What link building costs in 2026: a study of 253,527 prices

How guest post prices are spread

Link prices are heavily skewed. The average guest post in our data cost $640, but the median was $240: a minority of expensive placements drags the average up. For budgeting, use the median.

• 11.9% of guest post offers cost less than $50.
• 24% cost less than $100.
• 51.4% cost less than $250.
• 72.1% cost less than $500.
• 12.9% cost $1,000 or more.

The cheapest tenth of offers cost $42 or less. Some of those are fine small blogs; many sit on sites built mainly to sell links. At that price point, checking traffic and outbound links isn't optional.

Price by authority (DR)

Authority is the biggest single driver of price. The median guest post rose steadily from $142 on DR 1–9 sites to $637 on DR 70–79 sites, 4.5 times as much.

Above DR 80 the pattern breaks. Medians fall ($506 for DR 80–89) while the spread widens sharply: the middle half runs from $121 to $1,750. Very large sites sell everything from cheap contributor slots to premium sponsored features, so DR alone tells you little about what you're buying there.

The pale band in the chart shows the middle half of prices in each band; the dark bar is the median.

Price by organic traffic

Traffic moves price almost as much as authority. Sites with 100 to 999 monthly organic visits had a median guest post price of $152; sites with 100,000 or more visits had a median of $582.

Traffic is also harder to fake than DR, which is why we recommend setting a traffic floor before looking at any price list. Sites with almost no measurable traffic (1,611 offers) were the cheapest group at a median of $87, and usually the ones to avoid.

Price by country

Where a site's readers live changes the price. Among the ten countries with the most offers, German-audience sites were the most expensive at a median of $633, and Indian-audience sites the cheapest at $131.

US-audience sites, the largest group with 26,879 offers, had a median of $255; UK sites cost $316. Buy from the markets you sell into: a cheap link from the wrong country is still the wrong link.

Price by marketplace

Median guest post prices varied more than twentyfold between marketplaces, from $37 to $754. A marketplace's median reflects both the kind of sites it lists and the markup it adds.

Among the larger catalogs, Adsy ($140), eReferer ($141), PRWiz ($154) and Collaborator ($169) sat well below the $240 market median. Bazoom ($439) and Backlinked ($754) sat well above it.

Cheap isn't automatically good value, and expensive isn't automatically premium. The marketplace rankings show how each one vets sites.