Original data · updated 22 October 2026
Link building statistics from 23,441 placements we verified ourselves
Of 23,441 backlink placements we built and later re-checked, 71% were still live. That figure comes from 34 delivered campaigns, and the average is the least useful number on this page. Survival is decided by what KIND of placement a link is, and the spread is enormous: our editorial and article placements come back near-intact, the foundation tiers hold a solid majority, and a couple of categories never worked at all — so we stopped selling them. The table below is that split, best first, computed from our own delivery records rather than estimated.
Backlink statistics by placement type
Every placement type with at least 20 verified links, strongest survival first. A placement counts as live only when a link to the customer’s site is actually found on the page. Read it top-down: the types at the top are the ones worth paying for, and they are what our editorial and in-article packs are built from.
| Placement type | Verified | Still live | Survival |
|---|---|---|---|
| Article | 138 | 129 | 93% |
| Social Bookmarking | 28 | 25 | 89% |
| Wiki | 4,335 | 3,467 | 80% |
| Web 2.0 | 15,806 | 11,999 | 76% |
| Profile | 97 | 64 | 66% |
| Backlink | 1,870 | 915 | 49% |
| Doc Sharing | 29 | 5 | 17% |
| Social Profile | 154 | 24 | 16% |
| Directory / Citation | 237 | 4 | 2% |
| Social Bookmark | 691 | 0 | 0% |
8 further placement types had fewer than 20 verified links and are left out rather than shown at a rate too thin to mean anything.
Method, and what this data cannot tell you
How it is measured. Every placement in a delivered report is fetched and inspected for a link resolving to the customer’s site. Live means the link was found. Dead means the page loaded and the link was absent. Anything inconclusive is excluded from the percentages rather than counted against the source, so 23,441 of 23,507 placements are represented above. Re-checks run nightly, so these figures move over time.
The category names are the sources’ own. We report each placement under the label it was delivered to us with, and never rename one, because a renamed category walks straight past the check that blocks it. Two labels that read almost the same can therefore be different work by different sources and sit rows apart in the table above — a 0% and a 90% on near-identical names is not a typo, it is the point.
This is one vendor’s record, not an industry study. It reflects the placement types we sell, the suppliers we use and the sites our customers operate. A different mix would produce different numbers. It is a census of our own work rather than a sample of the market, which makes it complete but not representative.
Live is not the same as valuable. A surviving link on a page nobody reads is still worth little. This measures persistence only — not authority, not traffic, not ranking impact — and a high survival rate should be read as a floor on quality rather than as proof of it.
Some attrition is normal. Self-published properties are removed, blogs close, pages get pruned. A rate in the seventies for that kind of placement is ordinary and priced in. What is not ordinary is a category that never produced a live link, which is why the two findings are reported separately above.
The category we stopped selling
- Social Bookmark — 0 live of 691 verified
These are not links that decayed. The pages load normally; they simply carry no link to the customer, and in these categories not one verified placement ever did. They are still sold by the thousand across this industry, inside packages priced on the count — which is exactly why the count is the wrong thing to buy on.
We found it in our own delivery records, so we removed both from every pack we sell and built the check into delivery: a report containing either category cannot be sent, and neither can a batch that comes back verified and essentially dead, whatever it is labelled as. That is the useful thing to take from this page — not that some link types fail, but that the ones we still sell are the ones we can show you surviving.
One distinction, so this does not read as a contradiction: our local SEO packages for businesses in the US, UK, Canada, Australia and other supported countries build business listings, a business’s own page on directories such as Yelp or Bing Places. Those are sold and checked as listings, meaning the page has to show the business’s name and its phone or website, and they are never counted in the tables on this page or delivered as backlinks.
What this means if you are buying links
Ask for the placement type breakdown before the count. A thousand links is a meaningless number until you know how it splits, and the split is what determines how much of it will still exist in six months.
Ask whether anyone re-checks after delivery. Most reports are written at handover and never revisited, which means they describe an intention rather than an outcome. A supplier who re-checks can tell you what survived; one who does not is quoting you the day it shipped.
Treat a claim of total survival as a warning rather than a reassurance. Nothing in this dataset — across 23,441 verified placements — supports the idea that every link in a campaign stays live, and a supplier promising it either is not measuring or is not telling you.
And buy from the top of the table. The reason we publish this is that it points at our own catalogue: the placement types with the strongest survival in our data are the ones in the editorial guest post and in-article link packs. Every counted link in those is checked live before your report is sent, and re-checked afterwards — which is the whole reason this page has numbers in it at all.
We publish this because it is the same measurement we run before any report goes out. If you want the equivalent read on your own site rather than on ours, the AI Visibility Audit shows where you currently stand in AI answers, and AI SEO services explains how models choose which source to quote.
Questions about backlink survival
What percentage of backlinks stay live?
Across every placement we have built and re-checked — 23,441 verified links from 34 campaigns — 71% were still live when we looked again. That single figure hides the only thing that matters, because survival is decided by placement type rather than by how well a campaign was run. One category — social bookmark — came back at zero across 691 verified placements. Anyone quoting a site-wide survival number without splitting it by type is averaging away the useful part.
How long do backlinks last?
The useful question is not how long a link lasts but whether it was ever really placed. In our data, links that disappear overwhelmingly do so early — the page is deleted, or was published without the link in the first place — rather than decaying gradually over years. An editorial placement inside a real article on a site with its own audience tends to persist as long as the article does. A link on a page created only to hold links tends to vanish with the page, and that is a property of the placement type, not of time.
Are cheap bulk backlink packages worth buying?
Partly, and only if you know which part. Bulk foundation packages are a mix of placement types whose survival rates differ enormously: the strongest components in our data hold up well, while social bookmark measured zero live across 691 verified placements. Those links are real in the sense that the pages exist, and worthless in the sense that no link to the customer survived on them. Buying a bulk pack is therefore not automatically a mistake, but paying for the whole count as though it were uniform is.
Why do most link building statistics come from tool vendors?
Because vendors who sell links have little reason to publish how many of theirs survive, and the companies with the crawl data sell software rather than placements. That leaves a gap: plenty of published research on what correlates with rankings, almost none on whether the links people actually buy are still there afterwards. This page is one vendor's own delivery record, which is a narrower thing than an industry study — see the limits section — but it is measured rather than claimed.
How is this data collected?
Each placement in a delivered report is fetched and checked for a link pointing to the customer's site. A placement counts as live only when that link is actually found, counts as dead only when the page loads and the link is absent, and is left out of the percentages entirely when the check is inconclusive — which is why 23,441 of 23,507 placements are represented. Re-checks run nightly against links already delivered, so these figures move as pages come and go rather than being frozen at handover.