10 Best Link Prospecting Tools (2026), Prices Checked
A link prospect is a site worth asking for a link, plus the person to ask. Prospecting tools differ mainly in where they look: who links to your competitors, what ranks for a topic, which listicles name your rivals, or who writes a given post.
The ten below are grouped by that source. Every price was read on the vendor's own site on 5 October 2026.
Pick by where your best prospects already are. A tool that searches the wrong source returns a long list of sites you cannot win.
Want the list, the contacts and the pitch done for you: MentionAgent, $99/mo.
Sites linking to competitors: Ahrefs from $29/mo, Majestic from $49.99/mo, Mangools LinkMiner from $49/mo.
Pages ranking for a topic: Citation Labs Link Prospector from $5 a credit, Pitchbox from $300/mo.
Listicles naming your competitors: ListBrew, free to $199/mo.
Just the email address: Hunter, free for 50 credits a month.
DR is a weak filter. Across 20,473 domains MentionAgent pitched from 1 July to 24 September 2026, reply rates by DR band ranged from 6.0% to 10.1% with no steady trend.
DR 60+: 8.4% replied, but only 1.95% moved on to discussing a placement, against about 3% for DR 0 to 39.
Why: 38% of DR 60+ replies were off topic or general and 4% were interested or agreeing. At DR 0 to 19, 26% were interested or agreeing.
Role inboxes (info@, editor@): 8.8% replied, against 6.4% for named addresses.
Comparison table
| Tool | Where it finds prospects | Finds contacts? | Entry price (5 Oct 2026) |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1. MentionAgent | Blog posts on your topic, found by an agent | Yes, included | $99/mo, free trial |
| 2. Ahrefs | Competitor backlinks, Content Explorer | No | $29/mo Starter |
| 3. Semrush | Backlink Gap across up to 5 domains | No | €134/mo (EUR, see note) |
| 4. Majestic | Clique Hunter, Topical Trust Flow | No | $49.99/mo Lite |
| 5. Mangools LinkMiner | Competitor backlinks (Majestic data) | No | $49/mo Basic |
| 6. Citation Labs Link Prospector | Search results, 16 report types | No | $5 per credit, or $47/mo |
| 7. Pitchbox | Live SERP scraper plus Ahrefs/Semrush data | Yes, credits | $300/mo, 1-year commitment |
| 8. BuzzStream | Prospecting searches inside an outreach CRM | Yes | $49/mo Starter |
| 9. ListBrew | Listicles and comparison pages naming competitors | Yes, credits | Free, then $49/mo |
| 10. Hunter | None: you bring the domain | Yes, that is the product | Free, then €49/mo (EUR) |
Semrush and Hunter served us euro prices from an EU location and would not switch to dollars, so we quote what we could read rather than convert.
1. MentionAgent: prospects, contacts and a draft in one pass
Where it looks: blog posts in your niche that are a natural fit for a mention of your site.
Price: $99/mo Starter with one sending inbox on its own domain, up to 40 outreach emails a day once warmed, and 5,000 credits. Finding blogs, looking up contacts and checking domains do not use credits; a draft costs 2. Plans go up to $629/mo for eight inboxes. The free trial shows real drafts for your site without a card.
The other tools on this list hand you a list. MentionAgent works one prospect at a time: it searches for posts on your topic, skips very large domains and anything on its never-contact list, finds the editor's address and writes a pitch about that specific post. You approve each draft and it sends from an inbox MentionAgent sets up and warms for you.
What you do not get is a spreadsheet of thousands of sites to export and sort. The output is a queue of drafts. Pick it if you want links rather than a prospect list, and would rather review drafts than run a tool stack. Skip it if you need every site linking to five named competitors in one file; that is a backlink-index job, and Ahrefs or Majestic does it better.
Competitor backlink tools
These four answer one question: which sites link to your competitors but not to you? A site that has linked to a rival has already shown it links out on your topic, which is why this is the most common starting point. None of them finds email addresses, so pair them with Hunter or similar.
2. Ahrefs
Price: Starter $29/mo (renews monthly only), Lite $129/mo, Standard $249/mo, Advanced $449/mo. Annual billing saves up to 17%. No trial; the pricing FAQ says Ahrefs never runs discounts.
For prospecting: Link Intersect ("find the sites linking to your competitors but not to you") and Content Explorer, which Ahrefs pitches for finding link prospects and which starts at Standard. Ahrefs' own help pages disagree on whether Link Intersect needs Lite or Standard, so confirm with them before buying Lite for it.
Free tier: Ahrefs Free (the old Webmaster Tools) shows up to 1,000 backlinks for sites you have verified. It does not show competitors, so it is no use for prospecting. More on plans in our Ahrefs pricing breakdown.
3. Semrush
Price: the plans have been renamed. The pricing page now lists SEO €134/mo, Starter €190/mo, Pro+ €286/mo and Advanced €526/mo, billed monthly, plus a free plan with 10 reports a day. Those are euro prices; we could not get the dollar page.
For prospecting: Backlink Gap compares up to five domains and has a "Prospects for domain" filter. Semrush's old Link Building Tool page now returns a 404, and its help center points prospecting at Backlink Gap and the Backlinks report instead. The "AI Backlink Builder" in Semrush's App Center is a separate app made by Respona, not part of the Semrush plan. See also Semrush pricing.
4. Majestic
Price: Lite $49.99/mo, Pro $99.99/mo, Full API $399.99/mo, excluding VAT. No free trial, but a 7-day money-back guarantee for new Lite and Pro customers.
For prospecting: Clique Hunter (Pro and above) compares up to 10 sites to list domains linking to competitors and not to you. Topical Trust Flow, included from Lite, scores sites by topic, which helps you drop a high-authority site that is off topic. Details in Majestic pricing.
5. Mangools LinkMiner
Price: Basic $49/mo, Premium $69/mo, Agency $129/mo, cheaper billed yearly. LinkMiner is in every plan alongside the other Mangools tools. 48-hour money-back guarantee.
For prospecting: LinkMiner reads backlinks from Majestic's index,, with Citation Flow and Trust Flow shown as link strength. It is the cheapest way on this list into Majestic's data if you also want the other Mangools SEO tools in the same plan.
Search-based prospectors
These start from a keyword instead of a competitor. They run search queries with operators (guest post pages, resource pages, reviews, roundups) and turn the results into a list. That finds sites that have never linked to anyone in your space, which competitor tools cannot.
6. Citation Labs Link Prospector
Price: pay as you go at $5 a credit with no monthly fee; Consultant $47/mo (20 credits); Agency $127/mo (75 credits); Enterprise $497/mo (500 credits). 30-day refund on credit purchases. The page does not say what one credit buys.
For prospecting: 16 report types, including guest posts, links and resource pages, reviews, giveaways, donations, directories and expert interviews. Results export to CSV or BuzzStream. The old linkprospector.com domain no longer resolves; the tool lives at linkprospector.citationlabs.com.
7. Pitchbox
Price: Pro $300/mo ($210/mo billed annually), Advanced $600/mo, Scale $1,200/mo. The FAQ says every plan requires a one-year commitment, whichever billing you pick. Pro includes 1,000 prospecting searches a month; data credits cost 1 per website prospect and 2 per verified email. Trials go through a demo.
For prospecting: a live SERP scraper with advanced operators, competitor and broken-link prospects through Ahrefs and Semrush integrations, link-farm detection and a contact waterfall ranked by role. Its own page says it is built for teams building 20+ links a month and sending 10,000 or more emails. Compare in Pitchbox pricing and Pitchbox alternatives.
8. BuzzStream
Price: Starter $49/mo (1 user, 30 prospecting searches), Growth $174/mo (250 searches), Professional $424/mo (1,000 searches), Custom from $999. Free trial; no contract.
For prospecting: searches and contact lookup sit inside an outreach CRM, so the list and the follow-up live in one place. Thirty searches on Starter is small; BuzzStream is mainly a relationship tracker with prospecting attached. More in BuzzStream pricing.
9. ListBrew: listicles that name your competitors
Price: free with 50 one-time credits, Solo $49/mo (100 credits), Pro $99/mo (300 credits), Agency $199/mo (700 credits). Credits are spent per keyword, per AI engine queried and per contact enriched.
For prospecting: it finds "best X" and comparison pages where competitors appear and you do not, shows each page's Google rank and which AI engines cite it, and pulls contacts from Hunter and Apollo data. The outreach module and pitch writer were marked "Coming Soon" on its pricing page. It is a narrow tool. Listicles matter beyond Google because ChatGPT leans on top-ranking "best X" pages when it recommends products, which our ChatGPT mentions guide covers.
10. Hunter: the contact half of prospecting
Price: free plan with 50 credits a month; Starter €49/mo (2,000 credits), Growth €149/mo, Scale €299/mo, about 30% less billed annually. Euro prices again; the page would not switch currency for us.
For prospecting: give it a domain and it returns the addresses it knows at that domain. One credit per email found, half a credit per verification, and nothing is charged when it finds nothing. Every competitor backlink tool above needs something like this behind it. Alternatives are in our email finders roundup and Hunter pricing.
Tools we left out
Respona. It appears on most lists for this keyword, but its pricing page now sells done-for-you placements at $100 to $500 per link by DR tier (checked October 2026) rather than software plans. The software page still says "start for free", and we could not find the subscription prices anywhere on the site. Until those are back, we cannot tell you what the prospecting tool costs.
What DR predicts about a prospect, from 20,473 pitches
Most of these tools let you sort a prospect list by DR, and the habit is to work top down. MentionAgent's own outreach records let us test that. We took every domain first pitched between 1 July and 24 September 2026 across the customer link building workspaces (our own included, our sales outreach excluded) and counted a domain as replied if anyone there answered. Replies that looked automatic by subject or sender, such as out-of-office notices, auto-replies, bounces and DMARC reports, were left out. The late-September cut-off gives every pitch at least ten days to get an answer.
| Prospect DR | Domains pitched | Replied | Reached placement talk | Replies interested or agreeing |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0 to 19 | 4,241 | 6.7% | 2.92% | 26% (74 of 286) |
| 20 to 39 | 4,549 | 7.7% | 2.97% | 17% (59 of 348) |
| 40 to 59 | 4,837 | 7.4% | 2.73% | 9% (32 of 359) |
| 60+ | 6,446 | 8.4% | 1.95% | 4% (21 of 539) |
| All (incl. 400 with no DR) | 20,473 | 7.6% | 2.58% |
Reply rate barely moves with DR. In ten-point bands it runs 6.6%, 7.1%, 7.8%, 7.6%, 6.0%, 8.8%, 10.1% and 7.6% from DR 0 up to DR 70+, so DR 40 to 49 is the worst band and DR 60 to 69 the best, with no slope between them.
What changes is what the replies say. Our reply classifier labels each thread, and the last column uses the label on the latest reply. At DR 60+, 38% of replies were labelled off topic or general (unrelated to the pitch, or not clearly a yes or a no), 17% declined and 20% named a price. Only 4% were interested or agreeing, against 26% at DR 0 to 19. Price replies were common from DR 20 upwards, 20% to 26% of replies in each band, so a rate card is not something only big sites send. "Placement talk" means the classifier marked the thread as discussing which page the link goes on, or the link itself. It is not a verified live link.
For prospecting, that argues for filtering on topic fit and an active editor first, and using DR as a floor rather than a sort order. A list sorted top down by DR spends your first pitches on the band least likely to say yes.
The same records answer whether to drop sites that only list a role inbox. Domains pitched at an address like info@, contact@ or editor@ (10,428 of them) replied 8.8% of the time and reached placement talk 2.68% of the time. Named addresses (10,045) came in at 6.4% and 2.49%. A role address is a usable contact, not a reason to buy more email-finder credits.
The free method: search operators and a spreadsheet
The search-based tools above automate searches you can run by hand in Google. Queries such as "your topic" intitle:"write for us", "your topic" inurl:resources or "best your-category tools" return the same kinds of pages Link Prospector and Pitchbox scrape. Paste the domains into a sheet, check each one for a recent post and a named editor, then look up the address on the site's contact page.
The limit is time, not data. A few dozen prospects a week is manageable this way. Past that, the paid tools earn their price mostly by removing the copy-paste. Our guides to resource page link building, broken link building and unlinked brand mentions cover the operators for each tactic, and the guest posting sites list is a ready-made starting set.
How to pick
Decision tree
- Want prospects found, contacted and pitched without running the tools yourself? → MentionAgent.
- Already pay for an SEO suite? → use its gap report: Ahrefs Link Intersect or Semrush Backlink Gap.
- Want competitor gaps without a full suite? → Majestic Pro for Clique Hunter, or LinkMiner for single-site checks.
- Need sites that have never linked in your space? → Citation Labs Link Prospector, or Pitchbox if you are a team on a yearly contract.
- Chasing "best X" listicles that AI engines cite? → ListBrew.
- Have the list, need the addresses? → Hunter.
- Want the list and the follow-up tracking in one CRM? → BuzzStream.
For the wider set of outreach and sending tools these plug into, see backlink builder software and link outreach.
Skip the prospect spreadsheet
MentionAgent finds blog posts on your topic, looks up the editor and drafts a pitch about that post. You approve, it sends from a warmed inbox it sets up for you. From $99/mo, with a free trial that shows real drafts first.
See PlansFrequently asked questions
What is the best link prospecting tool?
It depends on where your prospects come from. For sites that already link to competitors, Ahrefs (Link Intersect) or Majestic (Clique Hunter). For pages that rank for a topic, a search scraper such as Pitchbox or Citation Labs Link Prospector. For listicles that name competitors, ListBrew. If you want the prospecting, the contact lookup and the pitch done for you, MentionAgent, from $99 a month.
Is there a free link prospecting tool?
Partly. Google search operators cost nothing. Ahrefs Free covers sites you have verified, not competitors. Hunter has a free plan with 50 credits a month. ListBrew gives 50 one-time credits. Citation Labs Link Prospector has a pay-as-you-go option at $5 a credit with no monthly fee. MentionAgent's trial shows real drafts for your site with no card.
Does a higher DR prospect reply more often?
Barely. Across 20,473 domains MentionAgent pitched between 1 July and 24 September 2026, reply rates by DR band ran from 6.0% to 10.1% with no steady trend. DR 60+ sites replied slightly more often but moved on to discussing a placement least often: 1.95%, against about 3% for DR 0 to 39.
What is the difference between link prospecting and link building?
Prospecting is the first step of link building: building the list of sites worth asking and finding who to ask at each one. Link building also covers the pitch, the follow-up, the negotiation and checking the link went live. Our how to build backlinks guide covers the rest.
Should I pitch info@ addresses or find a named person?
Do not skip a site because only a role inbox is listed. In MentionAgent's records, domains pitched at a role address such as info@ or editor@ replied 8.8% of the time, against 6.4% for named addresses, and reached a placement conversation at a similar rate (2.68% against 2.49%).