Sixty-six percent of the links pointing at any given page nine years ago are dead today, according to Ahrefs' review of its own index. Pages ranking on page one pick up new referring domains at a pace of roughly 5% to 14.5% a month, the same analysis found.
Put those two facts together and SaaS startup link building stops looking like a campaign with an end date. It's closer to a maintenance habit a growing product keeps up, the same way it keeps shipping features.
That changes what's worth funding first. A link built this quarter only pays off if the page hosting it survives and keeps getting crawled next year, so chasing volume over durability wastes a startup's limited runway.
What SaaS startup link building actually costs a founder
Money is usually the real constraint, not know-how. A founder with no PR budget can still get quoted by a reporter, which is worth more to a search engine than most guest posts a paid campaign would buy.
Featured.com acquired Help A Reporter Out from Cision and relaunched it as a free service on April 22, 2025, restoring the three-emails-a-day format journalists and sources used before Cision owned it.
Answering one of those queries well enough to get quoted earns a link from a publication that no outreach email could talk its way into on its own.
The same logic works on a company's own product data. A SaaS product that publishes usage numbers pulled straight from its dashboards gives other writers something to cite, and a citation is a link nobody had to email anyone to get.
What Google still calls manipulation
Not every shortcut is worth the risk it carries. Google's spam policies name buying or selling links for ranking purposes, trading goods or services for a link, and guest posts or press releases distributed purely to plant optimized anchor text as violations.
Paid placements are still allowed. Google says so directly, as long as the link carries a rel="nofollow" or rel="sponsored" attribute so it can't pass ranking credit. A startup that skips that one tag on a sponsored post is taking on Google's spam policy for no reason at all.
Backlinks aren't the only signal that counts anymore
Photo by Noussaiba Garti on Pexels
Ahrefs studied 75,000 brands to see what actually predicts inclusion in Google's AI Overviews, and web mentions correlated at 0.664 against just 0.218 for traditional backlinks.
A brand that turns up by name in forum threads, review sites and other people's articles is starting to matter as much as one with a tidy backlink profile.
That shift is worth planning around now, and it's the same pattern covered in our look at how retailers earn AI Overview citations. A digital marketing and growth plan built only around link counts is already behind.
None of this replaces the basics in a startup's broader digital transformation roadmap. It just means the line item labeled link building needs to include getting named, not only getting linked, if it's going to hold up for the next few years.
Cover photo by Jan van der Wolf on Pexels