You're not buying links. You're buying your way out of PR.

Sit with one sentence for a second. In a survey of 500 SEO professionals, 76% said they pay $300 or more per link. Nearly half pay over $500. One in six pays four figures.

Now — what's the going rate for earned coverage?

There isn't one. There can't be. Nobody sends an invoice when a journalist decides your client belongs in a piece. A price per link can only exist in a market where links are sold, so that survey isn't measuring what it costs to do PR. It's measuring the going rate for skipping it.

And the other published figure makes it plainer still: $150 to $500 per link, including content creation. You're paying for the placement and writing the article yourself. No publication that actually wanted the story would let you do that.

Agencies are under a constant crush. Clients want results now, authority fast, a chart that goes up and to the right by next quarter. Backlinks are part of the business and always have been, so you get them however you can get them.

But they only take you so far. You can buy them, and most of what's for sale is low quality. They can drag on a client's authority instead of building it, and they can turn poisonous later — the site that sold you the link gets flagged, and now that's attached to your client. Risky and common practice at the same time.

I'm not going to tell you it's wrong. I'm telling you it isn't the same thing as a citation from a journalist or a blogger somebody actually reads. Most of it doesn't even give you a citation. You get dropped into a pool on a listicle whose only real feature is that it won't nofollow you.

So what's a small agency supposed to do?

Earned coverage is the holy grail and everybody knows it. It's also the thing nobody has time for unless they've got a dedicated team — which is exactly why the money keeps going the other way.

Line the two up.

You buy a link, on a page you commissioned, on a site that agreed to sell you one. It exists. It's countable. You can put it on a report. Nobody read the article, and nobody was ever going to.

Or your client gets named in a piece somebody wrote because they thought it was worth writing — sitting next to three competitors, in front of that publication's actual audience, with the publication's own credibility attached to it.

Those aren't two grades of the same thing. One is a line item and the other is a mention, and the gap between them has been widening fast.

This is the part that turns a preference into a business problem.

Practitioners now consistently report that brand mentions and branded search volume correlate more strongly with AI visibility than backlink counts or Domain Rating. Not the link — the mention. Which means a piece that names your client without linking at all can be doing more work than a paid link on a site nobody visits.

And the pool the assistants actually draw from is brutally narrow. Search Engine Land's dataset found Forbes was the only traditional outlet cited across all eleven industries it measured, with Reddit, Wikipedia, YouTube and Forbes topping every single sector.

Nobody sells you a placement in that pool. You can't buy your way into a Reddit thread where people are recommending products to each other, and Wikipedia will actively remove you for trying. That tier is earned or it's nothing.

So the bought link is costing more than it ever has at exactly the moment it stopped being the thing that counts. That's a bad position to be holding for another year.

Two things, because this argument is easy to overstate and the overstated version is everywhere.

When I say the quality is usually low, that's forty years of looking at these links talking, not a study. Nobody has published a proper quality tiering of the paid-link market, and I'd rather you knew which of these is which — the prices are surveyed, the judgement is mine. The part that isn't a judgement call is the survey itself: they're bought, not earned.

And earned coverage is genuinely harder. It's slower, most pitches get ignored, and you can't promise a client four placements in March the way you can promise four bought links. Anyone selling you earned media as the easy option has never had to do it in a month with a deadline.

Less mystical than it sounds, and it isn't relationship-building over years — that's the version you can't do.

Start where the competitors already are. Find the pieces that name three of your client's competitors and don't name them. That list is finite, it's countable, and every row on it is a writer who has already demonstrated they cover this category. You're not cold-pitching a stranger; you're pointing out an omission in something they wrote.

Then watch the calendar. A "best X of 2025" published last December gets rewritten this December, because that's what keeps it ranking. In the few weeks before that happens, the writer is actively deciding who's in the new version — and you're helping with a job they've already scheduled rather than asking for a favour.

And write about their article, not about your client. The pitch that works says "you covered these three, here's the one you missed and here's why." The pitch that gets deleted opens with a paragraph about your agency.

Same $500. One bought link, or a month of pitching against a list where every name has a reason attached. The second one is slower and some months it returns nothing. It also compounds, and the first one never will.

The reason most agencies don't double down on earned coverage is that building that result by hand is days of work per client. And nobody's come up with an elegant solution.

It's what I've been building.

Coverage Opportunities reads the competitors' coverage and hands back the list: every article that named them, who wrote it, when it ran, whether it looks like it refreshes annually, and the verbatim line where the competitor appears — so you can see exactly why your client belongs in the same piece. The pitch still has to be written by a person. We just cut out 90% of the work getting you there.

Open your last three link invoices and go and read the pages. Not the metrics — the pages. Ask whether a real person would ever have landed on that article, and whether you'd send it to the client as a piece of press.

Then decide whether that's what the retainer should be buying.

What's the difference between earned coverage and a bought link?

Price. Earned coverage doesn't have one — a publication writes about a client because it thinks the story is worth writing. A bought link has a rate card, and in most cases you supply the article as well.

How much do agencies pay for links?

76% of SEOs pay $300 or more per link, 47% pay $500 or more, and 16% pay over $1,000. Another analysis puts it at $150–$500 including the content. The most common monthly SEO retainer is 500 to 1,000 bucks, so the median client's month buys roughly one.

Are bought links bad?

I can't tell you they're low quality — no source I found grades them, and I'm not going to assert it. What I can tell you is that they're bought rather than earned, and that the tier of sources AI assistants actually draw from isn't for sale.

Does a mention without a link still count?

Increasingly yes. Practitioners report that brand mentions and branded search correlate more strongly with AI visibility than backlink counts or Domain Rating. That's a real shift in what's worth chasing.

How do you earn coverage without a PR person?

Work the competitor gap. Find the pieces naming their competitors that don't name them, pitch the writer about their own article, and time it to when roundups get refreshed. It's a finite list, not an open-ended chore.

Isn't earned coverage much slower?

Yes, and anyone telling you otherwise hasn't done it. You can't promise four placements in March. What you can do is build something that compounds, which a bought link never does.

• The intern with a spreadsheet is your PR department — who actually does this work at a small shop, and what it costs them.
• Your client asked ChatGPT about their own industry — why third-party presence is the slow, decisive one.
• Who's actually paying for AI visibility work — where the budget for this sits.