There is a set of pages in every industry that almost nobody competes for, that are maintained by companies who want them to be comprehensive, and that link out by design. They are the where-to-buy pages, dealer locators, partner directories and approved-installer lists run by the suppliers you already pay.

This is the least competitive link source in most industries and it is usually overlooked because it is not exciting.

The Pages Your Suppliers Already Maintain

Consider the incentive from the other side. A manufacturer’s where-to-buy page exists so their end customers can find someone to buy from. An incomplete list costs them sales. A partner directory exists to make the company look established and well-supported; a thin one is embarrassing. These pages want more entries.

Which means you are not asking for a favour. You are offering to solve a problem the page exists to solve. That is a fundamentally different conversation from every other kind of outreach, and it is why the completion rate is so much higher.

The categories worth checking, in rough order of yield:

• Where-to-buy and stockist locators. The classic. If you resell anything, you probably qualify already.
• Approved installer or certified partner lists. If anyone on your team holds a certification, there is very often a public directory attached to it that nobody told you about.
• Software and platform partner directories. Every tool you pay for monthly likely has one, and they are frequently self-service.
• Trade association member listings. You are already paying the membership. Check the listing actually links.
• Franchise, distributor and regional-agent pages. Where they apply, they are usually the strongest pages of the lot.

Auditing Your Own Accounts Payable For Prospects

The prospect list is not something you research. It is an export from your accounting system, and this is the single most useful hour in the whole play.

1. Export twelve months of supplier payments. Every company you have paid, with the annual total.
2. Strike out the irrelevant. Utilities, rent, payroll, tax. What remains is trade suppliers, software and services.
3. Sort by annual spend, descending. Spend is leverage, and it is also a reasonable proxy for how likely they are to say yes.
4. Check the top thirty for a partner page. Site search for “where to buy”, “stockists”, “partners”, “find a…”, “approved…”. Five minutes each.
5. Note who your contact is. The account manager, by name. This is what makes the email work.

A typical small business finds somewhere between five and fifteen qualifying pages, and is usually already listed on two of them without a link.

The Request That Takes One Email

Send it to your account manager, not to a generic address. They are commercially motivated to keep you happy and they know exactly who internally owns the website.

Keep it to four lines: you are a customer, you noticed the partner page, you would like to be added, and here are the exact details to use — business name, one-line description, the URL, the service area. Supplying the copy removes the only real obstacle, which is that somebody would otherwise have to write it.

• Never mention SEO. You are a customer asking to be listed on a customer listing. That is all this is.
• Ask for the right destination. The relevant service page, not the homepage, if the directory allows it.
• Check what is there afterwards. Listings frequently go up with the business name as plain text. A one-line reply fixes it.
• Do it at renewal. If you are about to place an order or renew a contract, that is the moment with the most goodwill in it.

Reciprocal Partner Pages Done Honestly

The obvious next step is a partner page of your own, and it is worth doing for reasons that are not primarily about links. A genuine “who we work with” page helps customers understand what you install, what you stock and who stands behind it.

The honest version is straightforward. List the suppliers you actually use. Say what the relationship is. Do not build a page whose only function is to trade links with anyone who will trade back, and do not solicit reciprocity as a condition — a partner page that exists to be swapped looks exactly like what it is, to editors and to search engines.

Built properly, it also gives you something to offer first. Adding a supplier to your page before asking about theirs converts the request into a reciprocation, which is an easier thing for anyone to agree to.

The tactic page is partner and supplier where-to-buy links; the adjacent play is generating links through complementary business partners, and the process documentation lives in our DIY link building SOPs.

Outreach has a structural problem: almost every template asks a stranger for something before giving them anything. Guest post pitches ask for space. Link requests ask for an edit. Skyscraper emails ask for a swap. The recipient’s first thought is always the same, and it is not a warm one.

There is one common outreach format that inverts this completely, and it is the reason we keep recommending it: asking to interview someone.

Why Nobody Refuses An Interview

An interview invitation is the only outreach message where the first thing the recipient reads is an offer. You are proposing to give them a platform, an audience and a transcript that flatters their expertise, in exchange for an hour.

It is also, unusually, an ask that is easy to say yes to for reasons that have nothing to do with you. People like talking about their work. People want to be seen as the expert in their field. Very few people are asked. That combination is why the format converts where better-written pitches do not.

We are not going to give you a response-rate figure, because we do not have a clean one and neither does anybody else quoting them at you. What we can say from running both is that the shape of the reply is different: interview requests get answered by the person, not by an assistant, and the no is usually “not this month” rather than silence.

Value Before The Ask

Greg Digneo, who ran growth at Time Doctor and now runs Content Guppy, describes the strategic version of this — not as an outreach tactic, but as where brand conversation now happens. Asked how the approach had changed, his answer moved the activity off the blog entirely:

We’re going to put that stuff on Reddit. We’re going to put that stuff on other publications. We’re going talk about that in podcasts. We’re going to talk about that in YouTube channels— Greg Digneo, Content Guppy, Unscripted SEO

He is describing where the audience actually is rather than a link-building play, and we want to be exact about that rather than recruit him to an argument he did not make. What he does confirm is the payoff from the recipient side: describing why Time Doctor’s outbound and inbound were both warmer, he says people already knew them — they had signed up for the newsletter and forgotten, or read the blog once, “or because they had heard us on a podcast.”

His related warning is worth carrying: an SEO focused only on links and content is, in his words, siloed. The interview format is one of the cheapest ways out of that silo, because it produces a conversation, a page, a relationship and a link from a single hour.

One thing Digneo did not say, and we are flagging it because the claim circulates: he did not tell us that an hour on a microphone outperforms reworking your own content. That is not in the interview. What is in it is the argument for building and borrowing distribution rather than relying on a channel you do not own.

Setting Up A Q And A Both Sides Publish

The version that reliably produces a link on both sides. The key is that neither party publishes the same text, so both have something original.

1. Record once, properly. Thirty to forty-five minutes, video if they will, transcript either way.
2. Split by theme, not by half. You publish the part that suits your audience; they publish the part that suits theirs. Two distinct pieces from one conversation.
3. Each side links to the other half. Natural, editorially justified, and genuinely useful to the reader, who may well want the rest.
4. Send them their half ready to publish. Formatted, quotes checked, images included. The gap between a willing participant and a published page is almost always effort they do not have.
5. Keep the transcript. It is your evidence for every quote and it is where the next three pieces of content come from.

The Link That Follows Without Being Requested

The link is rarely the thing you ask for, and that is why the format works. Someone who has spent an hour talking to you, been quoted accurately, and received a finished page they can publish under their own name will almost always link back, mention it, or send it to their list.

The one discipline that decides this: quote them verbatim. A subject who reads a tidied-up version of their own words, however flattering, immediately trusts you less — and they are the one person guaranteed to notice. Accuracy is the whole basis of the reciprocity.

Scaling To Four Interviews A Month

Four a month is a realistic ceiling for one person doing this alongside other work, and it is enough to change a link profile within two quarters.

• Batch the outreach. Twenty invitations in one sitting, monthly. It is the same twenty minutes whether you send two or twenty.
• Batch the recording. Two afternoons a month, back-to-back slots. Context switching is what kills this.
• Standardise the question set. Six core questions, two specific to the person. Comparable answers across interviews are worth more than bespoke ones, because they become roundups later.
• Fix the turnaround. Publish within ten working days, every time. Late delivery is the single fastest way to lose the referral to the next guest.

The tactical versions are the two-way Q&A guest post, podcast guesting as a link channel, and reverse guest blogging.

There is a category of link that requires no prospecting, no relationship building and no persuasion, because the hard part already happened: somebody wrote about you and did not link. The page exists, the editor already decided you were worth mentioning, and the only thing missing is an anchor.

This is a weekend sprint. It has a beginning and an end, and most businesses have never run it once.

Why Unlinked Mentions Are The Cheapest Win

Every other link acquisition method has to overcome the same objection: why should this page reference you at all. Reclamation skips it entirely. The editorial judgement has been made, in your favour, by someone who was not asked.

That changes the email you are sending from a pitch into a correction, and corrections have a completion rate that pitches do not. You are not asking anyone to endorse you. You are pointing out that a reference they already made is missing the thing that makes it useful to their reader.

It also has a natural ceiling, which is why it is a sprint rather than a programme. Most businesses have somewhere between a handful and a few dozen unlinked mentions accumulated. You clear them, you set up monitoring, and you move on.

Five Places To Search For Your Own Name

Search your brand name, your product names, the founder’s name, and any proprietary number or phrase you have published. Then work these five sources.

1. News and trade press. Anywhere you were quoted, listed or referenced. Trade publications are the most likely to mention without linking, because house style often forbids it — ask anyway, and ask for the archive version.
2. Forums and communities. Reddit, Stack Exchange, industry boards. Many are nofollow and it does not matter; a recommendation from a real user is worth having as a citation and often as traffic.
3. Supplier, partner and customer sites. The most reliably productive category and the one everybody forgets. Companies list who they work with constantly and link inconsistently.
4. Directories and association pages. If you are a member of anything, check whether the listing actually links. A startling proportion do not.
5. Podcast show notes and transcripts. If anyone from your business has ever been a guest, check the episode page. Missing guest links are extremely common and are fixed in a day by a friendly host.

Do it in one session and keep a single sheet: URL, where the mention appears, who to contact, sent, outcome. The sheet is what makes the sprint finishable.

The Two-Sentence Reclamation Email

Length is the most common mistake. A long email turns a trivial correction into a decision, and decisions get deferred. Two sentences, a URL, done.

Sentence one: thank them and quote the exact line where the mention appears, so they do not have to go looking. Sentence two: give the URL you would like it to point to and say why it helps their reader — not why it helps you.

• Send it to a person. The author or the editor by name. Contact forms are where these die.
• Never mention SEO. The moment you do, you have converted a helpful correction into a favour with a commercial motive attached.
• Give the exact destination. Not your homepage. The page that actually answers the thing they mentioned.
• Follow up once, after ten days. Once. Then stop.

What To Do When They Say No

Some publications have a blanket policy against outbound commercial links, and the correct response is to believe them and be gracious. You have just had a friendly exchange with an editor who already thinks you are worth mentioning, which is a better position than you were in an hour ago.

• Ask if they will correct anything factual instead. A wrong job title or an out-of-date figure is worth fixing on its own merits, and it makes the mention more useful.
• Offer to be a source. “If you cover this again, I am happy to be quoted” converts a dead end into a relationship. This is where reclamation quietly turns into digital PR.
• Record the no. Put it in the sheet so nobody on your team asks the same publication again in eight months.
• Leave it alone. An unlinked mention still contributes as a citation. Not every mention has to become a link to have been worth something.

Then set up monitoring so this never becomes a backlog again — an alert on the brand name, checked monthly, turns a recurring sprint into a five-minute habit.

The detailed tactic pages are reclaim unlinked brand mentions, finding unlinked brand mentions, and recovering lost links, which is the adjacent job of repairing links that used to exist.

Every link builder eventually notices the asymmetry: the pages that get referenced by other people are rarely the pages that were built to be referenced. They are usually the ones that contained a fact somebody needed, stated clearly enough to be repeated.

Drew Dorenfest, who runs Client Magnet CRM, gave the clearest mechanical account of this we have heard, and it has a specific implication for how you rewrite what you already have.

The Verification Loop In Plain English

Dorenfest built content for a financial services client with offices in California and Las Vegas, going deliberately narrow: California versus Nevada tax code, gambling taxes, overtime taxes for Vegas service workers, student loan interest deductions. His account of why it worked:

The key to getting cited is to cite your sources. Link to IRS.gov, link to the tax research that backs your claims. When crawlers come and cross-reference your information against those sources and verify them, they go: okay, this company is legitimate, has been around for ten years, has great reviews — I will treat this as an authoritative source.— Drew Dorenfest, Client Magnet CRM, Unscripted SEO

The loop, stated plainly: a claim with a named source can be checked; a claim that checks out is safe to repeat; a page full of claims that check out becomes the thing other people repeat.

Dorenfest reports strong outcomes for that client — the student loan interest deduction post ranking above IRS.gov, HR Block and TurboTax within two weeks. He is careful about attribution, though, and so are we: he credits the combination of sourcing, content depth at a specificity the national brands lacked, and tax professionals reviewing every post for accuracy. Citing sources on a shallow page is not the play he is describing.

Where To Put The Source So It Gets Parsed

Our own guidance from here. There are three places attribution can live, and they are not equivalent.

• Inline, in the sentence. The strongest form. “According to the Office for National Statistics’ 2025 release, X” remains a complete, checkable statement if the sentence is extracted from the page entirely. A bare link on the word “research” does not.
• A sources block at the foot. Useful for human credibility and for anything that would clutter the prose, but it is disconnected from the claim it supports. Supplementary, not a substitute.
• Structured data. Worth having where it genuinely describes the page, and worth being honest that it is a machine-facing hint rather than the mechanism Dorenfest describes. His account is about the claim being checkable, not about the markup.

If you only change one thing, change the inline form. It costs nothing, it improves the page for humans, and it makes every sentence portable.

Turning Your Own Data Into A Citable Claim

The other half of the loop, and the half most businesses ignore: you can be the source. Most companies are sitting on numbers nobody else has — job durations, failure rates, seasonal patterns, quote-to-close ratios, response times.

To turn an internal number into something citable it needs four things, and missing any one of them makes it unusable to anybody else:

1. A precise statement. What was measured, in what unit. “Most” is not a statistic.
2. A period. Undated numbers rot silently and nobody will risk repeating them.
3. A denominator. Out of how many, from where. This is the single most common omission and the one that gets a claim dismissed.
4. A method anyone could repeat. Short, plain, on the page. A number nobody can reproduce is an assertion with a decimal point.

Do that and the loop runs in your favour: your page is the source other people cite, and their citation is the link you did not have to ask for.

The Rewrite Pass On Your Top Twenty Pages

This is the practical programme, and it is deliberately small. Take the twenty pages that already earn something — traffic, leads, links. Do not start with the archive.

1. Highlight every factual claim on the page. Most pages have between three and eight.
2. For each one, find the origin. Some will be sourceable in a minute; some will turn out to be industry folklore nobody can trace.
3. Rewrite the sourceable ones with the attribution inside the sentence.
4. Cut or properly research the ones that are not. This is the uncomfortable step and the valuable one.
5. Where the honest source is your own data, apply the four-part test above and make the page the citable original.

Budget about forty minutes a page. Twenty pages is a fortnight of afternoons, and it improves the pages for readers regardless of whether any machine ever notices.

What To Watch After The Rewrite

Do not measure this in referring domains for the first quarter; that is the wrong instrument and it will tell you it failed. Track instead: unlinked mentions of your brand and your specific claims; what the answer engines name when asked the questions your buyers ask, recorded monthly in identical wording; and whether the specific statistics you published start appearing in other people’s writing.

That last one is the real signal. When somebody repeats your number, the link usually follows, and when it does not you have a clean, courteous reclamation email to send.

The strategic version of this argument is digital PR for the AI consensus engine; the wider context is in our notes on link building in the age of AI overviews and the outreach content category.

The most linkable thing most agencies could produce this quarter is not a guide. It is a number nobody else has, about something everybody argues about, gathered by doing something tedious that no competitor will bother to repeat.

Jake Melendy of Ignitvio did exactly that, more or less by accident, and the result is a useful worked example of what a small original study looks like when you are not a research firm.

Why Original Calling Data Earns Links

Melendy’s study did not start as a study. His mother called five roofers for a quote and none got back to her within three days. Two months later he called five local law firms on a Sunday afternoon as a prospective client, left voicemails, and none of them called back either. His reaction: “okay, this has got to be happening everywhere. So then we started testing it.”

That origin is the point. The research question came from an irritation he had personally experienced twice, which is why it was worth answering and why the answer is interesting to anyone in the industry. Studies designed backwards from a desired headline read like what they are.

The other reason this format earns links is supply. Opinions about follow-up speed are infinite and free. Measurements are rare, because measuring requires somebody to actually make the calls.

Designing A Study You Can Finish In Two Weeks

Melendy describes his method in outline: “I started running these tests in individual metros — in the most competitive metros for certain verticals. So roofing, HVAC, accounting, dentists. And every single time the same thing kept happening.”

The design principles worth copying, as we read them, are ours to state but his to demonstrate:

• One question. His was: if I present as a real prospect, does anyone respond? Not a survey. One behaviour, observed.
• Verticals a reader belongs to. Roofing, HVAC, accounting, dental. Every business in those categories has a personal stake in the answer, which is what makes it shareable.
• Competitive metros. Choosing the hardest markets pre-empts the obvious objection that the sample was full of amateurs.
• Repeat until it stops being interesting. The finding got strong because the same result kept appearing, not because one round produced a big number.
• Behaviour you can observe without permission. Nobody has to agree to participate for you to record whether they called back.

Two weeks is realistic for a scoped-down version. One vertical, two metros, twenty businesses, one contact method, one metric. That is a couple of afternoons of calls and a spreadsheet.

Melendy’s Numbers As A Benchmark

Here are his figures, in his words, with the framing he gave them:

Every single time, over fifty percent would never get back to me. And of the ones that did, only two percent followed up more than once, which is insane to me.— Jake Melendy, Ignitvio, Unscripted SEO

The second half is what makes it a story rather than a statistic. He sets it against a sales fundamental: “you need five touches generally to get a sale. The majority of sales happen after the fifth touch.” So the market is not merely slow — almost nobody in it is running the follow-up sequence that the sale actually requires.

He also supplies the line that turns the finding into a decision. His account of what happens when he tells a service business its three-hour response time is fine: “Yeah, but your competitors are responding within ninety seconds, and they’re booking that same person. So where are we really at?”

A note on precision, because it matters for anyone citing this. Melendy describes running these tests across those four verticals in competitive metros and getting the same result every time; he does not state a total sample size in the interview. If you reference the finding, reference it as he framed it — over fifty per cent, two per cent, across roofing, HVAC, accounting and dental — and do not attach a headline count he did not give.

Pitching The Study To Trade Publications

Our own guidance on placement. A finding like this has one enormous advantage over almost any other outreach asset: the recipient is implicated. A roofing trade editor reading “over half of roofers never returned a lead call” has a story whether they agree with you or not.

• Pitch the vertical its own number. Split the data before you send it. The dental publication wants the dental figure, not your aggregate.
• Lead with the finding, not the methodology. Method goes in paragraph three and on the page, where sceptics will look for it.
• Publish the method in full anyway. This is what separates a study from a marketing claim, and it is what makes the next journalist trust the first one.
• Offer the interview. An editor will often take a quote when they will not take a press release.
• Expect to be argued with. A trade body disputing your number is coverage, and usually links.

Refreshing The Data Next Year

An annual study is a different asset from a one-off, and the difference is worth more than the second dataset. Year two gives you a trend, a reason to contact everyone who covered year one, and a defensible claim to being the source on the question.

Keep the method frozen even where you have thought of improvements — a comparable number is more valuable than a better one. Record the exact scripts, times of day and selection criteria now, because in twelve months you will not remember them and an unreproducible study cannot be refreshed.

The related plays are local digital PR with owner quotes, the broader outreach content category, and asking for attribution on roundup graphics.

If you accept that a meaningful part of modern SEO is public relations, the immediate problem is that PR is hard to start. You cannot decide to be covered by a trade publication. You can, however, decide to be on a podcast, and there are more shows looking for guests than there are people volunteering.

The Two Types Of SEO Left

Zak Ali, who leads SEO at Finder in the US, put the shift more sharply than anyone we have interviewed:

there’s two types of SEOs that exist today. There are the technical SEOs, and there are SEOs who haven’t realized yet that their job is digital PR and branding.— Zak Ali, Finder US, Unscripted SEO

He is not speaking hypothetically. He describes deciding, in May of the previous year, to dissolve his SEO team and run a generalist marketing team instead — telling people who had spent years building the discipline that they were growth marketers now. He describes it as rough at the beginning. That is a real organisational cost, paid on the strength of the argument.

The relevant consequence for link building is that if the job is PR, then the deliverable is coverage rather than placements, and the cheapest coverage available to a person with no media relationships is a conversation on somebody else’s show.

Why Guesting Is PR You Can Actually Book

Jason Wade makes the supply-side argument for the same conclusion, and it is the most practical case for this channel we have heard. His observation is about how few people ever actually do it: on his account most podcasts that start do not get far — he cites seven episodes as the typical stopping point — and only a small fraction of people even say they want to.

His conclusion is about friction: “If a company can take that friction away of the work and you can do that, you or I can take that friction away and do the stuff they won’t do. That’s where the magic was.” The same logic runs in reverse for a guest. Hosts need people willing to talk. Most people are not. Being willing is most of the qualification.

Wade is also direct about the ranking side, from his own experience: “I did a podcast and it ranked instantly.” He attributes it to nobody else competing for the space, and is specific that it works best when the subject is specific or when the guest has an unusual name. His summary is worth stealing: if you know that works, do a podcast every time.

One caveat we would add and he did not: that is his account of his own results in his own niches, not a general law. A guest spot on an unindexed show about a saturated topic will not rank instantly for anybody.

The Show-Note Link And What It Is Worth

Our own assessment of the asset, since neither guest priced it. A show-notes link is an editorial mention on a page that exists specifically to be about you for an hour. It usually sits alongside a transcript containing your name repeatedly, your company, what you do, and sentences you actually said.

Judged purely as a link it is unremarkable. Judged as a citation — a brand reference with corroborating detail, on a page a machine can read — it is one of the densest artefacts you can produce in an hour. And unlike a guest post, the host wants to publish it, promote it and keep it live, because it is their content too.

The second-order effect is the one people miss. A good episode produces clips, quotes, a transcript and a set of claims attributed to you by name on somebody else’s domain. Wade’s framing of that is that one podcast could become fifty assets. That is his estimate of the ceiling, not a promise, but the direction is right.

A Twelve-Week Guesting Plan

This plan is ours. Neither Ali nor Wade laid out a schedule; we are turning their argument into something a person can put in a calendar.

1. Weeks 1–2: build the list. Thirty shows whose audience overlaps your buyer. Check they have published in the last sixty days — a dormant show is a dead link.
2. Weeks 2–3: prepare three angles. Not topics. Angles, with a specific claim you will defend and one story only you can tell. Hosts book angles, not CVs.
3. Weeks 3–6: pitch in batches of ten. Short, specific, name the episode of theirs you actually listened to. Expect most to go unanswered and treat that as normal.
4. Weeks 5–10: record. Two to four is a realistic quarter for one person with a job.
5. Weeks 6–12: follow up. This is the step that determines whether any of it counts.

Following Up So The Link Goes Live

The failure mode of this channel is not booking. It is the fortnight after recording, when the episode sits in an edit queue and everyone forgets. Our own follow-up sequence:

• Same day, send the host exactly what you want in the notes — name, one-line description, the URL, correctly spelled. Do not make them retype it from the recording.
• Send anything that makes their job easier: a headshot, three pull-quotes, the links you mentioned. Hosts remember guests who reduce work.
• When it publishes, check the notes actually contain the link. A surprising share do not, and this is the single highest-yield check in the whole process.
• Promote it properly from your side. The reciprocity buys you the next booking, and the next booking is where this channel starts compounding.

The longer case for this channel is in podcast guesting as a link channel. The mechanics of the citation are in guest citation links, and the host-side version is podcast link building.

Press releases have the worst reputation of any tactic in link building, and they earned it. For about a decade they were sold as a link product: pay a wire, get several hundred syndicated copies of the same optimised text, count the referring domains, invoice the client. Search engines took that apart, correctly.

Bradley Benner is making a different argument, and it is worth separating from the old one before you dismiss it. His case for the format has nothing to do with the links.

The Old Reason Press Releases Failed

The failure mode was structural. Syndication produces near-identical copies across domains that have no editorial relationship with the subject, which means the “links” were never editorial decisions. Nobody at those properties chose to reference you. The wire did, once, on your instruction, and then a distribution network copied it.

That is a scheme by any reasonable definition, and treating it as one is not a Google quirk. So the corrective advice — do not buy press releases for links — was right, and remains right. What has changed is that links are no longer the only way a mention pays.

Benner On Freshness And AI Visibility

Benner runs Semantic Links, a white-label off-page agency, alongside Semantic Mastery. On Unscripted SEO he framed the whole off-page category around citations rather than links. In his terms a citation is a brand mention plus one corroborating data point — name and website, name and phone, name and address — and it does not have to be a directory listing to count.

His words: “press releases, branded assets, brand mentions on blog posts, things like that, those all can act as unstructured citations. And that’s what influences LLM or AI search visibility right now, more than anything.” On the format specifically:

Press releases work really, really good for helping to improve AI search visibility because you get brand references on high authority media and news style like freshness factor type properties that the LLMs like to cite.— Bradley Benner, Semantic Mastery / Semantic Links

He is explicit that this sits alongside on-page work rather than replacing it — he says you can and should still optimise on page to improve the chance of your own domain being referenced. The release is a way to get the brand attached to a fact somewhere that is read and re-quoted, faster than you can earn the same placement editorially.

One more thing from him worth carrying into this: he treats relevance as the governing filter across all off-page work, and describes the job as forcing the models to recognise the associations between a brand, its services, and the places it serves. A release is one more chance to state those three things in a place a machine will read.

What A Citable Release Contains

This section is our own guidance rather than Benner’s prescription. If the value is in being quotable, then the release has to be written to be quoted, which is almost the opposite of how release copy is usually produced.

• One fact in the first two sentences. Not a summary of the company. A dated, specific, checkable statement. Machines and journalists both stop reading at the same place.
• A named person with a title. An unattributed sentence cannot be safely quoted by anything. A named operations director can.
• An original number. If you have data nobody else has — response times, volumes, survey results — that is the sentence that gets lifted.
• A source for anything you did not generate. Cite the study you are referencing rather than asserting it. A claim that can be verified is a claim that can be repeated.
• Entity clarity. Brand, what it does, where it does it, spelled out plainly at least once in a full sentence.
• Boilerplate that is not stuffed. No optimised anchors, no keyword lists. The moment the release is written for anchor text you have rebuilt the tactic that failed.

Wire Tiers Worth The Money

Honest caveat first: Benner did not name specific wires, tiers or prices, and neither will we invent them. What the mechanism implies is a way to evaluate any distributor rather than a shopping list.

If the value is a brand reference on a property that gets read and re-quoted, then the only question that matters about a distributor is which properties actually publish the release as a page with your named quote intact. Not how many outlets are claimed. Not the total “potential audience” figure. Ask for example placements from the last month in your sector, open them, and check whether the quote and the attribution survived. Most of the price difference between tiers evaporates under that single check.

How To Measure Something That Is Not A Link

This is where most programmes will fail, because the reporting habit is older than the tactic. If you commission releases on this rationale and then report referring domains, you will conclude it did not work — and your report will be measuring the mechanism you were explicitly told not to buy.

1. Log placements, not domains. A list of URLs where the release actually appeared as a page, with a note on whether the named quote survived.
2. Track unlinked mentions of the brand over time. The release should raise the rate at which the brand name appears in text you did not publish.
3. Ask the answer engines the question your customer would ask. Record what gets named, monthly, in the same wording, so the comparison means something.
4. Watch branded search. Blunt, laggy, and the hardest to argue with.

None of this is a reason to move budget out of earned coverage. It is a reason to stop pretending the format has only one use. If you want the version of this argument built around earning the citation rather than buying the placement, that is digital PR for the AI consensus engine, and the local variant is earning editorial links with owner quotes.

Ask most teams for a linkable asset and you will get a long article. It is the default because it is the thing content teams already know how to make. It is also the thing every other team in your niche is making this quarter, which is precisely why it no longer earns anything.

Christopher Gimmer has built two bootstrapped SaaS products, Snappa and GoodMetrics, and got his original distribution from exactly that kind of article — a free stock photos post that ranked first and went viral. He is now unusually clear-eyed about why that playbook has stopped paying.

The Linkable Asset Nobody Builds

On Unscripted SEO he connected two things that are usually discussed separately: the collapse of cold outreach, and what people are actually willing to link to now.

Another benefit of the tools and stuff is that it’s hard to do traditional link building now, just because everyone’s inbox is full of spam. So I think people are more willing and likely to link out to a really good tool that actually solves a problem versus yet another blog post with a wall of text.— Christopher Gimmer, Snappa & GoodMetrics

Both halves matter. Outreach got harder because every inbox is saturated, and the asset most people are pitching got weaker at the same time. A tool changes the arithmetic on both sides at once.

He also described where he is putting effort for GoodMetrics, and it is not the blogging treadmill. His view is that the top of the funnel is more or less dead because those queries are being answered by AI Overviews, so the investment has gone into comprehensive documentation, landing pages that describe the product in detail, and free or interactive tools rather than posts.

That is the opportunity. Almost nobody in your niche is shipping small tools, because it feels like an engineering project. Scoped properly, it is not.

Scoping A Tool You Can Ship In A Week

The reason most linkable tools never ship is that they get scoped like products. Cut them to three things instead. This scoping frame is our own; Christopher named the category, not the method.

One input. A single number or choice the user already knows without looking anything up. If your tool needs three fields, you have a form, and forms do not get linked. If it needs data the user has to go and find first, most of them will not come back.

One calculation. A rule you can defend in a plain sentence, published openly on the page. No account, no login wall, no model. The transparency is not a nice-to-have — an editor deciding whether to cite you needs to see the method, and a black box is not citable.

One shareable result. A figure or verdict at a URL that someone can paste into Slack or reference in an article. If the result cannot leave your page, the tool cannot earn a link.

Then cut everything else. Settings, saved history, export, a second mode, an accounts system: every one of those is a week of work that adds nothing to the linkability of the thing. Ship the narrowest useful version and let demand tell you what to add.

The best candidates are usually the calculation your own team already does by hand for every client in a spreadsheet. You have already validated that it is useful and you already know the rule. Publishing it is mostly a matter of putting a front end on something that exists.

Where The Data Comes From

This section is practitioner guidance rather than anything from the interview, and it is where most tool projects quietly die, so it is worth being concrete. There are four honest sources, roughly in order of how much work they cost.

A published rule. Tax bands, postage rates, building code minimums, standard industry formulas. Zero data collection. You are packaging a lookup that is annoying to do manually, and the maintenance burden is one update a year.

Your own operational data. Benchmarks derived from work you have already done, anonymised and aggregated. This is the strongest option because nobody can replicate it, and it is the one most likely to get cited by name rather than just linked.

A public dataset. Government statistics, open APIs, published industry surveys. Free, credible, and the citation obligation cuts both ways — naming your source clearly makes your tool more linkable, not less.

A one-off survey. The most expensive and the most defensible. Only worth it if the tool is a genuine pillar asset rather than an experiment.

Whichever you choose, put the source and the last-updated date on the page. It is the cheapest thing you can do to make a journalist comfortable citing you.

Outreach For A Tool Versus Outreach For A Post

The pitch is structurally different, and this is the part teams get wrong by reusing their article template.

Pitching a post asks for a favour. You have written something and you would like the recipient to link to it, and the only benefit on offer is that it is good. In an inbox already full of that exact message, it is indistinguishable from spam even when it is sincere.

Pitching a tool offers a utility. The message is that their readers have a job to do and here is something free that does it, no signup required. That is a different email: shorter, specific about which of their existing pages it belongs on, and with the value stated in terms of their audience rather than yours.

Three differences worth building into your template. Name the exact page you think it fits and why, because a tool has an obvious home in a way an article does not. Lead with what it does, not how you built it. And make the no-strings part explicit — no email gate, no account — because the recipient will assume it is a lead magnet in disguise.

The other route worth running in parallel is to get the tool into the hands of people who already publish in your space, which overlaps heavily with how attribution-driven expert roundups and graphics earn placements. If the surrounding campaign structure is new to you, start with outreach and content link building and slot the tool in as the asset.

Keeping The Tool Alive So Links Persist

Also our guidance rather than Christopher’s, and the least glamorous section here. A tool is not a campaign that ends. It is an asset with an ongoing failure mode that an article does not have: articles get stale, tools get wrong, and a wrong tool loses links permanently rather than gradually.

Four habits keep it earning.

Put a visible last-reviewed date on it and honour it. An editor deciding whether to keep a citation checks whether anyone is still home.

Monitor it like infrastructure, not content. An uptime check and an alert. A broken calculator that nobody notices for three weeks costs you every link pointing at it, and those referring pages will not tell you.

Never change the URL. If you rebuild it, rebuild it in place. The accumulated links are the entire return on the project and a migration is the most common way teams throw them away.

Re-pitch on genuine updates. New data or a new capability is a legitimate reason to contact everyone who linked before, and it is a far warmer email than the original pitch was.

Do that and one week of work keeps compounding for years, which is more than the article you were going to write instead would have done. If you are working through the fundamentals of what earns a link in the first place, our learn how to link build guide is the place to start.

Version one of this checklist argued that relevance, not Domain Authority, should be the first filter on a link prospect. That argument still holds. What it lacked was a procedure — a specific, ordered set of things a person on your team can actually do before an outreach email leaves the outbox.

This is version two. It adds the procedure, and borrows its governing standard from Kristiyan Yankov of the SaaS link-building agency Above Apex, who put it on Unscripted SEO better than we had.

Why We Rebuilt The Checklist

Two problems showed up once teams started running the original relevance-first checklist at volume.

The first was that “is it relevant?” is not a check. It is a conclusion. Two people looking at the same prospect reached opposite verdicts and both believed they were applying the rule correctly, because nothing in the checklist told them what evidence to gather before deciding.

The second was that removing DA as the qualifier left a vacuum, and vacuums get filled by whatever is easiest to measure. Teams quietly reinstated a metric floor under a different name. If you do not replace the number with something concrete, the number comes back.

So version two defines a standard of proof, then turns the relevance judgement into ten specific observations you can make in about two minutes per prospect.

Yankov’s Verify Do Not Trust Standard

The first question we ask every guest is why the audience should trust them. Kristiyan rejected the premise of the question immediately.

You shouldn’t trust anyone. You should verify. You should verify, especially in our industry.— Kristiyan Yankov, Above Apex

He was talking about his own credentials, but it is the correct operating posture for link prospecting, and it is the standard version two is built on. Applied to a prospect list, it means something quite specific and slightly annoying: every claim about a prospect must be observed, not inferred.

You do not infer that a site has an audience because it has a high DR. You look for the audience. You do not infer that a page is editorially reviewed because the site looks professional. You look for the policy. You do not infer that a link will sit in real copy because the vendor said so. You look at where their last five placements landed.

Kristiyan is explicit that his team looks at five to ten different signals as a starting point rather than domain rating alone, examining the site first, then the page, then whether it is a genuine website that serves a purpose rather than a private blog network, whether it carries relevant content, and whether the link is seamlessly integrated into the actual copy. Version two is our attempt to write that down as steps.

The Google Is Not More Stupid Than Me Test

Before you spend two minutes on the ten checks, spend ten seconds on one question. Kristiyan’s version of it is the most useful heuristic we have added to this process in a year.

If I look at a link-building opportunity and it makes sense to me, it would be the same for Google, because Google is definitely not more stupid than me. It’s quite the opposite — it’s actually smarter.— Kristiyan Yankov, Above Apex

Run it as a gate, phrased from the other side of the transaction: would a human editor place this link for a reason other than SEO?

If the honest answer is no — if the only reason that link could exist is that someone wants a link — then no combination of metrics rescues it, because the thing you are hoping to fool is smarter than the person trying to fool it. Reject it and move on. You have just saved yourself the ten checks and an outreach email.

If the answer is yes, the prospect has earned the two minutes. Proceed.

Ten Checks Before You Send The Email

Run these in order. The early ones are cheap and disqualify fastest, which is the whole point — you want most of a bad list gone before you have paid a tool a single API call.

Checks two, three, four, seven and ten map directly onto what Kristiyan described. The rest are ours, added because they are the disqualifiers our own reviews kept catching late. Once a prospect clears all ten, it belongs in a real campaign structure rather than a one-off blast — that is what our outreach and content link building process is for.

Logging Rejections So The Team Learns

This last step is entirely our own practice rather than anything Kristiyan prescribed, and it is the one most teams skip.

Every rejection gets one line in a shared sheet: the domain, the check number it failed on, and a five-word reason. That is the whole format. It takes about eight seconds and it does three things that compound.

It stops you re-prospecting the same dead domain in four months, which every team does. It shows you which check is doing the most work, so you can move it earlier and disqualify faster. And it turns a subjective judgement into a training artefact — a new team member reads two hundred logged rejections and absorbs the standard far faster than from any document.

Kristiyan mentioned that when his team faced an unusually demanding client with hyper-specific criteria, they deliberately treated it as a case study for their own team rather than dismissing it. Anything that stress-tests your standard is worth capturing.

Review the log monthly. If one check accounts for most of your rejections, your prospecting source is the real problem, not your vetting. If you are documenting this as a team process, our DIY link building SOPs cover the surrounding workflow.

Verify, do not trust. Then write down what you verified.

Our newest episode is a quick one — barely three minutes, three sharp minds on what actually makes link building work now. We pulled the best link insights from Bradley Benner, Rob Bonham, and Justin Oberman into one short listen. Here’s the expanded version, with a link to each full interview.

Bradley Benner: relevance beats every metric

Benner flips the old link-buying checklist on its head. Stop chasing Domain Authority, Domain Rating, and trust flow — those are third-party scores, not signals Google actually passes. What decides a link’s worth is relevance: does this page, on this site, in this context, genuinely relate to yours? His bigger point for anyone building a service is that the job isn’t pushing metrics — it’s creating and strengthening the entity associations that teach the algorithms (and the AI models) what you’re about.

→ Hear the full conversation: Bradley Benner on relevance, entity associations & the future of link building.

Rob Bonham: the biggest footprint wins

Bonham zooms out from the single link to the whole picture. Links, mentions, citations, reviews — they add up to a footprint, and the size and positivity of that footprint is what ultimately wins the SERPs. It reframes “link building” as reputation building at scale: the more of the web that talks about you in a good way, the more both Google and the AI answer engines treat you as the obvious answer.

→ Hear the full conversation: Rob Bonham on SEO in the agentic age.

Justin Oberman: the worst thing is to be ignored

Oberman comes at links from the attention side. AI search, he argues, is a consensus engine — it surfaces what the ecosystem already says about you. So the goal isn’t persuasion, it’s being talked about at all. It’s easier to move someone from hate to love than from indifference, because indifference means you’re invisible. Links and mentions are how you stop being invisible.

→ Hear the full conversation: Justin Oberman: all marketing is showmanship and AI search is a consensus engine.

The through-line: relevant links = a footprint search and AI both trust

Three lenses, one conclusion. Benner says make it relevant. Bonham says make it big and positive. Oberman says make sure you’re talked about at all. Put them together and that’s the modern link-building brief: earn relevant mentions across the web, and you build the footprint that Google ranks and the AI models cite.