How to Get Backlinks: A Step-by-Step Guide to Your First 100 Links

TL;DR

• Getting backlinks is one of the highest-leverage activities in SEO — backlinks signal authority to Google, push pages up the SERP, and drive referral traffic directly
• The how to get backlinks playbook follows a clear progression: zero-effort low-hanging fruit first (directories, coupon sites, business network), then competitor analysis and listicle outreach, then content-led strategies (skyscraper content, guest posts, link insertion)
• The first 25 backlinks require no content creation whatsoever — directories, partner listings, and discount sites can be secured through outreach alone
• In 2026, how to get backlinks has a second strategic layer most guides miss: the same third-party sources that give you backlinks for Google are also the sources AI systems like ChatGPT and Perplexity cite when recommending brands — making link building simultaneously an SEO and a GEO strategy
• Brands are 6.5× more likely to be cited through third-party sources than their own domains in AI search — which means every backlink you earn from a relevant external source is also a potential AI citation source
• After building backlinks, monitoring which of those link sources are actually driving AI citations — and which competitor sources are feeding AI recommendations instead of yours — closes the loop most link building programs leave open

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What Are Backlinks and Why Do They Matter?

A backlink is when one website links to another. When you publish a data study and an industry publication cites it with a hyperlink, that's a backlink pointing to your domain. When you reference an external source in your own content, you're creating a backlink for that site.

Backlinks matter to search engines because they function as votes of confidence. A page with many high-quality backlinks from relevant, authoritative sites signals to Google that it is worth recommending. The more trusted the referring domain, the more authority its backlink transfers.

For a brand new website, getting backlinks is the most direct path to establishing the baseline authority needed for content to rank. Without backlinks, even technically excellent content often fails to surface in competitive queries — Google has no external signal confirming the page's credibility.

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The Dual Value of Backlinks in 2026

How to get backlinks has always been central to SEO. In 2026, backlinks have a compounding second function that makes the same effort significantly more valuable.

According to AirOps' research on off-site signals in AI search, brands are 6.5× more likely to be cited through third-party sources than through their own domains when AI systems generate recommendations. The third-party sources that drive AI citations — comparison listicles, industry directories, authoritative blog posts, review platforms — are structurally identical to the sources that generate high-quality backlinks.

This means how to get backlinks in 2026 is also how to build AI citation authority. A link from a respected industry publication simultaneously improves your Google rankings and increases the probability of being cited by ChatGPT and Perplexity. The same effort serves two channels, and the compounding effect on brand visibility is substantial.

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Phase 1: Your First 25 Backlinks — Zero Content Required

The fastest path to initial backlinks requires no content creation. These sources can be secured through outreach alone.

Get Listed in Online Directories

Directories are the most accessible entry point for getting backlinks. They are low-effort, broadly available, and provide consistent NAP (Name, Address, Phone) signals that benefit local SEO alongside the backlink itself.

Priority directories for most businesses:

• General: Google Business Profile, Yelp, Bing Places, Apple Maps, Yell.com
• Industry-specific: search "[your niche] + directory" or "[your niche] + resources list" to find relevant vertical directories
• For SaaS: G2, Capterra, Product Hunt, GetApp, Trustpilot

Rules for directory backlinks:

• Quality over quantity — 20 relevant, high-traffic directories outperform 200 low-quality ones
• Never keyword-stuff your business name in a listing — Google penalizes this
• Ensure NAP is identical across every directory — inconsistencies undermine both SEO and AI entity accuracy

The AI visibility angle for directories: Review platforms are among the most impactful backlink and AI citation sources simultaneously. SE Ranking's research on ChatGPT citation factors found that domains with substantial brand mentions on consumer review platforms have significantly higher ChatGPT citation rates. G2, Capterra, and Trustpilot listings are dual-purpose investments.

Register on Discount and Coupon Sites

For e-commerce and consumer brands, coupon sites provide backlinks alongside direct referral traffic. Focus on platforms with genuine traffic: Hotukdeals, Vouchercodes, Groupon, Honey, StudentBeans, TopCashback.

Leverage Your Existing Business Network

Your current suppliers, partners, and collaborators are the easiest source of contextually relevant backlinks. The relationship already exists — you just need to activate it.

How to get backlinks from your network:

1. List every supplier, partner, and adjacent non-competing business you work with
2. Check their websites for a blog, partners page, or resources section
3. Email each one asking to be featured — offer a reciprocal listing or a guest post in return
4. Follow up quarterly to confirm backlinks remain live

These backlinks carry particularly strong SEO value because they come from topically relevant domains sharing your audience — which Google weights more heavily than generic directory links.

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Phase 2: Your First 50 Backlinks — Competitor Analysis and Outreach

Analyse Competitor Backlink Profiles with SEO Tools

Understanding where competitors get their backlinks is the fastest shortcut in link building. If a site linked to a competitor, it is far more likely to link to you than a cold prospect that has never heard of your category.

Workflow in Ahrefs or Semrush:

1. Enter a competitor's domain in Site Explorer / Domain Analytics
2. Open the Backlinks report and filter for followed links from high-authority referring domains
3. Identify directories, listicles, resource pages, and publications you're not yet listed on
4. Extract contact details using Hunter.io or ContactOut
5. Reach out with a personalized pitch explaining why your site belongs on the same sources

Get Added to Listicles

Listicles — "10 Best [Category] Tools" or "Top [Service] for [Audience]" — are among the highest-value backlink sources available in any industry. They are frequently trafficked, contextually relevant, and regularly cited by AI systems in response to category research queries.

How to get backlinks from listicles:

1. Search "best [your product/service]" on Google, filtered to past year for recent articles
2. Identify listicles where you should appear but don't
3. Contact the author or site owner with a brief pitch and a pre-written two-sentence product description
4. Repeat monthly as new listicles are published

The critical AI connection: According to AirOps' 2026 State of AI Search report, third-party comparison and listicle content is a dominant driver of brand citations in AI-generated answers. Getting added to a listicle simultaneously earns a backlink and increases the probability of ChatGPT and Perplexity citing your brand when buyers research your category. These are not separate outcomes — they come from the same effort.

Create Ego Bait Listicles

The reverse strategy: compile a listicle featuring non-competing businesses in your ecosystem and offer them inclusion in exchange for a backlink or guest post. "The Best [Adjacent Service Providers] in [Your City or Niche]" generates positive-sum outreach — featured businesses gain exposure, you gain backlinks and content. Most businesses approached will accept, because being featured in a curated list costs them nothing.

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Phase 3: Your First 100 Backlinks — Content-Led Strategies

Reaching 100 backlinks requires content investment. These strategies produce the most durable, high-authority backlinks available.

Skyscraper Content

The skyscraper technique: create definitively better content than the top-performing piece on a valuable topic, then reach out to sites currently linking to the inferior version and ask them to update their link.

The workflow:

1. Find high-traffic topics in your niche with existing top-ranking content using Ahrefs Content Explorer
2. Identify gaps in the top-ranking piece: outdated data, missing subtopics, thin coverage
3. Create a version that is demonstrably more comprehensive, more current, or more specific
4. Use Ahrefs to find every domain linking to the original piece
5. Email each: "We've published an updated resource on this topic — thought you might prefer to link to the more current version"

Skyscraper content also earns backlinks organically over time as it ranks and becomes the go-to reference. Assets combining original research with comprehensive coverage earn the most backlinks because they are genuinely cite-worthy — both for human curators and AI retrieval systems.

Link Insertion Outreach

Find existing published content where your page could naturally be referenced and ask the author to add your link.

Search operator: intext:"[your topic or content title]" in Google — surfaces pages discussing your topic without currently linking to your resource. Email the author explaining the value your link adds to their readers. Many will ask for a reciprocal link or guest post in return.

Guest Posting

Contributing guest posts means writing an article for another website's blog in exchange for an author bio with a backlink to your site. When executed with genuine content value, guest posts earn backlinks from contextually relevant, high-authority domains.

Finding guest post opportunities:

• Search: intext:"write for us" + "[your topic]" or inurl:"guest-post" + "[your topic]"
• Evaluate using Ahrefs Domain Rating — target DR 40+ for meaningful backlinks
• Pitch 2–3 topic ideas that genuinely serve the host site's audience
• Write to the highest standard of your regular content — a weak guest post reflects on your brand and earns a weak backlink

To acquire links, you might also consider link exchanges or submissions to web directories. In this regard, I recommend using:toolpilot.ai

Dageno AI: Know Which Backlinks Are Driving AI Citations

Getting backlinks builds authority with Google. But in 2026, the most strategically valuable backlinks do double duty: they improve search rankings and they appear in the citation sources AI systems use when recommending your brand.

The challenge is knowing which sources are doing which job. Not every high-DR backlink source is also an AI citation source. The comparison listicle that earns you a modest backlink from a DA-45 site might be driving 40% of your Perplexity citations. The guest post on a DA-80 domain might be almost entirely absent from AI retrieval. Without visibility into which sources are actually feeding AI recommendations, link building prioritization is partially blind.

Dageno AI is a GEO visibility platform that connects backlink building to AI citation outcomes. It monitors brand citations across 10+ AI platforms — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, AI Mode, Gemini, Claude, Grok, DeepSeek, Qwen, and Microsoft Copilot — and surfaces the specific third-party sources driving those citations. When a listicle you've been added to starts generating AI recommendations for your brand, Dageno surfaces it. When a competitor's guest post in an industry publication is driving ChatGPT to recommend them for a query you should be winning, Dageno identifies the source.

For link building teams, this intelligence changes how outreach is prioritized. Rather than ranking prospects purely by domain authority, you can factor in whether the source type and topic area matches the citation patterns AI systems favor. Explore the Dageno blog for the latest research on which external sources drive AI citations, use the Dageno extension to check AI visibility signals while researching link prospects, or read about AI search monitoring platforms to understand the full monitoring landscape. Free plan available at dageno.ai.

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Backlink Quality Evaluation Framework

Before pursuing any backlink opportunity, evaluate it across these dimensions:

Factor	What to Check
Domain Authority (DR/DA)	Target 30+ for meaningful SEO value; 50+ for premium backlinks
Topical relevance	Is the referring domain in your industry or a closely related vertical?
Referring page traffic	Does the page receive organic visitors? Zero-traffic pages provide minimal value
Link type	Followed backlinks pass authority; nofollow backlinks pass referral traffic but not PageRank
Placement	In-content backlinks outperform footer or sidebar placements
AI citation potential	Is this source type cited by AI systems for queries in your category?

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Bottom Line

How to get backlinks in 2026 follows the same three-phase progression it always has — zero-content outreach, competitor analysis and listicle targeting, content-led strategies — with the same fundamentals of quality (relevance, authority, traffic) unchanged.

The meaningful new dimension: backlinks from third-party sources are simultaneously AI citation sources. With brands 6.5× more likely to be cited through off-site content than through their own domains, your link building program is also your GEO program. Prioritizing backlink sources that serve both Google's ranking algorithm and AI retrieval systems — and monitoring which ones are actually generating AI recommendations — makes every link building effort work harder across both channels that increasingly determine brand discovery.

Dageno is the monitoring layer that connects the two, showing you which of your backlinks are becoming AI citations and where competitor sources are winning the citations your link building should be generating.

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References

• AirOps – Off-Site Signals in AI Search: Brands 6.5× More Likely Cited via Third-Party Sources, Listicle and Directory Citation Rate Analysis
• SE Ranking – How to Optimize for ChatGPT: 32K+ Referring Domains 3.5× Citation Rate, Review Platform Brand Mention Impact
• Ahrefs – AI Brand Visibility Correlations: Web Mentions as Top AI Visibility Factor, Backlink Domain Authority vs AI Citation Rate Comparison
• AirOps – 2026 State of AI Search: Third-Party Comparison Content Citation Dominance, ChatGPT 77%+ AI Referral Visit Share
• Position Digital – Step-by-Step Guide to Getting Your First 100 Backlinks: Directory Strategy, Competitor Analysis, Skyscraper and Guest Post Techniques