the market report
The backlink market, measured
Everyone selling links tells you about their own inventory. Nobody tells you what the same domain costs next door, or how much of what is on sale has authority it did not earn. We buy across 6 marketplaces, so we can measure both.
Free, updated hourly, and yours to cite. No supplier or domain is named — see method.
finding 01
The forgeries cluster where people shop
A domain is counted suspect when its link authority is high but it has effectively no organic search presence — the signature of authority that was bought rather than earned. You would expect that to rise steadily with claimed DR. It does not. It peaks at DR 40–50, where 26.7% of domains fail, and then falls away above DR 70.
That band is not an accident. It is the workhorse range most link budgets are spent in: high enough to be worth buying, low enough not to invite scrutiny. Forgery follows demand.
share of domains flagged suspect · domains measured at right
finding 02
Who checks the inventory matters more than what it costs
Suppliers are not named here. They are grouped by how they operate: a self-serve marketplace lets anyone list a site, while a managed seller has a human decide what gets sold. That one distinction predicts the fake rate better than price does.
Pick a listing at random from a self-serve marketplace and it is 1.8× more likely to sit on a fake domain than one from a curated seller. A domain carried by several suppliers is counted once per supplier here, because that is the choice a buyer actually faces.
Both kinds sell real inventory too, which is the problem: you cannot avoid the fakes by avoiding a supplier, only by measuring the domain.
finding 03
What a link actually costs, by subject
Median price per placement, across every supplier, in USD. Suppliers use unrelated category vocabularies, so these are harmonised subjects rather than any one seller’s labels.
| Subject | Domains | Median price | Median DR | Suspect | Price gap |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| News | 57,916 | $139 | 26 | 20.3% | 77% |
| Lifestyle | 36,158 | $153 | 28 | 19.1% | 71% |
| Technology | 36,056 | $147 | 26 | 18.1% | 79% |
| Business | 35,402 | $180 | 28 | 19.1% | 70% |
| Finance | 28,825 | $103 | 20 | 17.1% | 77% |
| Arts | 25,038 | $196 | 27 | 18.9% | 80% |
| Entertainment | 23,602 | $200 | 29 | 18.2% | 79% |
| Health | 22,560 | $149 | 24 | 17.7% | 79% |
| Sports | 20,755 | $203 | 29 | 17.9% | 64% |
| Home | 18,965 | $194 | 26 | 18.9% | 66% |
| Travel | 18,790 | $195 | 24 | 16.2% | 66% |
| Marketing | 15,226 | $195 | 31 | 19.3% | 73% |
| Education | 14,802 | $175 | 27 | 19% | 76% |
| Fashion | 13,700 | $151 | 23 | 18.1% | 74% |
| Food | 13,274 | $170 | 25 | 14.7% | 77% |
| Society | 13,051 | $246 | 29 | 21.6% | 59% |
| Gaming | 12,361 | $120 | 27 | 15.9% | 78% |
| Family | 11,467 | $228 | 27 | 17.5% | 70% |
| Beauty | 7,574 | $258 | 27 | 18.7% | 57% |
| Gambling | 7,449 | $94 | 27 | 20.3% | 66% |
| Shopping | 7,203 | $202 | 25 | 17.2% | 66% |
| Fitness | 7,155 | $216 | 28 | 16.7% | 83% |
| Music | 6,563 | $187 | 26 | 15.6% | 78% |
| Real Estate | 6,473 | $184 | 25 | 18.1% | 51% |
| Science | 5,980 | $228 | 28 | 15.9% | 69% |
| Automotive | 5,823 | $173 | 23 | 18% | 73% |
| Career | 4,862 | $245 | 30 | 19.1% | 69% |
| Legal | 3,827 | $171 | 27 | 21.3% | 79% |
| Environment | 3,674 | $264 | 28 | 20.3% | 52% |
| Pets | 2,818 | $135 | 19 | 13.6% | 86% |
price gap = median difference between the cheapest and dearest seller of the same placement on the same domain
finding 04
The same domain, two prices
56,256 domains in this catalogue are sold by more than one marketplace at the same placement type. The median gap between the cheapest and dearest seller is 77%.
Nothing about the link changes. Same domain, same placement, same publisher — the difference is entirely which account you happened to buy through. A buyer with one supplier cannot see this, because from inside one catalogue there is only ever one price.
finding 05
Sites that take gambling money are cheaper, not dearer
Conventional wisdom says restricted verticals carry a premium. In this catalogue they carry a discount, against the median unrestricted placement:
| Vertical | Placements | Median price | vs unrestricted |
|---|---|---|---|
| Forex | 12,823 | $100 | -24% |
| Crypto | 13,621 | $100 | -24% |
| Gambling | 12,907 | $100 | -24% |
| Pharma | 7,996 | $95 | -28% |
| CBD | 12,094 | $90 | -32% |
| Dating | 8,063 | $90 | -32% |
| Vape | 9,095 | $70 | -47% |
The sites accepting them are not lower quality on paper — their median claimed DR is 30, against 22 for everything else. They are more likely to be fake (20% versus 18.1%). A publisher willing to take anything is telling you something, and the market appears to have priced it in.
finding 06
Price and turnaround by placement type
| Type | Placements | Median price | Median turnaround |
|---|---|---|---|
| Guest Post | 281,485 | $153 | 7 days |
| Link Insert | 73,580 | $82 | 8 days |
| Niche Edit | 61,565 | $96 | 5 days |
| Homepage Link | 26,869 | $228 | 7 days |
| Media Placement | 193 | $1,048 | — |
method
How this was measured
Every placement offered by 6 marketplaces we hold accounts with, normalised to one schema and one currency. 161,065 domains were then measured independently, against a third-party backlink index rather than the seller’s own claim.
Suspect means substantial link authority with effectively no organic search presence. It is a strong signal, not a verdict: a legitimate site can be missed by an index. We publish it as a share, never against a named domain.
Price gap compares the same placement type on the same domain across sellers. Comparing a homepage link against a niche edit produces a far bigger number that means nothing, so it is excluded.
DR is what the seller claims. Our independent measure runs on a different scale and correlates with claimed DR at only 0.36, so it is used to flag fakes, never to silently restate the number you are shopping on.
Generated 2026-08-30. Refreshed hourly from the live catalogue.
Your agent can see all of this at order time.
Every number on this page is a filter in the API. Search all 6 marketplaces at once, take the lowest price on a domain, and skip anything flagged suspect.