Link prospecting
Link prospecting is the work of finding pages that can link to your site. Mentionry does it by reading the web, not a database, and writes the email for you.
- Length
- 5 min read · 1,076 words
- Sections
- 5
- Questions
- 4 answered
On this page5 sections
Who else does this channel
Pitchbox, Respona, BuzzStream. Each of those pages compares them on their own published facts, with the source and the date we checked it.
What link prospecting is
Link prospecting is finding the specific places you can get a backlink. It is not a list of domains. It is a list of pages, each with a reason it would link to you.
A good prospect is a page that already links to a site like yours. A better prospect is a page that already links to your direct competitor. The best prospect is a page that already links to your competitor, does not link to you, and you have a genuine reason to be included.
This work is manual. You read the page, you judge whether your site fits, you find a contact, you write a note. The value of a tool is in how well it filters, not how many rows it shows.
How Mentionry prospects for links
You give Mentionry a domain. It finds your competitors by looking at who ranks for your keywords. Then it runs two engines.
The first engine finds pages that link to your competitors and not to you. It also finds resource pages, listicles and directories by searching your niche directly. The second engine finds journalists asking for sources, reporters already covering the subject, podcasts that book guests, conferences taking speakers, awards taking entries, publications that take contributed articles, articles that already name you without linking, and the pages Google's AI reads when it answers a buying question in your category.
Every opportunity comes with a drafted email, form submission or reply. Those drafts can be written into your own Gmail. Mentionry sends it from your own connected mailbox.
The filtering is the product. In a measured run for one domain, it found 110 openings, judged 40 as viable, and kept 14 as worth pursuing. Each opportunity is judged individually by a model that is allowed to say this business cannot honestly answer this, and it does say it.
What it reads and what it refuses
Mentionry reads the live web. It has no database of prospects. A page it cannot open is reported as unchecked, never as unlinked.
The drafting model refuses unethical requests. Given a reply asking for payment for a link, it declines and explains why. Paid placements are excluded by design. Buying links that pass ranking signals violates Google's link spam policy and the penalty lands on your site, not on the vendor's.
For awards, rows are leads, not confirmed open calls. A ranking page cannot tell us whether entries close on Friday or closed in March. No row carries a deadline and every row says the date has to be checked.
It does not cover HARO or Source of Sources. Those services reach sources as an email digest only. Reading them needs a subscribed mailbox and IMAP parsing, which Mentionry cannot do.
What it will not do
Mentionry is not a registry or a dataset. It does not do broken link building. It does not maintain a relationship inventory of vendors, partners or customers. It does not perform anchor text audits.
It does not cover ChatGPT or Perplexity visibility. The AI answer visibility channel covers Google AI Overviews only.
It finds the opening, writes the message and sends it. It does not place anything. It does not guarantee links, placements, rankings, traffic or Domain Rating.
How to judge if it is worth your time
Compare it to doing the work manually, or to other tools. The cost of a tool is not just its price. It is the time you spend filtering bad prospects and writing emails.
If you run outreach at agency scale across many clients and need seats, sequences, a CRM and reporting, consider Pitchbox. Its Pro plan is 300 dollars a month billed monthly, or 210 dollars billed annually, for 2 users and 2,000 emails a month. If you have one site and do not want to build a sequence, that price before you have sent anything may be the wrong shape.
If you want a guaranteed placement on a domain of a stated Domain Rating, consider Respona. Its pricing is per placement, from 100 dollars for a DR 20 plus publisher to 500 dollars for DR 60 plus. Buying links that pass ranking signals is a link scheme under Google's spam policies.
If you need a shared outreach CRM with history and reporting across a team, consider BuzzStream. If you want the opportunity found and the message drafted, and you already have a mailbox, Mentionry may fit.
Mentionry requires no API keys. The only optional connection is your own Gmail, for drafts. You can judge its output by the specificity of each reason for a link and the quality of the draft.
Questions people actually ask
How is this different from a list of websites?
A list of websites is not a prospect. Mentionry finds specific pages, like a resource page that lists five accounting tools and yours is not there, or a news article that mentions your company without a link. Each row has the exact URL and a drafted message for that page.
Does it find journalist requests like HARO?
No. Services like HARO and Source of Sources send requests as an email digest. Reading them requires a subscribed mailbox and parsing IMAP, which Mentionry cannot do. It finds journalists by reading articles they have already published on your topic.
Can I buy links through Mentionry?
No. Paid placements are excluded by design. The drafting model will refuse if a reply asks for payment. Buying links that pass ranking signals violates Google's link spam policy, and the penalty for that lands on your site, not on the vendor's.
How many prospects will I get?
It varies by domain and niche. In a measured run for one domain, Mentionry found 110 openings, judged 40 as viable, and kept 14 as worth pursuing. The filtering is the product, not the volume. It is designed to show you what you can act on, not a large number to sort through.
Run this against your own domain
Give it a domain and it works out who you compete with, mines the pages that link to them and not to you, judges every opening one at a time, and writes the email, the form or the reply. It sends them from your own mailbox, so the replies come to you.
Find out what your domain is missing
Qualifying a domain is free and it is the honest first question: some sites have a pool worth mining and some have nothing to mine and everything to earn. Run that first.
One plan. There is no cheaper rung with things taken out of it.
- Both engines, all fourteen channels
- Every opening judged one at a time, with the reason kept
- The email, the form or the reply drafted for each one
- Sent from your own mailbox, so the replies come to you
- Nine connectors that need no key and no account of yours
- Marketplaces and paid placements filtered out, twice