A backlink costs from $179 to several thousand dollars. See prices by link type and site quality, why studies disagree, and what to check before you pay.
A backlink costs anywhere from about $179 to several thousand dollars, and the link type sets the floor. In BuzzStream's 2026 price studies, a link insertion lists at $179 on average, a guest post at $295 bought direct or $461 through a vendor, and a digital PR link at $1,250 to $1,500. Most of the sites behind those averages are low quality, and a high-quality guest post through a vendor averages $3,130. That is almost seven times the $461 vendor average. Below are the prices by type and by site quality, followed by a check you can run on any seller.
What each type of link costs
BuzzStream, a link outreach software company, publishes the widest set of numbers. Its link building pricing page, last updated October 20, 2026, pulls them together:
- A link insertion (also called a niche edit) adds your link to an article that already exists. BuzzStream's link insertion study puts the average at $179.
- A guest post is a new article that carries your link. BuzzStream's guest post study puts the average at $295 if you buy from the site and $461 through a vendor. The pricing page says vendors list guest posts at about 56% more than the publisher charges.
- Digital PR is coverage a journalist chooses to write. BuzzStream estimates $1,250 to $1,500 per unique link, and says a $5,000 to $10,000 campaign typically nets 6 to 7 linking domains.
- An agency retainer is a monthly fee for a set number of links. BuzzStream found published retainers from $2,500 to $10,000 a month.
BuzzStream says insertions are cheaper mainly because, with a guest post, you pay for a whole article to be written. Its digital PR estimate covers data collection, writing, design and outreach.
What a link you would want costs
The averages describe the market, and most of the market is weak. BuzzStream's guest post study rates 96.2% of guest post sites as low quality, and found that 39.6% of the sites have no monthly organic traffic at all. It defines a top-tier site as DR 81 or higher with at least 100,000 organic visits a month.
Once you filter for quality, prices change sharply:
- A high-quality guest post costs $3,130 on average through a vendor, and a top-tier one $6,018.
- On top-tier news sites, the study found averages of $3,836 bought direct and $7,209 through a vendor.
- A top-tier link insertion averages $778. That is about four and a half times the $174 low-quality average.
BuzzStream found traffic a better guide to guest post price than DR, though Adsy's data points the other way. The guest post study found you would pay $229 from a vendor for a site below 100 organic visits a month, against $3,210 for a site above 100k.
Why three studies give three different averages
Two other link sellers published guest post prices in 2026, and their averages do not match BuzzStream's. Each counts something different.
PressWhizz, published July 22, 2026, analyzed 22,703 completed placements from its own marketplace, worth $3,660,761. It reports an average guest post price of $164 and a median of $112 for a paid link. Those are completed sales on one marketplace, so they show what its buyers paid.
Adsy, updated June 23, 2026, used 52,671 websites from its inventory and reports an average guest post price of $459. That counts sites for sale, not sales.
BuzzStream counts listings across a large vendor database and splits them by quality. An average of completed orders and an average of listings should not match, and an average can sit well above a median when a few expensive placements are in the data.
Adsy's page also says the average price website owners list is $929 per backlink, while the average people pay is $207. It sums that up as listings at roughly 4x the typical transaction price. A quote is a starting point for negotiation, not the price.
A worked example: what a monthly budget buys
This is an illustration with round numbers, not a real campaign. Say you have two thousand dollars a month.
At the average insertion listing, that buys about eleven links, but BuzzStream rates 97.5% of the sites selling insertions as low quality. If you insist on top-tier insertions, it buys two. If you want a high-quality guest post through a vendor, it does not cover one. And as a digital PR budget, it is below the low end of the campaign range above.
The question to settle is how many weak links you would trade for one good one, and whether you can reach good sites directly and skip the vendor markup. Our post on what you are paying for with white-label link building covers the vendor markup from the agency side.
Check a site before you pay
These checks are ours. Each takes a few minutes and filters out most of what is for sale.
- Look at organic traffic over time, not just DR. A sharp drop or a flat line near zero means Google has stopped sending visitors, and a link there is worth little. Our post on guest post prices and publisher traffic covers what falling publisher traffic means for price.
- Check that the page will be indexed. Search Google for a few of the site's recent guest posts. If they do not show up, yours probably will not either.
- Read the outbound links. A site whose posts link to casinos, pills and loan sites in the same month sells to anyone, and your link would sit among theirs.
- Judge the page, not only the site. For an insertion, the article should be about your topic and already get some traffic.
- Ask the question BuzzStream recommends: what is my cost per link, and what DR and traffic will those placements have? If the seller cannot answer, treat that as a no.
- Agree on the link attribute in writing. See the policy note below.
Our checklist on how to vet a backlink before paying adds more checks.
The policy line before you buy
Paying for a link is a policy question as much as a price question. Google's spam policies list "Exchanging money for links, or posts that contain links" as link spam. The same page allows paid links as long as they carry a nofollow or sponsored attribute, which means a bought link should not pass ranking credit. Price your budget on that basis: what you are buying is exposure and referral traffic, and a followed paid link is a risk you take on.
After a placement goes live, confirm what you got. SerpCrest's bulk DoFollow checker checks a list of URLs for live, dofollow and indexed status, so you can see whether each link exists and carries the attribute you agreed on.
Before you sign anything, get three quotes for the same type of link, ask each seller for the cost per link with DR and traffic, and check the traffic yourself. If you are weighing an insertion against a new article, our comparison of niche edits and guest posts compares the two and the main risk of each.
