Link Building Trends Report (2025) buzzstream.com

Link building is always a hot-button issue in the SEO community. After a tumultuous 2024, we’ve heard (and felt) that SEOs and organizations are becoming more skeptical about the impact of links and link building. We teamed up with Garrett French of Citation Labs to truly understand where things are going in 2025. Garrett and his team have been building links since the early days of SEO, and I trust no one better to help us identify market trends and get to the bottom of how link building is used by organizations worldwide. So, without further ado, here’s our Link Building Trends Report. Feel free to use any/all of the data in the report below, but please link and attribute to BuzzStream and Citation Labs. Table of Contents 61% manage link building in-house, but agencies still play a role. 66% struggle with identifying backlink tactics, making strategy a key challenge. Only about a third (29%) find their link building efforts successful. 68% prioritize links to blog posts, but only just 41% focus on product pages. 75% are given 6 months or fewer to prove the value of their link building efforts. Only 29% say link-building budgets are easy to secure. 56% expect their link building budgets to increase in 2025. Just 11% have a repeatable process for getting cited in AI. Only 40% feel reports effectively convey the value of link building. Section 1 Link Building Management Tracking, reporting, and executing link building efforts is a full-time job for many organizations. So, we wanted to start with some baseline information on how link building is managed in major organizations. (Note: this section examines how link building is managed in-house only. The rest of the report is from agencies, freelancers, consultants, and in-house.) 1 For those we surveyed who work in-house at […]