What backlinks actually cost in 2026

If you search for what a backlink costs, you get a range so wide it's useless — $100 to $1,500, pick a number. That range exists because most of the sources are agencies describing what they charge, not what publishers charge. The markup is inside the figure and nobody itemises it.

So here is the other kind of answer. Linkova's catalogue holds 225,872 publishers with a listing price attached to each one, and the market median from other marketplaces beside it. Filtering that catalogue is how the numbers below were produced. You can reproduce every one of them by applying the same filter yourself.

The median placement is $140

Not the average — the average is dragged upward by a long tail of $3,000+ listings that almost nobody buys. The median is the number that describes what a normal placement costs, and it is $140.

For orientation: 88,654 listings sit under $100, and 138,449 under $200. That is well over half the catalogue below $200. The cheapest genuine listing is $30.

Prices by authority band

Domain Rating is the crudest possible way to segment a market, and it is also the way this market actually prices itself. Here is the honest picture:

The jump from DR 50–69 to DR 70+ is the steepest in the market — roughly triple, for maybe ten points of a logarithmic authority score. Whether that is worth paying is a real question, not a rhetorical one, and the answer depends on whether you are buying authority or buying an audience.

What the price is actually for

A placement price bundles several things that are worth separating, because you are charged for all of them whether you need them or not:

• The publisher's fee — what the site charges to host a post with a link. This is the bulk of it.
• Editorial work — someone writes the article. Sometimes included, sometimes an add-on, occasionally billed at a rate that exceeds the placement itself.
• Discovery and vetting — finding the site, checking it isn't a link farm, confirming it has real traffic. Cheap at scale, expensive one at a time.
• Coordination — briefing, submitting, chasing, confirming the URL went live. This is where agency time genuinely goes.
• Margin — whatever the intermediary keeps. In an opaque market this is unbounded.

The reason transparent pricing matters is not that margin is immoral. It's that when the publisher's fee is hidden, you can't tell whether you're paying for coordination or for the fact that you didn't know the number.

How much of the market is overpriced

148,550 listings in the catalogue — 66% of it — are priced under the median for comparable placements on other marketplaces. Average saving on those: $116 per placement.

Read that the other way round and it's more interesting: a third of the market is priced at or above the going rate, and there is no way to tell which third from the listing alone. That is the actual problem with buying links. Not that prices are high — that they are unknowable, so a fair one and a bad one look identical.

Prices that should make you suspicious

Two patterns are worth naming, because both look like good deals:

High DR, almost no traffic

A DR 72 domain with 400 monthly visits is not a bargain, it is a domain whose authority was bought. Ahrefs' DR is computed from backlinks, so a site that has done nothing but acquire links scores well while being read by nobody. Only 5,669 listings in the catalogue have 100,000+ monthly visits — real traffic at scale is genuinely rare, and that scarcity is what a high price is supposed to reflect.

Unusually cheap in an expensive niche

Finance, insurance and gambling placements cost what they cost because the sites can sell to buyers with real budgets. A $40 finance placement on a DR 60 domain means something else is going on — usually that the site sells to everyone, and your link will sit in a footer of 200 others.

The number that isn't in this post

What a link is worth. Nobody knows, including us. There is no defensible way to convert a placement into expected traffic or revenue, because the outcome depends on your site, your competition, and how Google weights a signal it doesn't document.

Anyone selling you an ROI figure for a backlink built it from assumptions they chose. The cost side is knowable — that is what this post is. The return side isn't, and a price guide that pretends otherwise is doing the same thing as the rate cards it's replacing.