Link building statistics for 2026: the numbers worth citing
More than 100 link building statistics for 2026, each with its source and year. Link prices, survey data, outreach reply rates, digital PR, link loss, backlink tool indexes, AI citations and Google enforcement dates.
In short
- The average acceptable price for one high-quality link was $508.95 in a March 2026 survey of 518 SEOs by Editorial.link.
- A guest post costs $295 on average bought direct and $461 through a vendor, and a niche edit lists at $179, according to BuzzStream's 2026 studies.
- BuzzStream's June 2026 study rated 96.2% of roughly 257,000 guest post sellers as low quality and found that 39.6% had no organic traffic.
- In uSERP's September 2026 survey of 116 senior SEOs, 35.3% had paid for or approved sponsored backlinks in the past year, and 91.9% of 518 SEOs surveyed by Editorial.link believe their competitors buy links.
- Cold outreach had a 1.06% reply rate and warm outreach 20.1% in BuzzStream's April 2026 study of 1.32 million emails from 17 agencies.
- Ahrefs reported in a study dated February 2024 that 66.5% of the links pointing to more than two million sampled websites had rotted since January 2013.
- Ahrefs found in March 2026 that 37.9% of URLs cited in AI Overviews ranked in the top 10 for the same query, down from about 76% in July 2025.
This page collects the link building statistics that hold up when you check them: prices, survey results, outreach reply rates, digital PR data, link loss, backlink index sizes, AI citation studies and the dates of Google’s enforcement changes. It is a reference page. Use the tables to find a figure, then follow the link in the last column for the context.
Every figure names its source and year. Where the source is a vendor describing its own data, a small survey, or a number relayed second-hand, the row says so in the same words the detailed lesson uses. Prices are in US dollars unless marked.
Link prices
Most price data comes from marketplace listings and publisher quotes, so these are mainly list prices, and list price is not paid price.
| Statistic | Source and year | More detail |
|---|---|---|
| The average acceptable price for one high-quality link was $508.95 | Editorial.link, survey of 518 SEOs, March 2026 | Cost and budget |
| A guest post bought direct from the site costs $295 on average | BuzzStream, 257,267 sites, June 2026 | Paid guest posts |
| A guest post bought through a vendor or marketplace costs $461 on average | BuzzStream, June 2026 | Paid guest posts |
| A niche edit has an average marketplace list price of $179 | BuzzStream, 41,783 sites, August 2026 | Niche edits |
| Link insertions by quality tier average $174 for low, $330 for mid, $615 for high and $778 for top tier | BuzzStream, August 2026 | Cost and budget |
| The median publisher list price for a sponsored article is $570, with the middle half at $250 to $1,290 | ESBO analysis of 16,625 publishers, reported by Entrepreneur, September 2026 | Cost and budget |
| The median price from publishers for a link insertion is $270 | ESBO, September 2026 | Posts vs edits |
| A typical digital PR campaign costs $5,000 to $10,000 and earns 6 to 7 unique linking domains once syndicated copies are removed, which is $1,250 to $1,500 per unique link | BuzzStream pricing guide, updated September 2026 | Digital PR |
| Cost per link was about $150 for guest posting, about $400 for journalist requests, about $625 for reactive PR and about $800 for hero campaigns | BuzzStream survey of roughly 70 respondents, more than half in the UK, October 2025 | Journalist requests |
| A guest post pitched cold to “write for us” sites cost $77.80 on average | Ahrefs, 180 sites, about 2023 to 2024. Dated | Cost and budget |
| A niche edit negotiated by cold outreach cost $361.44 on average | Ahrefs, 450 sites, about 2023 to 2024. Dated | Cost and budget |
| At DR 41 to 50, sellers asked $406 on average and buyers paid $59 | Adsy, analysis of 37,542 sites using its 2024 data | Cheap backlinks |
| Gambling guest posts average $238 across all sellers and $1,109 on sites with DR 50 or more and 10,000 monthly visits | BuzzStream, 2026 | Paid guest posts |
Prices by country and language
ESBO only counted publishers with a Domain Rating above 30 and at least 2,000 organic visits a month, so its medians describe established sites. It is a single dataset, so treat the figures as a guide.
| Statistic | Source and year | More detail |
|---|---|---|
| Median sponsored article in Sweden: $1,440. In Norway: $1,350 | ESBO, 16,625 publishers in 53 languages, September 2026 | The Nordics |
| Median sponsored article in Finland: $1,230. In Denmark: $740 | ESBO, September 2026 | The Nordics |
| Median sponsored article in German: $1,230, based on 1,086 publishers | ESBO, September 2026 | DACH |
| Median sponsored article, English with an Australian audience: $1,330. With a Canadian audience: $1,130 | ESBO, September 2026 | International |
| Median sponsored article, English with a UK audience: $1,040. With a US audience: $452 | ESBO, September 2026 | UK and Ireland |
| Median sponsored article in France: $870. In the Netherlands: $870. In Spain: $655. In Italy: $630 | ESBO, September 2026 | International |
| Median sponsored article in Polish: $480 | ESBO, September 2026 | Poland |
| Median sponsored article in India: $100 in English and $70 in Hindi | ESBO, September 2026 | International |
| Regional medians: Nordic languages combined $1,110, Western European languages combined $855, Central and Eastern Europe $490 | ESBO, September 2026 | The Nordics |
| Average guest post list price by country: Switzerland $1,218, Ireland $800, Australia $741, the UK $713, Canada $605 and the US $583 | Adsy, 37,542 sites, 2024 data | International |
| The average UK marketplace placement costs about £120 and the median about £85 | Marketplace dataset of 22,703 placements, July 2026, reported by Whito | UK and Ireland |
| The cost per earned digital PR link was about £610 in the UK and about £260 in the US | BuzzStream survey of about 70 respondents, October 2025, reported by Whito | International |
What SEOs spend and expect
These are survey answers: opinions and admissions from people who chose to take part, not measurements.
| Statistic | Source and year | More detail |
|---|---|---|
| 35.3% had paid for or approved sponsored backlinks in the past year. 58.6% said no and 6% preferred not to answer | uSERP, 116 senior SEOs, September 2026 | Link buying |
| 74.3% pay for links, at an average of $83 a link | Authority Hacker survey of 755 link builders, about 2023 to 2024, cited by Ahrefs in 2024. The original page is no longer online | Link buying |
| 91.9% believe their competitors buy links | Editorial.link, 518 SEOs, March 2026 | Link buying |
| 56% believe Google cannot reliably identify paid links | Editorial.link, 2026 | Link buying |
| Competitive niches need $8,406 a month on average, in a range of $4,000 to $150,000 | Editorial.link, March 2026 | Strategy and plan |
| Link building takes 32.1% of the SEO budget at agencies and 36% in-house | Editorial.link, March 2026 | Strategy and plan |
| 56% outsourced at least part of their link building | Editorial.link, March 2026 | Team roles and KPIs |
| 57.1% expect links to show an effect within one to three months, and 33% said three to six months | Editorial.link, March 2026 | Timescales |
| 80.9% believe unlinked brand mentions affect rankings. That is a belief, not a measurement | Editorial.link, March 2026 | Brand mentions |
| 78.8% believe nofollow links have an effect on rankings. That is a belief, not proof | Editorial.link, March 2026 | Link attributes |
| 53.4% named digital PR as the tactic that gave them the strongest results in the past year. Niche edits came second at 12.9% | uSERP, September 2026 | Digital PR |
| 40.5% called guest posting the most overused tactic relative to its results, and 17.9% named paid links as a dying tactic | uSERP, September 2026 | Link buying |
Quality of sites that sell links
Counting sellers is the second way to size the market, and the counts say most of the supply is weak.
| Statistic | Source and year | More detail |
|---|---|---|
| 96.2% of roughly 257,000 sites selling guest posts were rated low quality | BuzzStream, June 2026 | Vetting publishers |
| 39.6% of those sellers had no organic traffic | BuzzStream, June 2026 | Vetting publishers |
| Only 1.37% reached a basic bar of DR 65 or more with 10,000 monthly organic visits | BuzzStream, 2026 | Vetting publishers |
| 97.5% of link insertion offers were rated low quality | BuzzStream, August 2026 | Posts vs edits |
| Only 12.6% of 450 sites across nine niches were willing to sell a link in an existing article | Ahrefs, about 2023 to 2024. Dated | Link buying |
| Of 180 sites with “write for us” pages, 25.5% replied, and roughly half of the replies asked for a fee | Ahrefs, about 2023 to 2024. Dated | Link buying |
| 57% of publishers at DR 80 and above state that they use a sponsored label, against 15% at DR 30 to 39 | ESBO, September 2026 | UK and Ireland |
| 39% of publishers with a Domain Rating of 80 or more sell nofollow placements only, at a median price of $1,840, against $510 for publishers that sell followed links | ESBO, September 2026 | Link attributes |
| 41.5% of publishers accept gambling content, 35.4% accept CBD and 15.9% accept adult content | ESBO, September 2026 | Link buying |
The sponsored attribute is reported to appear on about 0.01% of referring domains. The figure is not verified on the original page, so treat it as indicative |
Reported from an Ahrefs study, undated | Link attributes |
Outreach and reply rates
The samples differ, so read these as separate figures and not as one rate. About 1% is the cautious planning number for cold outreach.
| Statistic | Source and year | More detail |
|---|---|---|
| Outreach emails had an 8.5% reply rate. This figure is out of date | Backlinko and Pitchbox, 12 million emails, 2019 | Outreach emails |
| The average open rate was 33.79% and the reply rate 0.85% | BuzzStream, 31 million emails in 86,000 campaigns, April 2025 | Outreach emails |
| A 3.59% reply rate across 51 million outreach emails | BuzzStream, 2025. A separate sample | Outreach emails |
| Cold pitches got a 1.06% reply rate. Pitches to journalists who had replied before got 20.1% | BuzzStream, 1.32 million emails from 17 agencies, April 2026 | Outreach emails |
| Journalists who had replied before were about 19 times more likely to reply again. One contacted within 90 days of a previous reply was about 30 times more likely to respond than a cold contact | BuzzStream, April 2026 | Outreach emails |
| Campaigns of 1 to 50 emails had a 1.15% reply rate. Campaigns of 1,001 to 5,000 had 0.37% | BuzzStream, April 2025 | Outreach emails |
| Pitches under 300 words got more than double the reply rate of longer ones | BuzzStream, over 5 million emails, June 2026 | Outreach emails |
| A personalised subject line lifted replies by 30.5% and a personalised body by 32.7% | Backlinko and Pitchbox, 2019 | Outreach emails |
| Emailing more than one person at a site lifted replies by 93% | Backlinko and Pitchbox, 2019 | Finding contacts |
| A single follow-up lifted replies by 65.8% | Backlinko and Pitchbox, 2019 | Outreach emails |
| 55.4% of digital PR practitioners send one follow-up and 33.1% send two | BuzzStream, State of Digital PR 2026 | Outreach emails |
Digital PR and what journalists want
BuzzStream’s State of Digital PR 2026 surveyed more than 150 practitioners. Cision’s State of the Media 2026 surveyed 1,899 journalists.
| Statistic | Source and year | More detail |
|---|---|---|
| 68.2% of practitioners said digital PR works better than a year ago and 75% said it is harder | BuzzStream, State of Digital PR 2026 | Digital PR |
| 95.9% of digital PRs use data-led pitching and 79.1% pitch press releases | BuzzStream, 2026 | Digital PR |
| The most common self-reported cost per link was $300 to $500, and 39.2% of respondents did not know their cost per link | BuzzStream, State of Digital PR 2026 | Measuring PR |
| Metrics used: quality links 85.1%, total mentions 72.3%, total links 70.9% | BuzzStream, State of Digital PR 2026 | Measuring PR |
| 63.5% measure organic traffic or rankings, down from 78% in 2025. 55.4% measure AI citation mentions, new in 2026 | BuzzStream, State of Digital PR 2026 | Measuring PR |
| 81% said first coverage arrives within a week, and 85.2% see measurable results within six months | BuzzStream, 2026 | Measuring PR |
| A link mix of 48% followed, 19% nofollow and 33% syndicated. An aggregate of several samples, so a rough split | Digitaloft compilation of industry statistics, July 2026 | Digital PR |
| 66% of journalists rely on PR-provided content for story ideas, more than any other source | Cision, State of the Media 2026 | Digital PR |
| 82% reject pitches that do not match their audience or beat, and 72% block senders of irrelevant material | Cision, 2026 | Outreach emails |
| Journalists ask for data and research (47%), embargoed or early access (45%, as relayed by BuzzStream) and access to experts (42%) | Cision, 2026 | Digital PR |
| 97% prefer email. 64% want one follow-up at most and 8% want none | Cision, 2026 | Outreach emails |
| 69% of journalists are reported to prefer pitches under 200 words, and 78% to want them before noon | Muck Rack, State of Journalism 2026, as relayed in secondary summaries not checked against the original | Digital PR |
Link loss and link lifespan
Ahrefs and Pew describe the web as a whole. Linkody is a vendor describing links its customers chose to track, and its age figures are a snapshot of links of each age, not one group of links followed over time.
| Statistic | Source and year | More detail |
|---|---|---|
| 66.5% of the links pointing to 2,062,173 sampled websites had rotted since January 2013 | Ahrefs, study dated February 2024 | Link lifespan |
| Counting crawl errors and other problems, Ahrefs put the total lost at 74.5% | Ahrefs, February 2024 | Link lifespan |
| Of lost links, 47.7% were lost because the linking page dropped from Ahrefs’ index and 34.2% because the link was removed from a page that still exists | Ahrefs, February 2024 | Link lifespan |
| 38% of webpages that existed in 2013 were no longer available, and 23% of news webpages contained at least one broken link | Pew Research Center, May 2024 | Link lifespan |
| Share of tracked links of each age that were live when checked: 89% at three months, 63% at one year, 46% at two to five years, 31% beyond five years | Linkody, more than 865,000 backlinks monitored by its customers, June 2026. A snapshot | Link lifespan |
| Links that die have an average lifespan of about 20 months, with 52% of the losses inside the first twelve months | Linkody, June 2026 | Link lifespan |
| Of all monitored links, 56% were live and correct, 17% had been removed from a page that was still live, 14% sat on pages returning errors and 13% hit crawl errors | Linkody, 2026 | Link lifespan |
| Links on domains with a Moz Domain Authority under 10 survived at 33%, against 70% on domains at 30 to 49 | Linkody, 2026 | Link lifespan |
Links, anchors and rankings
A correlation is not proof of cause, because pages that rank also attract links.
| Statistic | Source and year | More detail |
|---|---|---|
| Correlation with rankings: referring domains 0.255, followed referring domains 0.250, backlinks 0.248, Domain Rating 0.131 | Ahrefs, one million US keywords, January 2025 | Do links matter |
| The correlation was stronger for local queries, at 0.33, and weaker for commercial and transactional queries | Ahrefs, January 2025 | How many links |
| The correlation between referring domains and rankings for comparable queries fell from 0.27 in 2019 to between 0.22 and 0.24 in 2024 | Ahrefs, 2024 | Do links matter |
| The share of exact-match anchors showed only a weak positive correlation with ranking position, and most top-ranking pages had a low share | Ahrefs, 384,614 pages across 19,840 keywords, last updated April 2020 | Anchor text |
| An industry convention keeps exact-match anchors to roughly 1% to 5%. It is a convention, not a rule from Google | Cited in the Ahrefs anchor study, April 2020 | Natural link profile |
Backlink tool indexes
These figures were read on each company’s own website on 4 October 2026. They are marketing claims and are not counted the same way, so they cannot be ranked against each other.
| Statistic | Source and year | More detail |
|---|---|---|
| Ahrefs: 35 trillion external backlinks and 493.9 billion pages in its index, with the backlink index updated every 15 to 30 minutes | Ahrefs’ own site, October 2026 | Tool indexes |
| Majestic: a Fresh Index of about 184 billion unique URLs crawled, covering 6 June to 3 October 2026, and a Historic Index of about 4.5 trillion URLs crawled since 2006 | Majestic’s own site, October 2026 | Tool indexes |
| Moz: 45.5 trillion links, 8.7 trillion URLs and 1 billion domains in Link Explorer | Moz’s own site, October 2026 | Tool indexes |
| Semrush: more than 43 trillion backlinks and 390 million referring domains, with the database refreshed at least hourly | Semrush’s own site, October 2026 | Tool indexes |
| Search Console’s Links report shows a sample, and its tables stop at 1,000 rows | Google’s help page for the Links report, undated | Tool indexes |
AI search and citations
Most of these studies come from companies that sell AI visibility or SEO tools.
| Statistic | Source and year | More detail |
|---|---|---|
| Of URLs cited in AI Overviews, 37.9% ranked in the top 10 for the same query, 31.2% ranked 11 to 100 and 31.0% ranked beyond 100 | Ahrefs, 863,000 results pages and 4 million cited URLs, March 2026 | AI sources |
| In July 2025 the same analysis showed about 76% from the top 10. Ahrefs attributes the shift to heavier fan-out, which Google has not confirmed | Ahrefs, March 2026 | Query fan-out |
| The share of cited URLs found in Google’s top 10 was 8% for ChatGPT, 8% for Gemini, 8.6% for Copilot and 28.6% for Perplexity | Ahrefs, 15,000 long-tail prompts, August 2025 | AI sources |
| Only 10% of ChatGPT’s citations were in Google’s top 10, but there was 31.8% overlap at domain level | Ahrefs, 3,311 short keywords, September 2025 | AI sources |
| 59% of prompts trigger 5 to 11 fan-out queries and 24% trigger 12 to 19. The average is 9 to 11 and the highest seen was 28 | Seer Interactive and Nectiv, as cited by Ahrefs in March 2026 | Query fan-out |
| Over 95% of fan-out queries have no recurring human search volume | Ahrefs, March 2026 | Query fan-out |
| On non-English prompts, 43% of ChatGPT’s research steps ran on the English-language web | Peec AI, 2026 | International |
| Correlation with brand visibility, for ChatGPT, AI Mode and AI Overviews in that order: YouTube mentions 0.737, 0.740 and 0.712. Branded web mentions 0.664, 0.709 and 0.656. Domain Rating 0.266, 0.285 and 0.326 | Ahrefs, 75,000 brands, updated December 2025. Correlation only, and limited to sites above Domain Rating 40 | AI sources |
| Peec states that Reddit and YouTube are the only domains in every engine’s top five, but its own published ChatGPT list is Wikipedia, Reddit, Forbes, TechRadar and LinkedIn, with no YouTube | Peec AI, 30 million US citations, March 2026 | YouTube |
| YouTube was the most cited domain in AI Overviews, at 5.6% of all cited URLs, and made up 18.2% of the cited URLs that did not rank in Google’s top 100 for the query | Ahrefs, March 2026 | YouTube |
| Reddit’s share of all citations was 6.6% on Perplexity, 2.2% in AI Overviews and 1.8% on ChatGPT | Profound, 680 million citations, August 2024 to June 2025 | |
| Wikipedia is 7.8% of all ChatGPT citations. The often quoted 47.9% is a share of the top ten sources | Profound, 680 million citations, 2024 to 2025 | AI sources |
| AI assistants sent 0.32% of all site traffic in 2026, against 0.24% in 2025 and 0.02% in 2024 | SE Ranking, 101,574 websites, June 2026 | AI referral traffic |
| People clicked a traditional result on 8% of visits that showed an AI summary, against 15% without one. Only 1% clicked a link inside the summary | Pew Research, 68,879 Google searches by 900 US adults, July 2025 | AI referral traffic |
Google policy and enforcement dates
Dates from 2024 onward were checked against current reporting. Earlier dates come from Google’s announcements as they are generally recorded, so treat an exact day before 2024 as indicative.
| Statistic | Source and year | More detail |
|---|---|---|
| Penguin 1.0 launched on 24 April 2012. Google put the effect at about 3.1% of English queries | Google, 2012 | Timeline |
| Penguin 4.0 arrived on 23 September 2016: real time, part of the core algorithm, and devaluing spam links instead of demoting the whole site | Google, 2016 | Timeline |
| The sponsored and ugc attributes arrived on 10 September 2019, and nofollow became a hint | Google, 2019 | Link attributes |
| The December 2022 link spam update ran from 14 December 2022 to 12 January 2023 and named SpamBrain. No update since has carried the “link spam” name | Google, 2022 | Timeline |
| On 5 March 2024 Google added three policies: expired domain abuse, scaled content abuse and site reputation abuse | Google, March 2024 | Timeline |
| The August 2025 spam update ran from 26 August to 22 September 2025, 27 days | Google, 2025 | Timeline |
| The March 2026 spam update, on 24 March 2026, completed in about 19.5 hours, the fastest on record | Google, March 2026 | Timeline |
| The August 2026 spam update ran from 18 to 21 August 2026. Google said it targeted neither link spam nor site reputation abuse, which are handled by separate systems | Google, August 2026 | Timeline |
Google has not published a recent figure for how many manual actions it issues, and we could not verify any number for 2025 or 2026. Treat any manual action count you see quoted for those years with suspicion.
Case study results
Each result below was published by the agency involved. The figures are the publisher’s own and have not been independently checked.
| Statistic | Source and year | More detail |
|---|---|---|
| JRPass: 122 links, 139% more referring domains and 46% more organic traffic from digital PR in several countries | Reboot Online, agency case study, read October 2026 | Case studies |
| Rant Casino: 433 links and 114 pieces of coverage from 56 or more campaigns since 2020 | Reboot Online, agency case study, read October 2026 | Case studies |
| DAZN Bet: more than 350 pieces of coverage, 311 links, and Domain Rating from 26 to 58 in about a year | Receptional, agency article, July 2026 | Case studies |
| Cosmetify: 125 links, 72% to commercial pages, on a 12,000 pound budget, with a 421% return claimed | JBH, award entry, Performance Marketing Awards 2026 | Case studies |
| Booking.com for Business: 75 or more links at an average Domain Rating of 53, and 28% more organic traffic in under 12 months | Digitaloft, agency case study, updated April 2026 | Case studies |
| A dormant test site reached page one for all target terms within weeks after more than 180 syndicated links. Reboot notes it was not designed as a formal test | Reboot Online, own experiment, February 2025 | Case studies |
How to read these numbers
Vendor studies. Most of this data is published by companies that sell link building, outreach software or SEO tools. BuzzStream, Ahrefs, Semrush, Linkody, Peec AI and Muck Rack all describe their own platforms or their own customers. That does not make a figure wrong, but it shapes what was counted. Index sizes are marketing claims.
Survey samples. A survey reports what people say. The uSERP sample was 116 senior SEOs, the BuzzStream cost survey had about 70 respondents, and every survey here was answered by people who chose to take part. The gap between 35.3% and 74.3% on link buying is mostly a difference in who was asked and what they were asked.
Snapshots and tracked groups. Linkody’s “live by age” figures are a snapshot of links of each age, not one group of links followed over time. The Ahrefs link rot study measures links since January 2013 across the web. The two cannot be combined into one decay curve.
Correlation. The ranking and AI visibility figures are correlations. Big brands have more mentions, more links and more visibility for the same reason: they are big.
How to cite this page
Credit the original source, not us. If you quote the $295 guest post figure, the citation is BuzzStream, June 2026. If you quote the 66.5% link rot figure, it is Ahrefs, February 2024. Keep the year and keep the caveat: “reported”, “by its own count” and “snapshot” are part of the fact.
If you want to point readers to the collection, link to this page as well.
Where to go next
For prices in full, see link building cost and budget. For the survey evidence, read how common link buying is and do backlinks still matter. The tactics chart compares every method on cost and risk, and the glossary defines the terms used in the tables.
Common questions
How much does a backlink cost in 2026?
It depends on the method. BuzzStream's 2026 studies put a niche edit at $179 on average and a guest post at $295 direct or $461 through a vendor. ESBO's September 2026 analysis of 16,625 publishers put the median sponsored article at $570. SEOs surveyed by Editorial.link in March 2026 called $508.95 an acceptable price for one high-quality link.
What percentage of SEOs buy links?
Surveys disagree. In uSERP's September 2026 survey of 116 senior SEOs, 35.3% had paid for or approved sponsored backlinks in the past year. An older Authority Hacker survey of 755 link builders, cited by Ahrefs in 2024, put the share who pay for links at 74.3%. Both are admissions from self-selected samples, not measurements.
What is a normal reply rate for link building outreach?
About 1% for cold email. BuzzStream's April 2026 study of 1.32 million emails found a 1.06% reply rate for cold pitches and 20.1% for pitches to journalists who had replied before. The often quoted 8.5% comes from a 2019 Backlinko and Pitchbox study and is out of date.
How many backlinks are lost over time?
Ahrefs reported in a study dated February 2024 that 66.5% of links to about two million websites had rotted since January 2013. Linkody reported in June 2026 that 63% of the tracked links that were about one year old were live when checked, which is a snapshot from one vendor's customers.
Do backlinks still correlate with rankings?
Yes, modestly. In Ahrefs' study of one million US keywords, published in January 2025, referring domains correlated with rankings at 0.255. A correlation does not show cause, because pages that rank also attract links.
Can I cite these statistics?
Yes. Credit the original source named in each row, with its year, and link to this page if you want to point readers to the collection.
