How to get backlinks for a brand new SaaS, without buying any

What a backlink actually does in 2026, versus 2016

A backlink is a link from someone else's page to yours, and what it communicates has not changed in ten years: another party, independent of you, thought your page was worth pointing at. What has changed is how many systems read that signal and what they do with it.

In 2016, a backlink mattered almost entirely for one thing: it fed PageRank-style algorithms that used the link graph to estimate authority and pass a fraction of that authority along to your page. The game was largely about quantity and anchor text, which is exactly why the industry filled up with link farms, blog networks, and paid placements, because that older generation of ranking systems was comparatively easy to game with sheer volume.

In 2026, the same link still feeds that ranking signal, but it also feeds a second system: the retrieval and synthesis pipeline behind AI answer engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google's AI Overviews. Those systems are trying to answer a slightly different question than a ranking algorithm. They are asking whether multiple independent sources describe your product the same way, which lets them state a fact about you with confidence instead of hedging or omitting it. A backlink from a directory or a roundup article is not just link equity anymore, it is a data point in a cross-referencing exercise. That is why quality and consistency now matter more than raw count, and why a small number of accurate, well-placed mentions can outperform a hundred low quality ones.

The practical upshot is that you should build links the way you would build references for a job application: a handful of people who know your actual work and will describe it accurately, not a stack of form letters from people you paid to write nice things.

Domain authority is a proxy, not a goal

Domain authority and similar third party scores are estimates, built by tools like Moz or Ahrefs from their own crawl of the link graph, meant to approximate how much trust a search engine might place in a domain. Google does not use these specific numbers. It uses its own, unpublished internal signals.

The reason this distinction matters practically is that founders who treat domain authority as the goal end up buying or trading for exactly the links that raise the number fastest and help the business least: link farms with artificially high scores, reciprocal link exchanges, and directory spam sites optimized purely to look authoritative to a scraper. None of that traffic converts, none of it gets cited by an AI answer engine, and some of it actively invites a manual action once a search engine's spam systems catch up.

Use domain authority the way you'd use a fitness tracker's step count: a rough, occasionally useful signal that something you're doing is generally in the right direction, never the actual objective. The actual objective is to be findable, described accurately, and referenced by real, independent sources that real buyers already trust. If you do that consistently, the score moves on its own, slower than a shortcut but in a direction that does not reverse on you.

Rule of thumbIf a link building tactic's only benefit is moving a third party score, and it would embarrass you to explain it to a customer, skip it regardless of what it promises to do for domain authority.

Product directories and launch platforms

Product directories and launch platforms are the single highest-leverage, lowest-effort category of link for a brand new SaaS, because they are built specifically to list products like yours and most of them will accept a real, working product without gatekeeping.

The pattern to look for is an indexable, per-product page: a URL that exists permanently, gets crawled, and states clearly what your product is, who it's for, and what category it competes in. That page is useful whether the link on it is dofollow or nofollow, because it is corroborating text about you hosted somewhere that is not your own domain, which is exactly what both a search ranking system and an AI answer engine are looking for when they try to verify a claim.

LaunchLoop is a reasonable place to start for this reason: a listing there gives you an indexable product page, placement on relevant category pages, the option to be included on alternatives pages once other founders compare tools in your space, and a badge you can embed back on your own site linking to your launch page. None of that is unique to LaunchLoop, it is the same shape of value you should look for in any directory you submit to, and you should treat a listing there as one entry on a longer list, not the whole strategy.

Beyond launch platforms, general SaaS directories (think listing sites organized by category, pricing model, or platform) are worth a submission if they have real traffic and get indexed themselves. A quick way to check before you spend time on a submission form: search site:thedirectory.com in Google and see whether pages come back. If a directory itself is not indexed, a listing on it will not help either system.

• ▸Claim your listing with a complete profile: logo, screenshots, an accurate category, and a description that matches the wording on your own site.
• ▸Prioritize directories with a visible "last updated" date or active submissions, that's a proxy for whether the directory itself is still crawled regularly.
• ▸Don't submit to directories that ask for payment to be listed at all. A free listing that is well categorized beats a paid one that isn't.

Tool roundups and 'best of' articles

A tool roundup is an article, usually written by a blogger, agency, or media site, that lists several products solving the same problem, and getting included in one is one of the most durable link types available because roundups tend to rank for exactly the comparison queries your future customers search.

Finding candidates is mostly a search exercise: look for "best [your category] tools", "[competitor] alternatives", and "[job title] tools for [use case]" and note which articles rank on the first two pages and look maintained, meaning they've been updated within the last year and don't list obviously dead products. Those are worth a pitch.

The pitch itself should be short and specific: who you are, what the tool does in one sentence, and one concrete reason it fits their list that a generic email would not have, such as a feature the other tools on their list lack or a use case they didn't cover. Do not send a templated paragraph to fifty authors at once, most experienced bloggers can tell within a sentence, and a template that gets marked as spam once tends to get ignored by the same author every time after.

Some of these authors will ask about your traffic, users, or pricing before including you. Answer honestly. Roundup authors who ask real questions are also the ones whose lists get cited by other people, which is exactly the kind of link worth the extra effort.

Integration and partner pages

An integration page is the page a tool you connect with publishes to describe how it works with products like yours, and it is one of the easiest links to earn because the other party benefits from it too.

If your SaaS integrates with Slack, Zapier, Stripe, HubSpot, or any platform with a public app marketplace or partner directory, submit to that marketplace as soon as the integration is functional, not after it's polished. Most marketplaces list every accepted integration on an indexable page with a link back to your site, and being listed also puts you in front of that platform's own user base, which is a second benefit beyond the link itself.

If you have partnerships that don't go through a formal marketplace, for example a data provider you use, a payment processor, or a complementary tool you co-market with, ask directly whether they maintain a partner or customer showcase page and whether you can be added. Many companies maintain these pages and rarely think to populate them without being asked.

Open source, free tools, and original data

Open source repositories, free standalone tools, and original data all share the same mechanism: they give someone an independent reason to link to you that has nothing to do with asking them to.

If any part of what you've built is reasonably open-sourceable, a small library, a CLI, a plugin, a well-documented public repo naturally accumulates links from people who use it, cite it in their own posts, or reference it in Stack Overflow answers and GitHub issue threads. This works even for a small utility that isn't your core product, as long as it's genuinely useful and maintained.

A free tool built around your product's core function, a calculator, a checker, a converter, a generator, tends to get linked from blog posts and roundups about that specific narrow problem, separate from any link building outreach you do about your main product. It works because it solves a problem completely on its own, with no signup wall, which is exactly what makes people comfortable linking to it.

Original data is the highest-effort, highest-payoff option on this list. Run a small survey of your own users, publish an analysis of aggregated, anonymized usage patterns from your own product, or compile public data into one useful summary nobody else has put together. Journalists, bloggers, and other founders link to original numbers far more readily than they link to opinion, because a specific number is something they can cite without doing the research themselves.

Rule of thumbYou do not need a large sample size to publish useful original data. A survey of 40 real users of your product, reported honestly with the sample size stated, is more citable than a vague claim with no numbers at all.

Community profiles, podcasts, and HARO style sourcing

Community profiles are the accounts and bios you maintain on platforms where your buyers already spend time, and while most of the links from them are nofollow, they still do two jobs worth doing: they get crawled and indexed as corroborating mentions of your name, and they occasionally send real, warm traffic that converts better than cold search visitors.

Set up complete profiles on the platforms relevant to your category: Product Hunt's maker profile and any related directory pages, relevant subreddits where self-promotion is allowed on a fixed schedule, IndieHackers, dev.to or Hashnode if you're technical, and any Slack or Discord communities where your buyers hang out and where a profile link is standard. Fill in the bio fully rather than leaving it blank, an empty profile with a bare link reads as spam to both a moderator and a crawler.

Podcast appearances are worth pursuing specifically for early stage founders because most podcasts publish show notes on an indexable page with a link to the guest's company, and a founder with a real, specific story to tell (what problem you solve, an interesting technical or business decision, a lesson from a failure) is a genuinely easy guest to book on smaller, niche shows that need guests more than you need them.

HARO and its modern equivalents (journalist request platforms and their Twitter/LinkedIn hashtag equivalents like #JournoRequest) connect founders with journalists looking for a quote or a data point for a story they're already writing. Respond only to requests where you have a real, specific, non-generic answer, a one-line generic quote gets ignored, but a specific number or a concrete anecdote from your own experience running the product gets used and often linked.

Guest posts that are actually good

A guest post is an article you write for someone else's site in exchange for, typically, a link back to yours, and the entire category has a bad reputation because most guest posts pursued for links alone are neither good enough to get accepted by a real publication nor useful enough to the reader to be worth writing.

The filter that keeps this tactic honest is simple: would you write this post for that publication's audience even if there were no link in it? If the honest answer is no, because the topic is thin, generic, or exists only to justify a link placement, don't write it, because it will read that way to both the editor and their audience, and it will not get accepted anywhere worth being accepted.

Target publications where your actual expertise overlaps with their actual audience: a technical blog if you have a genuinely useful implementation story, an industry newsletter if you have a specific data point or contrarian take about that industry's workflow, a founder community's blog if you have a concrete lesson from building your product. One well-placed, well-written guest post on a site your buyers actually read is worth more than ten placed on generic "write for us" content mills that accept nearly anything.

Comparison and alternatives pages that others cite

A comparison or alternatives page written by someone else, naming your product alongside competitors, is one of the most valuable links available because it appears at exactly the moment a buyer is deciding, and it is also one of the pages most frequently pulled into AI answer engine responses to "X vs Y" and "alternatives to X" queries.

You earn inclusion on these pages the same way you earn inclusion on roundups: by being reachable, by keeping your own listed facts (pricing, features, category) accurate and current so an author doesn't have to guess, and sometimes by reaching out directly once you notice a comparison page exists and doesn't mention you. A short, factual note pointing out where you fit and offering to answer any questions works better than asking outright to be added.

It also helps to publish your own honest comparison pages on your site, naming the two or three tools you're actually compared to and stating real trade-offs rather than a one-sided table. Other writers researching that same comparison sometimes cite your page directly as a source, especially if it's more specific and current than what already ranks.

Dofollow versus nofollow, honestly

A dofollow link passes ranking signal by default, a nofollow link (or the newer sponsored and ugc attributes) tells a search engine not to pass that signal, and the honest answer for a new SaaS is that this distinction matters far less than most link building advice suggests.

Most directories, community platforms, and social profiles use nofollow by default, and that is a reasonable, sane default for them since anyone can create a profile or a listing. Chasing only dofollow links leads founders to skip exactly the directories and communities that would otherwise send real traffic, real signups, and real corroborating mentions that AI answer engines read regardless of the link attribute.

Nofollow links still get crawled, still appear in the link graph even if discounted for ranking purposes, and still function as a factual mention when a system is trying to verify what your product is and does. A nofollow link from a directory with real traffic and a real audience is worth more, in practice, than a dofollow link from an abandoned blog with no readers and no crawl budget behind it.

Build for a natural mix. A backlink profile made up entirely of dofollow links from unfamiliar small sites is itself a pattern that spam detection systems have learned to flag, precisely because it doesn't look like the mix a real, organically mentioned business accumulates.

How directory listings feed AI answer engines, not just Google

A directory listing does two jobs at once in 2026: it contributes to your backlink profile the way it always has, and it becomes a structured, third party data source that an AI answer engine can retrieve and cross-reference when someone asks about your product by name or by category.

The mechanism is straightforward once you see it. When someone asks an assistant "what tools handle [your category]" or "what does [your product] do", the retrieval step often pulls in exactly the kind of page a directory publishes: a structured page with a category, a description, a pricing indicator, and often schema markup identifying it as a Product or SoftwareApplication. That page is easier for a model to parse confidently than a marketing homepage full of persuasive language, because it's already organized the way the model wants to consume it.

This is why consistency across listings matters so much more than any single listing's authority score. If your product name, category, and one-line description read the same way on your own site, on LaunchLoop, on a general SaaS directory, and on any review platform you're on, a model cross-referencing those sources finds agreement and states the fact with confidence. If the description drifts (a different category here, a different feature list there) the model either hedges the answer or leaves you out of it rather than pick a version to trust.

Practically, before you submit anywhere new, write down one canonical product description, one canonical one-line pitch, and your actual current category, and reuse that exact wording everywhere. Update it in every place you can find it whenever it changes.

Rule of thumbSchema markup on your own site (Organization and Product/SoftwareApplication types with sameAs links to your directory profiles) ties all of these separate listings back to one entity, which makes the corroboration effect stronger than the listings alone would produce.

Anchor text hygiene

Anchor text is the visible, clickable text of a link, and how it's worded across your backlink profile is one of the clearest signals a spam detection system looks at, because a natural profile has messy, varied anchor text and a manipulated one has suspiciously repeated, exact-match commercial phrases.

You control the anchor text you use when you write guest posts or submit your own description to a directory, so use it deliberately but naturally: your brand name most of the time, the bare URL sometimes, a generic phrase like "this tool" or "their pricing page" occasionally, and an exact-match keyword phrase ("best project management software") rarely, if ever, when you're the one supplying the text.

You do not control the anchor text other people use when they link to you organically, and you shouldn't try to. Requesting a specific keyword-rich anchor from a blogger or journalist is one of the fastest ways to make an otherwise good, organic link look manipulated, and some experienced writers will simply decline the ask.

What to avoid entirely

A handful of tactics promise fast link volume and consistently cost more than they're worth for a brand new SaaS with limited runway and reputation to protect.

• ▸PBNs (private blog networks): a set of low quality sites built or bought purely to link to each other's client sites. Search engines have gotten reliably good at detecting the hosting, template, and link patterns these networks share, and being caught in one can tank the sites you actually care about.
• ▸Paid link packages: bulk offers promising a fixed number of "high DA" links for a flat fee. These links are almost always placed on networks built for exactly this purpose, get devalued in bulk when discovered, and rarely if ever get read by an actual human buyer.
• ▸Mass guest posting through content mills: services that place a templated article on dozens of low quality "write for us" sites simultaneously. The resulting links look, and are, generated at scale rather than earned, and the sites themselves add nothing to your credibility with a reader.
• ▸Link exchange schemes: "I'll link to you if you link to me" arrangements pursued purely for reciprocal SEO value, especially in bulk through link exchange groups or forums. A few genuine, relevant reciprocal links between real partners are normal, a spreadsheet of fifty swap partners is not.
• ▸Comment and forum spam: dropping your URL into blog comments or forum threads with no real contribution to the discussion. Nearly all of these are nofollow anyway, get moderated out quickly, and damage your reputation in the one community where it happened.

Tracking your links without an expensive tool

You do not need a paid backlink tool in the first year of a new SaaS. A spreadsheet, a free Google Search Console account, and a recurring habit of manual checks cover almost everything you need to know.

• ▸Keep a spreadsheet with one row per link: the source URL, the date you got it, dofollow or nofollow, and the category (directory, roundup, integration, guest post, community).
• ▸Check Search Console's Links report monthly. It shows top linking sites and top linking pages for free, directly from Google's own data, which is more accurate for your site than any third party crawl.
• ▸Run a site: search for your domain periodically (site:yourdomain.com) to see what Google has indexed about you, and a plain search for your exact product name in quotes to catch new mentions that haven't linked yet but might.
• ▸Set a Google Alert for your product name and your founder name to catch new mentions as they're published, so you can follow up quickly while the author still remembers writing about you.
• ▸If you eventually want a paid tool, Ahrefs or Semrush's free trial tiers are enough to do a one-time competitive backlink audit later. It's not worth paying monthly for this in month one.

A realistic 90 day plan

A realistic plan for the first 90 days assumes a founder doing this alongside actually building and supporting the product, roughly three to five focused hours a week, not a full time job.

Weeks 1 to 2 (about 4 hours a week): write your one canonical product description and pitch, then submit to 8 to 10 directories and launch platforms, including LaunchLoop, prioritizing ones that are themselves indexed and get real traffic. Set up complete profiles on 3 to 4 relevant community platforms.

Weeks 3 to 5 (about 4 hours a week): research and list 15 to 20 tool roundups and alternatives pages relevant to your category. Send 5 short, specific pitches a week rather than one mass email blast. In parallel, submit to any integration marketplaces your product qualifies for.

Weeks 6 to 8 (about 5 hours a week): scope and ship one free tool or a small open source utility related to your product, or run a short survey of your existing users if you have any. Start following up on the roundup pitches that didn't get a reply the first time, once, politely.

Weeks 9 to 11 (about 4 hours a week): write and pitch one genuinely good guest post to a publication your buyers actually read. Publish your original data or free tool with its own page and start manually sharing it in the communities where it's relevant, not as a link drop but as an actual contribution.

Week 12 (about 3 hours): audit everything. Check Search Console for new referring domains, update your spreadsheet, fix any inconsistent descriptions you find across your listings, and note what worked so the next 90 days focuses more time on it.

Rule of thumbBy day 90, a founder who follows this schedule realistically ends up with somewhere between 20 and 40 links across directories, a few roundups, community profiles, and one or two earned mentions. That's a healthy, honest starting profile, not a number to be embarrassed by next to a competitor who bought a thousand.