A leading AI writing platform, 40M+ monthly visits
874 placements across 133 product pages, in nineteen months.
Most link building case studies ask you to trust a screenshot. This one is built from the public Ahrefs index, so you can verify any figure on this page yourself.
The brief
In early 2025 the client began launching product pages into the most contested corner of the AI market. A new URL starts with nothing: no referring domains, no authority, no reason for Google to rank it above competitors who had been pointing links at their equivalent pages for years.
The client’s internal bar was stricter than most agencies’ sales decks. Domain Rating 40 or above. Two thousand real organic visits minimum. Relevant ranking keywords. A stable traffic graph with no post-update cliffs. A human reviewer signing off on every domain before outreach began.
We ran the campaign for nineteen months. What follows is how the work was done, and then one page examined in full detail, because a single page is where cause and effect are actually visible.
How the links went in
Delivery ran continuously for nineteen months without a break in the engagement, across 736 separate publisher relationships.
Every domain cleared the full bar before the client ever saw it, and the client approved each one before any outreach began. In a typical vetting batch roughly three of every four candidate domains fail. That rejection rate is the largest single cost in running a campaign like this, and it is the reason the placements hold up years later.
Anchor text was disciplined to the same degree. Across 851 placements with recorded anchors we used 184 distinct variations, and the brand name appeared in eleven of them. The profile is built on product-category anchors, which is what keeps it defensible when an update arrives.
The campaign ran straight through Google’s March 2026 core update, the one that wiped a significant share of the qualified publisher pool across the industry. Nothing in the profile needed cleaning up afterwards, because the pipeline was built on sites that had real traffic and rankings to lose.
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What happens when a link comes down
Links get removed. Editors leave, sites get redesigned, articles get consolidated. Any agency claiming otherwise is either new or not paying attention. The question that matters is what happens next, and for most agencies the answer is nothing, because nobody is watching.
Removals are flagged automatically
Every placement we have ever built is monitored by automation, not by someone remembering to check a spreadsheet. The moment a link comes down, an alert goes to our team and to the client at the same time. You find out when we do, not at the next quarterly review.
We restore it, or we replace it
First we go back to the publisher and work to get the original link restored. Where that is not possible, we build a replacement placement on an equivalent domain at no cost. The guarantee has no expiry date, which is why placements we built in 2025 are still our responsibility today.
One page, examined closely
The client’s flagship product page took 135 of the 874 placements, the deepest single-page campaign in the account. It launched in January 2025 with nothing pointing at it.
By the middle of 2026 it had 592 referring domains. We built 135 of them. The remainder is organic acquisition, client PR, and the unsolicited links a page of this size attracts once it starts ranking, which is the compounding effect a foundation campaign is supposed to produce.
Referring domains to the target page, page-level, monthly. Source: Ahrefs Site Explorer.
Estimated organic traffic to the target page, monthly, through June 2026. From 30,035 visits in January 2025 to a peak of 2,425,454 in October 2025, settling above 1.2 million as the category’s search volume and SERP composition shifted.
Keyword rankings by position band, US. Top-three positions grew from 199 to a peak of 1,262.
URL Rating for the target page, from 2.3 to 30 at peak.
Launching a product page into a competitive category this year?
This is the exact scenario we build for: a new URL with no authority, in a market where incumbents have a multi-year head start. We will map what it takes to close that gap before you commit to anything.
What we actually placed on
Quality claims are cheap, so here is the distribution. Not a sample and not our pick of the batch: we ran all 735 publisher domains from the entire campaign back through Ahrefs and measured every one of them.
Domain Rating distribution across all 735 publisher domains used in the campaign. Ninety-four percent sit at DR 40 or above, 53 percent at DR 60 or above, and 32 percent at DR 70 or above.
| Measured across all 874 placements | Result |
|---|---|
| Placements delivered | 874 |
| Unique publisher domains | 735 |
| Domains carrying exactly one link | 609 (83%) |
| Median Domain Rating | 61.0 |
| Domains at DR 40 or above | 691 (94%) |
| Domains at DR 60 or above | 392 (53%) |
| Domains at DR 70 or above | 236 (32%) |
| Median publisher organic traffic | 8,906 / month |
| Publishers above 2,000 monthly visits | 607 (83%) |
| Combined monthly readership of all publishers | 31,359,530 |
| Distinct anchor variations used | 184 |
| Anchors containing the brand name | 11 of 851 (1.3%) |
What we did not do
We built 135 of the flagship page’s 592 referring domains, which is roughly 23 percent. The content, the on-page work, and the product were entirely the client’s. A page this strong earns links on its own, and we are not going to claim a curve we did not draw.
What is unambiguously ours: 874 placements across 736 publisher relationships, at a median Domain Rating of 61 on the page we verified in full, on sites with millions of monthly readers between them, built on a profile where the brand name appears in barely one anchor in a hundred.
One thing the audit found that nobody was looking for
While verifying our own placements we found something else in the page’s backlink profile: a network of at least 104 machine-generated domains pointing at it. All sat below DR 1 with zero organic traffic, following two obvious naming patterns, and they arrived in two clusters, October 2025 and February to March 2026.
None were ours and none were natural. We flagged them for disavow review. This is the kind of finding that only surfaces when someone audits a link profile at the individual link level, which is what verifying your own work honestly requires you to do anyway.
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How to check any number on this page
Every figure here comes from Ahrefs Site Explorer, pulled on 12 September 2026. Referring domain counts and organic traffic are page-level exact-match queries. Domain Rating and publisher traffic for every publisher domain come from Ahrefs batch analysis. Keyword bands come from the keywords history report, United States. Placement, domain and anchor counts come from our own delivery records.
Anyone with an Ahrefs seat can reproduce the third-party figures. That is the point: the client relationship ended in September 2026, and the numbers did not change when it did.