Linkova vs Adsy: The Honest Comparison

Let's clear one thing up first, because a lot of comparison posts get it wrong: Adsy is a genuinely transparent marketplace. It has been running since 2017, it shows per-site prices before you purchase, it carries deep SEO metrics on each listing, and it brokers the whole placement — payment, content check, and link monitoring. Reviewers consistently praise its support. If someone told you Adsy hides its prices or has no real marketplace, they were selling you something. It overlaps with Linkova more than most rivals do. This post is about the places where the two genuinely differ — and there are a few that matter.

The overlap: both show you the price before you buy

On both platforms you filter a catalogue, open a listing, and see what that publisher costs before you spend anything. Adsy shows the publisher's asking price (their fee plus Adsy's commission); Linkova shows a per-placement price too. On this axis they are close, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise. Adsy also carries a strong metric stack — Ahrefs DR and organic traffic, Moz DA, Semrush, Similarweb, Google Analytics, spam score, completion rate, link lifetime — so you are not buying blind there either.

Where Linkova goes further: transparent, and then some

Here is the real difference. Adsy shows you its listed price. Linkova shows you its price next to the tracked market median from other marketplaces, on the same row. So when a domain is listed at $180, you don't just see the ask — you see whether $180 is under, over, or about the going rate for that kind of site. Adsy's price may well be fair, but there is no benchmark on the page to check it against, so you are trusting the number rather than verifying it. That median is the one thing Linkova does that a single-price marketplace, however transparent, structurally can't.

You might reasonably ask whether a lower price means a weaker site. It doesn't have to: the metrics sit on the same row, pulled from Ahrefs, Moz, Majestic and DataForSEO, so you judge the domain and the price together. Worth noting honestly: both stacks are metric-rich. Adsy names Ahrefs, Moz, Semrush and Similarweb; Linkova names Ahrefs, Moz, Majestic and DataForSEO. Neither is thin — the difference is which providers, not whether the data is there.

The tooling around the order

This is where the two diverge most. Linkova wraps the buy in tooling that Adsy, as a fulfilment-focused marketplace, mostly doesn't offer:

• LinkRadar — a scored competitor backlink-gap analysis: point it at a rival and it shows the domains linking to them that you're missing, ranked. We couldn't find an equivalent on Adsy.
• Scout AI — brief-based publisher discovery: describe what you want and it surfaces matching sites. Adsy, by its own positioning, doesn't do AI generation, and we found no discovery tool of this kind.
• Linkprofile — weekly backlink monitoring. This one is closer to a tie: Adsy monitors whether your placed links stay live, which is real and useful. Linkprofile tracks your wider backlink profile on a weekly cadence.
• An inbuilt content module. Near-parity here — Adsy offers human writing too, so this is a convenience difference, not a capability gap.

The Linkova numbers

• 225,000+ publishers across 152 countries, each row carrying metrics from Ahrefs, Moz, Majestic and DataForSEO. Adsy claims 150,000+; independent reviews suggest roughly 80,000–90,000 live — both figures are worth knowing.
• A median placement price of $124, with 88,654 listings under $100. The cheapest genuine listing is $30.
• 168,000+ listings — about 72% — priced below the tracked market median, at an average saving of $112 (rising to $165 on placements over $100).
• Clear DR bands so you know what a fair price looks like: DR 30–49 runs $70–$220, DR 50–69 runs $180–$600, and DR 70+ runs $500–$5,000+.
• Depth where it matters: 35,000+ domains at DR 50+ and 11,000+ at DR 70+.
• Pay-per-placement with no subscription and a 1.9% service fee, plus 5% off your first order with code FIRST5 on orders over $300.

Where Adsy may be the better call

Plenty of buyers will be well served by Adsy, and it's worth being straight about that. It has a long track record since 2017, a large multi-GEO inventory, deep metrics, and it brokers the full placement — escrow, content check, and link monitoring — with support reviewers rate highly. For agencies that want to build their own workflow on top, Adsy exposes a mature API for bulk ordering under your own branding. The trade-off is that its agency path is developer-dependent — you need someone to build against that API, where Linkova gives you a no-code project per client. And on the buyer side, Adsy doesn't offer competitor gap analysis or brief-based discovery, so if that tooling is what you're after, it isn't the fit.