Broken link building services: what they include, what they cost and what to check

Broken link building services find pages that no longer load but that other sites still link to, offer the linking sites a live page to link to in place of the dead one, and charge per link or per package. The provider does the finding, the matching and the emailing, and the buyer receives the links that come back.

This guide covers what a broken link building service does step by step and the tool reports each step starts from. It then sets out what three studies counted when they measured links that stop working, what one dated campaign counted email by email, what six providers published as prices when we read their pages on 4 October 2026, what to check in a prospect list and a report before any money moves, and where the services we sell sit alongside this one.

What a broken link building service does

A broken link building service does three things in order: it finds a dead page that other sites link to, it prepares a live page on the same subject, and it emails the linking sites to offer the swap. Each step produces something a buyer can check, and those checkable items are what the prospect-list section of this guide is built on.

Step one: find a dead page with links pointing at it. The work starts from a tool's report, not from guesswork. Ahrefs Help, in an article dated 3 September 2026, defines the target: "A broken backlink is an incoming link pointing to an “error 404” page of a target website." Ahrefs has a Broken backlinks report that lists exactly those incoming links, and for finding the dead pages on a site that still carry links, its Best by links report takes a status filter, in the help article's words: "Just apply the “HTTP code: 404 not found” filter." Semrush's Knowledge Base gives the equivalent instruction in its own tool: "Now you’ll want to navigate to the indexed pages report and filter by Broken Pages error." The status code underneath all of this is the 404, and our reference on what a 404 status code is explains what it does to a link.

Step two: see what the dead page said, and prepare a live page on the same subject. The replacement has to cover what the dead page covered, or the email in step three has nothing to offer. The Internet Archive's help page for the Wayback Machine explains the colours on its calendar of captures: "Orange means the crawler got a status code 4nn (client error)". So an orange dot marks a day the page returned an error. A capture from before the page died shows what the page covered, and that capture is what the replacement is matched against: the same subject, covered for the same reader. The match is judged against the page as it was, not against a guess from its address.

Step three: email each site that links to the dead page and offer the replacement. The email names the dead link, shows the recipient where it sits on their page, and offers the live page as the swap. The list for one dead page can run to many sites, and each one receives its own email offering the same replacement. The site owner fixes a dead reference, and the buyer's page takes the link's place. A service runs this loop dead page by dead page, and the prospect list grows with each one.

If you want to run broken link building yourself rather than buy it as a service, our tactic guide covers the workflow in full.

How many links break: what three studies counted

Three research teams have counted links and URLs that no longer load, each in its own sample and each with its own measure. The counts are quoted rather than paraphrased, because the wording of each measure matters.

On 21 May 2021, the Columbia Journalism Review published a study of New York Times articles by John Bowers, Clare Stanton and Jonathan Zittrain. The sample held 553,693 articles carrying 2,283,445 links to pages outside nytimes.com, and 72% of those were deep links pointing at a specific page rather than at a bare domain; the analysis focused on the deep links. The finding: "Of these deep links, 25 percent of all links were completely inaccessible." The study also counted by the year of the article, and the share of dead links grows as the articles get older: "6 percent of links from 2018 had rotted, as compared to 43 percent of links from 2008 and 72 percent of links from 1998." The word "inaccessible" is the authors' measure, and the sample is one newspaper's archive.

On 23 April 2026, Sawood Alam of the Internet Archive published the Internet Archive's analysis of the dataset that Pew Research Center shared from its 2024 study. In Alam's words: "Their dataset contains 5.4 million unique URLs in general, news, government, and Wikipedia references categories sampled from the Common Crawl archive and Wikipedia pages." The count: "When we do not take any Web archives into account, about a quarter of all the 5.4 million sampled URLs would be considered inaccessible or dead as illustrated in Figure 1." The same post goes on to count how much of the dataset the Wayback Machine could recover. The measure here is URLs rather than links, and the sample mixes several categories of page.

The third count comes from an Old Dominion University poster published on 16 September 2024 by Kritika Garg and colleagues. In their words: "We examined how webpage lifespans have evolved using a sample of 27.3 million URLs archived from 1996 to 2021 by the Internet Archive (IA)." The result: "Only 35% of URLs remained active in 2023, indicating significant web inactivity." The sample is URLs an archive had captured, so a page no crawler ever saved does not appear in it.

For a buyer, every dead page with links pointing at it is a candidate for step one above.

The three studies quoted above counted different things: links inside one newspaper's articles, URLs in a mixed sample, and URLs an archive had captured. The figures sit side by side. They are not added, averaged or ranked.

What one campaign counted: 52 emails, 15 links

The one dated, first-hand campaign count in this guide comes from Sam Oh of Ahrefs, in a video published on 26 September 2018. He ran a broken link campaign for a natural-health blog he owned, and he reported the numbers himself. The campaign followed the three steps set out above: find a dead page with links, see what it covered, and email the sites that linked to it.

His first batch: "So from the 32 emails that I sent, 7 responded and 6 linked. That's an 18.75% conversion rate, which is quite good, although the sample size is small."

He then changed two things. He added a screenshot showing each recipient where the dead link sat: "First, add a screenshot of where the broken link is." And he sent one follow-up email. The next 20 emails produced 9 links.

The total: "So with a total of 52 emails sent, my broken link building campaign came in with 15 links, which is a 28.8% overall conversion rate". His own caution came with it: "I've seen significantly lower conversion rates in different niches and even on different topics."

This is one campaign on one blog in one niche in 2018, with a count small enough that Oh flags it himself. It shows what a provider's report can count: emails sent, replies received, links placed. It is not a rate to expect from any other campaign, in any other niche, in any other year.

Two details in Oh's account, the screenshot and the single follow-up, are things you can ask a provider about before you pay.

What broken link building services cost: six published price lists

These are the six providers whose service pages stated a price for broken link building when we read them on 4 October 2026. It is a sample of six pages, in no order of preference, and every figure is in US dollars as printed on the page. The rows differ in what they count, so the table lists each price next to the unit and the metric it is priced by.

Three differences a buyer can see in that table:

• The unit. A price can be per link, per placement, per package, or a one-time fee plus a per-link price. Comparing two providers starts with comparing the same unit.
• The metric a tier is set on. Two of the six pages set their price tiers on Moz Domain Authority, and two set them on Ahrefs Domain Rating, while a third lists a Domain Rating for each placement in its packages. They are two different scores from two different companies.
• What a package states. A package states a range of links, such as 6-8, where a per-link price states one number. A range means the final count can land anywhere inside it.

These are the prices printed on the day we read them, not quotes for any particular site. For per-link prices across other kinds of link, see our guide to link building costs.

What to check in a prospect list and a report

A prospect list and a monthly report are where the work becomes visible. None of the items below asks for a threshold or a score; each one asks to see the work. Before paying any of the providers above, or any other, ask for each of the following.

• The dead URL for each prospect, and the status code it returned on the day it was checked. A dead page is the foundation of every later step, so each entry should be one you can open and test yourself.
• The pages that link to each dead URL, by URL, with the anchor text each one uses. These are the sites the provider will email. Their anchors show what the replacement page has to cover.
• An archived capture of what the dead page covered, with the capture date. The capture is the evidence behind the subject match, and its date should fall before the page stopped loading.
• The replacement page each email offers, and how closely its subject matches the dead page's. This is the item that lets you judge step two above.
• For your campaign, the three counts Sam Oh reported for his: emails sent, replies, links placed, stated per month. Those three numbers are enough to see whether a campaign is moving.
• The live URL of every link placed, with the anchor text, the page it points to and whether it is dofollow. A placement you cannot open is a claim, not a placement.
• The unit the price is quoted in, and the metric a tier is set on. As the table above shows, per link, per placement and per package are different units, and Domain Authority and Domain Rating are different scores.
• What the provider's page says happens if a placed link is later removed. Pages come down and links get edited out, so the answer should be in writing before you pay.

You can check the linking sites yourself as well. Our guide on how to read a backlink profile covers what to look for on each one. A provider that supplies all eight items without being asked is showing its working.

Where the services we sell sit

We do not sell broken link building. What we sell is a different route to a link on a published page, and the two routes can run side by side.

A Rhino Rank Curated Link is a link placed into an article that is already published on a site that fits your niche. You supply the target URL and the anchor text, there is no article to write, prices start from $60 per link, and the delivery target is 7–14 days. The general name for this kind of placement is niche edits.

A Guest Post is a 750+ word article written in-house by our UK team, carrying one contextual dofollow link, from $75 per post.

Our Managed Service starts from $500 a month and includes a dedicated account manager, competitor research, manual outreach and monthly white-label reporting, with no contract.

On every order, the checks run the same way. Before a placement goes out, we check the HTTP status code your target URL returns. After publication, we open the live page and check it against your order, and only then is the URL reported to your dashboard. You can read more about how a placement is checked after publication. Every delivered link carries 12-month replacement cover.

Frequently asked questions

What are broken link building services?

A broken link building service finds dead pages that other sites still link to, offers those sites a live replacement page to link to, and reports the links placed. The provider runs the prospecting, the content matching and the outreach, and the buyer receives the placements.

How much do broken link building services cost?

On the six provider pages we read on 4 October 2026, per-link prices set by a site metric tier ran from $60 to $550. One provider priced from $800 per placement, another combined a one-time fee with a per-link price, and packages ran from $999 for 4 links to $13,499 for 30-35 links.

Can I buy broken link building services per link?

Yes. Three of the six pages we read price per link or per placement: LinkSpur, OutreachCrayon and LinkGathering. HackMySeo adds a per-link price on top of a one-time fee, while Linkscope and Linkible sell packages of links.

How many emails does it take to get one broken link replaced?

One dated count comes from Sam Oh of Ahrefs, who reported 52 emails and 15 links in 2018 on one blog in one niche, and said he had seen lower rates in other niches. It is a single campaign's count, not a rate to plan around.

Does Rhino Rank sell broken link building?

No. We sell Curated Links, Guest Posts and a Managed Service. A Curated Link is placed into an article that is already published, so there is no dead page to find and no replacement page to write.