Since backlinks are one of the most important ranking factors on Google, link-building is an integral part of any SEO strategy. 

Research shows that the top-ranked results on Google have 3.8x more backlinks than the other results. 

Also, sites with higher domain ratings rank better on Google, which is why link-building is all about securing backlinks from authoritative websites in your field (which help increase your domain rating).

Yet, link-building is also one of the most challenging aspects of SEO, and it’s not always easy to find backlink-worthy websites. 

That’s where AI link prospecting enters the picture. 

What’s link prospecting?

It’s the process of discovering and vetting potential backlink opportunities to ensure you only pursue the highest-quality options available. 

Link prospecting involves finding websites online that:

  1. Are in your niche (or are related to it contextually) 
  2. Have high domain authority and domain rating scores 
  3. Align with your preferred link-building method (like accepting guest posts) 

If a site is able to check all these boxes, it’s worthy of your outreach efforts. If the website doesn’t possess all of these qualities, your best bet is to forget about it and continue your search. 

The only problem?

Link prospecting is an extremely time-consuming process, which gets even worse when you pile it on top of link outreach, which is another massive time suck. 

The solution?

AI-powered tools are perfect for speeding up the link prospecting process. These tools will scour the internet to find golden backlink opportunities that align perfectly with your needs, saving you a ton of time and effort. 

Instead of handling link prospecting all on your own, AI tools will significantly speed up and simplify the process. 

In this article, we’ll teach you how to master AI-driven link prospecting, and we’ll take a look at the most popular tools for it right now, so don’t go anywhere! 

How AI Identifies High-Quality Link Prospects 

First, let’s go over the main aspects of link prospecting. 

Not all backlinks are of equal quality, as the impact of a backlink is directly tied to the quality and trustworthiness of the website it comes from.

In order to positively impact your search rankings, you need to generate backlinks coming from trusted websites in your field. Building backlinks from spammy sites that offer no value to users will have no impact on your rankings, so there’s no point in wasting your time with them. 

The same is true for irrelevant backlinks. If a site isn’t related to yours at all, then linking to it will provide no value to your audience, rendering it useless (and potentially a source of confusion). 

An example would be a blog about workout routines randomly linking to an online store selling pet toys in the middle of the post.

The link to the pet toy store isn’t relevant and may wind up causing confusion. This is why Google does not value irrelevant backlinks, so they’ll have no impact on your search rankings. 

The two most important qualities you should look for in a backlink are:

  1. Its level of authority 
  2. Whether it’s relevant to your content or not 

Measuring authority and relevance 

Let’s start with authority, which you can measure by checking a website’s Domain Authority score (Moz) or its Domain Rating (Ahrefs). 

They’re both third-party metrics that judge the ranking power of a domain, thus reflecting how impactful a backlink from said domain will be. 

The main difference is:

  • Moz’s Domain Authority (DA) score considers a domain’s backlink profile AND other SEO factors like on-page content and social media signals. 
  • Ahrefs Domain Rating (DR) exclusively measures the strength of a domain’s backlink profile and does not consider any other factors.

We find it beneficial to measure both DA and DR to get the most well-rounded view of a domain’s ranking strength. 

In terms of relevance, a backlink can be either directly or contextually relevant to your content:

  • Direct relevance means a page is directly related to your content. An example would be a fitness blog linking to an online store selling fitness products. 
  • Contextual relevance means the site normally isn’t related to your content but is in this one instance. An example would be a news site (normally not relevant) that’s covering a story about fitness products (relevant in context).

AI-powered backlink audits and competitor analysis 

Okay, now that you’re more familiar with how link prospecting works, let’s explore how AI speeds up the process. 

An AI-powered link prospecting tool like Semrush’s offering will find backlink opportunities for you at the push of a button. 

It will check each website’s DA and DR scores and ensure relevance before adding it to your list of prospects. 

The best part?

These types of tools can uncover thousands of prospects within minutes. 

You won’t have to waste countless hours and days hunting down relevant backlink opportunities, so you can jump straight into the outreach process (which AI can help with too, but more on this in a bit). 

Besides link prospecting, automated tools are also great for backlink audits and analyzing your competitors. 

Our completely free backlink checker tool can handle both processes, so let’s preview how it works. 

All you have to do is enter any URL (it could be yours or your competitors) into the tool, select what you want to check (like an exact URL or subdomain), and hit View Backlinks Report.

From there, you’ll see an extensive report detailing the domain’s backlinks. We include crucial metrics like dofollow/nofollow and each backlink’s authority score to help with the audit process.

This tool provides a reliable way to audit your backlink profile and analyze your competitors, especially if you don’t have the budget to invest in any paid tools. 

The Best AI Tools to Use for Link Prospecting 

AI-driven link prospecting can save you a ton of time and money, but you need to make sure you select the right tool for your needs. 

To us, the top 3 AI-powered platforms for link prospecting are:

  1. Semrush
  2. Pitchbox
  3. Ahrefs

Let’s analyze each one so you can determine which will work best for you. 

Semrush (Link-Building Tool and Copilot AI) 

As a platform, Semrush uses AI-driven algorithms to offer actionable insights into all things SEO. It has tools for keyword research, traffic analysis, and site audits – just to name a few.  

In terms of link prospecting, its most valuable features are its Link-Building Tool and Copilot AI. 

The Link-Building Tool is specifically made for gathering backlink opportunities based on your specifications, so let’s take a look at it first. 

You can find it under the Link-Building section on Semrush’s left-hand sidebar:

You’ll need to add a new project if you haven’t already added your website to Semrush. Once that’s done, the first step is to provide the keywords that you want to rank higher for online.

This step ensures that the backlinks you generate will help you improve your rankings for the right keywords. You can add up to 10 (we just added some generic keywords related to digital marketing for this example). 

After that, you need to enter competitors that you want to outperform:

Once again, you can add up to 10 competitors here, but it’s up to you how many you want to enter (for instance, you may only have one stubborn competitor that you want to outrank). 

As soon as you’ve entered your competitors, hit the Start Link-Building button to generate a huge list of prospects. 

Be patient, as this can take up to 15 minutes:

When your report is ready, you’ll have a few sections to check out:

To cut straight to the chase, head to the Prospects tab:

This is where the true meat of the tool lies. 

As you can see, we have 2,509 prospective websites to vet for the outreach process. Each prospect has its authority score (AS) listed, as well as its URL type (like if it’s a blog or review site). 

Semrush also has Copilot AI, an AI-powered dashboard assistant that gives you all sorts of helpful SEO tips. 

It will clue you in on things like lost backlinks, keyword opportunities, and backlink opportunities:

Semrush’s Copilot is a truly helpful assistant that provides actionable advice based on your website’s data. 

Unfortunately, it’s not a chatbot, so you can’t ask it for specific things outright (like backlink opportunities), so you’re stuck with the suggestions it spits out. 

Pitchbox’s AI-powered link prospecting 

Pitchbox offers extensive link prospecting tools powered by AI, including the ability to import data from other platforms. 

In fact, you can access your Semrush and Ahrefs data straight from Pitchbox, negating the need to switch tabs between programs.

It contains a lot of similar features to Semrush and Ahrefs, such as the ability to:

  • Analyze competitor backlinks
  • Filter for specific TLDs (top-level domains, like if you wanted to build links from .gov or .edu sites)
  • Monitor existing campaigns 

One unique feature is that Pitchbox will fetch the contact info for each website it provides, saving you the hassle of hunting down email addresses for site owners. This saves a ton of time and hassle during the outreach process, which is a plus. 

There is a steep learning curve involved with the program due to its sheer number of features, though. For this reason, Pitchbox can be a bit much for beginners. It’s also on the pricier side, especially if you choose to pay monthly:

You are able to get a 15% discount by paying upfront, but you’ll have to pay a hefty lump sum. 

Ahrefs competitive analysis tool 

Lastly, let’s take a look at how you can use Ahrefs’ Competitive Analysis tool to identify valuable link prospects. 

First, select it on the toolbar at the top of the page:

This is what the tool looks like:

By default, it’s set to show Keywords for competitive analysis, but that’s not what we want. To identify backlink opportunities instead, we need to set it to show referring domains:

Once that’s done, you need to enter your URL under ‘Not linking to this target.’ 

Next, add competitors that you know have valuable backlinks that you don’t under ‘But linking to these competitors’:

You have the option to add up to 10 competitors, but we’re sticking with two for this example. 

Hit the ‘Show link opportunities’ button to generate a list of backlink prospects:

We now have 3,319 domains to target for outreach, and we can see the Domain Rating (DR) for each one. 

You can also export this data to use in other tools (like Pitchbox, for example). 

This tool is particularly valuable for closing backlink gaps between you and your competitors. A backlink gap, as the name would imply, refers to a competitor who has more backlinks than you, thus forming a ‘gap.’ 

It’s difficult to outrank websites that have more backlinks than you, as evidenced by the stat shared in the intro (high-ranking web pages have 3.8x more backlinks than lower-ranking pages). 

So, if there’s a competitor who has you beat in terms of backlinks, you can use this tool to find the right opportunities to help even the odds. After all, if these websites are linking to your competitors, there’s a good chance they’ll link to you, too (and that they’ll accept things like guest posts). 

Automating Link-Building with AI (Outreach and Relationship-Building) 

Now that we’ve looked at the top tools for AI link prospecting, let’s examine how you can use the technology for other SEO tasks. 

For instance, Pitchbox and other tools have features for automating link outreach. 

Link-building outreach is famous for being extremely time-consuming (not to mention boring at times), so it’s the perfect type of task to use AI to speed up. You can even use free tools like ChatGPT to help you draft emails and come up with email outreach ideas. 

All it takes is a simple prompt like this:

To generate a useful email template like this:

This is a usable outreach template, but you shouldn’t send the email as is. Instead, it’s lacking personalization and the human touch. 

Sentences here are definitely usable, but it’d be much stronger if you’re able to add:

  1. A shared interest between you and the site owner (a genuine one, try not to phone it in) 
  2. Knowledge of their target audience 
  3. Reasons why your guest post would benefit their website (valuable information, traffic from your audience, etc.) 

Theoretically, you could use ChatGPT to churn out generic templates while your team adds personal touches to each email. Doing so wouldn’t be a bad approach to email outreach, especially if you have the time to dedicate a round of human editing to each email. 

Paid tools offer more in-depth features, like Pitchbox’s AI Template Assistant and AI Reply. 

The template assistant utilizes a powerful AI that’s trained on millions of outreach emails and the results they yielded, making it exceptionally adept at drafting convincing emails. 

It also has a tool for personalizing each email, which comes in handy for mass outreach (although we always recommend personalizing emails with human editors). 

The AI Reply feature automates the reply process using an AI trained on actual link-building emails. It will automatically reply to prospects to keep the conversation moving toward your ultimate goal. These features are most useful if you’re attempting a mass outreach campaign with a small team.

Wrapping Up: Using AI for Smarter Backlink Strategies 

To summarize, AI is extremely useful for link prospecting, streamlining outreach, and auditing your own backlink profile. 

The tools you wind up using will depend entirely on your needs. If you have virtually no budget, you can leverage our suite of free SEO tools and ChatGPT to get the job done. Otherwise, tools like Semrush and Ahrefs are excellent ways to use AI to enhance your link-building tactics. 

Would you rather have us handle your outreach process for you?

Our team of experts conducts rigorous link outreach using techniques and personal touches you won’t find anywhere else. We’ll take the process off your hands entirely, so don’t wait to get in touch!