Most SaaS companies still judge link building by domain rating. Saket Aggarwal has run a link building agency for B2B SaaS for about seven years, and he thinks DR is close to the wrong thing to measure — he would rather put your link on a topically relevant DR 40 site with real traffic than a DR 90 site with no connection to what you sell.
I wanted to talk to him because that view is now more useful than it used to be. AI assistants have changed what a mention is worth, and the metric most teams budget around was already a poor proxy for whether a link does anything.
Relevance over authority scores
Saket’s agency doesn’t build campaigns around DR or DA. The question they start from is whether the keyword a client wants to rank for would genuinely fit the page they’re placing on.
“We don’t rely on DA, DR, we don’t rely on those vanity metrics. We only focus on topical relevance.”
That isn’t a claim that authority is meaningless — he still looks at a domain before placing anything. It’s that relevance is the factor he’ll trade the headline number for. A DR 90 placement that no relevant reader sees is worth less than a DR 40 placement in the middle of your category.
This is easy to agree with and hard to sell, which is most of why it doesn’t happen. DR is a single number a client can check, and “topical relevance” is a judgement call they’re paying you to make.
The bottom-of-funnel playbook still works
I described the playbook I’d used up to about six months ago and asked whether it still holds: take a bottom-of-funnel keyword like cold outreach software, build a genuinely good page for it, ideally with original research so it isn’t a rewrite of the other results, then build links to it from sites in the same space. Then, separately, get yourself into the third-party listicles already ranking in the top ten for that term — so whichever result the buyer clicks, you’re in it.
His answer was that the playbook is “100% true” for traditional SEO, and that the listicle half of it has become more important rather than less, because those pages feed AI answers as well as human clicks.
What’s worth noticing is the order. The page comes first. Links to a mediocre page are the most common way SaaS companies waste a link building budget.
What changed for AI search
Two things, and the first one surprised me.
Unlinked and nofollow mentions now carry weight. For traditional SEO, a followed link was the thing worth paying for. Saket’s experience is that for citations in ChatGPT and other assistants, a nofollow link or even a plain brand mention without a link can still get you included.
Presence has to be spread across channels. His recommendation for being cited is to show up where the models are reading — YouTube, LinkedIn, Reddit, competitors’ blogs, the listicles — rather than treating link building as the whole off-page program.
But he was firm about the limit:
“You still have to have the good content. You can’t be on the fourth, fifth, seventh page and still be cited.”
So AI search hasn’t replaced ranking. If you’re nowhere near page one for a term, being mentioned in a few places won’t rescue you. The multi-channel work compounds what ranking already earns you.
Why the agency works with SaaS only
Digital Gratified takes B2B SaaS and nothing else, and Saket is blunt that the focus is why the business works — ten of their clients have stayed seven to eight years. His read on agencies spread across five or six verticals is that they usually either close or narrow down eventually.
For a founder choosing an agency, this is the useful filter. Someone who only works in your category has seen your failure modes before and doesn’t need you to explain your buyer.
Saying no is part of the job
The part I expect SaaS marketing leads to recognise: a client arrives wanting a fixed number of links in two months. Saket turns that work down.
His reasoning is practical rather than principled. Bottom-of-funnel work takes about three months to start showing, so a two-month engagement ends exactly when there’s nothing to show — the client churns, and nobody can tell whether the work was any good. He wants six to twelve months, and he’d rather lose the deal than take one that can’t succeed.
“If as an agency you are not trying to educate the client, then they can build an in-house team.”
That line applies well beyond agencies. It’s the same conversation an in-house SEO has with a founder or a CMO who’s arrived with a number in mind.
What SaaS companies underestimate about off-page
Time. Almost everything else follows from it.
His view is that most SaaS companies route budget to ads because the results arrive quickly, and then treat off-page as though it should behave the same way. It doesn’t — and the honest version of the pitch is that you need patience, not that you’ve found a faster route. His advice is to get the foundation right first and expand once there’s money to experiment with.
FAQ
Does domain rating still matter for SaaS link building? It’s useful for screening out obviously bad sites, but it’s a third-party score, not a ranking factor. Saket would rather place a link on a topically relevant DR 40 site with real traffic than a DR 90 site with no connection to the subject.
What makes a link topically relevant? The page, and the site around it, covers the same subject as the page you’re linking to — so someone reading it would plausibly want your product. For a cold email tool, that’s sales and outreach publications, not a high-authority site writing about something else.
Do nofollow links and unlinked brand mentions help with AI search? In Saket’s experience, yes. Mentions without a followed link still contribute to being cited by ChatGPT and other assistants, which is a real change from how link building was judged a few years ago.
How long does SaaS link building take to show results? Around three months before bottom-of-funnel work starts to show, with the engagement planned over six to twelve months.
The takeaway
If you’re briefing link building right now, the change worth making is to stop scoring prospects primarily by DR and start asking whether a real buyer would read that page. Then make sure the page you’re pointing links at deserves them, and treat the listicles your category already ranks for as part of the work rather than an afterthought.
That’s most of what I’d look at first in an organic program. If you want a straight answer about yours, book a call — and for the full conversation with Saket, watch the episode or connect with him on LinkedIn.