 result in Google has an average of 3.8x more backlinks than positions #2 to #10. (Backlinko, 2020, updated 2025)
• The #1 result has 3x more referring domains than positions 2 to 10. (Backlinko, 2020, updated 2025)
• The average URL Rating of a first-page Google result was 11.2. (Backlinko, 2020, updated 2025)
• Pages ranking in the top 6 had a URL Rating of 12, against 11 for positions 7 to 10. (Backlinko, 2020, updated 2025)
• The study analysed 11.8 million Google search results. (Backlinko, 2020, updated 2025)
• For roughly 1 in 5 search results, none of the top-ranking pages had links from pages with traffic. (Ahrefs, 2019)
• Only 20 of 44,589 results pages had every top-ranking page with at least one link from a page with traffic: one in every 2,229. (Ahrefs, 2019)
• Google's spam policies list buying or selling links that pass ranking credit, excessive link exchanges and automated link creation as link spam. (Google)

How long ranking takes

• Only 1.74% of newly published pages rank in the top 10 within a year (1 million random URLs). (Ahrefs, 2025)
• In a filtered sample of 2 million English pages, 6.11% reached the top 10 within a year. (Ahrefs, 2025)
• In Ahrefs' 2017 version of the study, 5.7% of pages reached the top 10 within a year. (Ahrefs, 2025)
• 40.82% of pages that reached the top 10 did so within one month. (Ahrefs, 2025)
• 72.9% of pages in the top 10 are more than 3 years old, up from 59% in 2017. (Ahrefs, 2025)
• 13.7% of top-10 pages were under a year old, down from 22% in 2017. (Ahrefs, 2025)
• On average, the #1 ranking page in Google is 5 years old, against 2 years in 2017. (Ahrefs, 2025)

Link rot: how fast links disappear

• 66.5% of the links pointing to 2,062,173 sampled websites have rotted since January 2013. (Ahrefs, 2024)
• Another 6.45% of links had temporary errors, and 1.55% had other issues that stop them counting. (Ahrefs, 2024)
• In total, 74.5% of the links in the study are considered lost. (Ahrefs, 2024)
• Ahrefs itself lost 26.9 million of 174.3 million links. (Ahrefs, 2024)
• 47.7% of lost links were lost because the linking page was dropped. (Ahrefs, 2024)
• 34.2% of lost links were removed from pages that still exist. (Ahrefs, 2024)
• 5.99% were lost because the linking page now redirects, and 4.11% because it returns not found. (Ahrefs, 2024)
• A 2012 study cited by Ahrefs found 30% of social media links were dead within two years. (Ahrefs, 2024)

Reciprocal links

• 73.6% of 140,592 domains with 10K+ monthly Google visits have some reciprocal links. (Ahrefs, 2020)
• 26.4% of those domains have no reciprocal links. (Ahrefs, 2020)
• 27.4% of sites have at least a 15% overlap between sites they link to and sites linking to them. (Ahrefs, 2020)
• 43.7% of 112,440 top-ranking pages studied have some reciprocal links. (Ahrefs, 2020)
• On average, 4 to 5 of every top 10 Google results have some reciprocal links. (Ahrefs, 2020)

What earns links

• Statistics pages make up 1% of B2B content but earn 4.1% of all referring domains, 4.25x their proportional share. (Foundation, 2026)
• Glossary and definition pages earn 1.47x their share, the second most efficient of 15 formats. (Foundation, 2026)
• 42.1% of statistics pages reach 1,000 or more referring domains. (Foundation, 2026)
• 84.2% of statistics pages reach 200 or more referring domains. (Foundation, 2026)
• Only 5.3% of statistics pages earn fewer than 50 referring domains, the lowest fail rate of any format. (Foundation, 2026)
• Thought leadership pages have a 2.1% hit rate at 1,000+ referring domains and a 44.8% fail rate. (Foundation, 2026)
• The study covered 12,154 pages from 24 B2B brands across 11 verticals and 2.4 million referring domains. (Foundation, 2026)
• Deloitte's top statistics page has 2,448 referring domains, followed by Semrush (2,095), Shopify (1,912) and HubSpot (1,744). (Foundation, 2026)
• URL architecture correlates with 2x more referring domains in the same study. (Foundation, 2026)

Outreach reply rates

• Only 8.5% of 12 million outreach emails received a response. (Backlinko and Pitchbox, 2019)
• 91.5% of cold outreach messages are ignored. (Backlinko and Pitchbox, 2019)
• One follow-up email boosted replies by 65.8%. (Backlinko and Pitchbox, 2019)
• Emailing more than one contact at the same site improved response rates by 93%. (Backlinko and Pitchbox, 2019)
• Personalised subject lines lifted response rates by 30.5%; personalised bodies by 32.7%. (Backlinko and Pitchbox, 2019)
• Subject lines of 36 to 50 characters got the best response rate. (Backlinko and Pitchbox, 2019)
• Emails sent Monday to Friday had a 23.3% better reply rate than weekend emails. (Backlinko and Pitchbox, 2019)
• Multi-contact, multi-message sequences boosted response rates by 160%. (Backlinko and Pitchbox, 2019)

Backlinks from startup directories (our data)

Link types and authority from the 352 directories in our catalog. Full data in our launch directory statistics.

Source: AgentLaunch directory catalog, checked by hand in September 2026.

• 214 of 352 directories (61%) gave a dofollow product link in our checks.
• 79 (22%) gave a nofollow link, and 19 were dofollow only with a badge or paid plan.
• 178 directories are both free and dofollow.
• 83 directories (24%) require a badge or link back, creating a reciprocal link.
• The median directory has a Domain Rating of 49; 69 have DR 70 or more.
• 15 of 71 directories with DR 70+ had under 10,000 monthly visits, so authority and traffic often diverge.
• In 165 directories, advertised or third-party DR differed from Ahrefs by a median of 5 points; 30 differed by 20 or more.
• 70% of AI tool directories gave dofollow links, against 54% of software review sites.