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In practice
Prospecting is the second step of the process we run — plan, prospect, qualify, write and negotiate, monitor — and the step most campaigns get wrong by confusing it with qualifying. Finding prospects is mechanical: competitor backlink gaps, pages ranking for the keywords you want links near, comparison roundups and review lists in your category, resource pages that already link to similar tools. Qualifying is the hard part, and it is where most link building fails.
A workable qualification bar is explicit and boring. We filter for Ahrefs DR 40+, which is a filter, never the verdict; require 2,000+ monthly organic visits, checked against the site itself rather than trusted as a dashboard number; require topical relevance to the client’s category; and reject sites with “write for us” or “advertise with us” pages, because a site that openly sells access is rarely editorially useful. Andreea Paluszak’s 30-second link-farm test sums up the screen: if one site jumps from crypto to health to SaaS to home improvement with commercial links dropped into everything, no metric turns it into a valuable prospect.
For a SaaS or AI buyer, the output of prospecting should be a shortlist you can inspect: site, page, why it fits, and what would have to be true for the link to exist. A vendor who will not show you the list is selling inventory, not work. The GEO angle matters too: AI answer engines draw heavily on reviews, lists and comparison articles, so those surfaces are worth prospecting even when their SEO metrics look unglamorous.
See also: Publisher vetting checklist, Relevance-first link building, Guest post.
Checklist: Link Insertion Campaign.
Related service: Link insertions.
