Link building statistics from 815 real outreach emails

Outreach only started in mid-July, so this is two months, not a year — shown as two bars rather than a line so it isn't read as a trend it can't yet support. The reply rate held roughly flat, 4.4% in July and 3.9% in August, while send volume roughly doubled. There isn't enough history yet to say whether the rate holds as volume keeps scaling; this section will read very differently once a full year of months exist.

Every tier here clears the 20-prospect minimum, but the relationship with Domain Rating is not monotonic in this dataset: DR 20–40 leads at 12.5%, ahead of DR 60+ at 9.5%, DR 40–60 at 5.8%, and DR 0–20 at 4.0%. With 2–13 replies per tier, this is too little data to claim DR predicts reply rate one way or the other yet — the honest read is "no clear pattern so far," not "authority wins" or "authority doesn't matter."

Mentiohunt scores how well a specific article fits a specific site before any outreach goes out — and in this dataset, that filter is doing its job almost too well to compare against: 426 of 434 contacted prospects (98%) score 0.9+ on fit. The three middle tiers have zero contacted prospects, and "very low fit" has only 5. This isn't a sample-size problem that more time will fix — it's the intended effect of screening for fit before sending. There's no genuine low-fit cohort in the platform's outreach to compare the 0.9+ tier against yet.

Just over 60% of replies arrive within 24 hours of the email being sent, and 76% inside three days. Only one reply so far — of 33 — has arrived after two weeks. Early days, but the shape already matches what's typically seen in cold outreach: if someone is going to answer, it usually happens fast.

Of 285 inbound messages received, 230 were bounces and 11 were automated out-of-office replies — both excluded here, since neither is a real reply. Of the 44 genuine messages left, 19 are logged as a human reply, 19 as needing manual review, and 6 as a negative reply. Mentiohunt is mid-migration to a more specific 8-value classification (interested / paid-placement ask / link-exchange ask / free-product ask / declined / other) that will replace "needs review" with an honest category once the backfill runs — until then, these are the platform's current raw labels, not the final taxonomy.

Measured against everyone contacted, not everyone still in the sequence: the initial email had produced replies from 5.8% of the 434 contacted prospects by the time each got a first follow-up, the first follow-up lifted that to 7.1%, and the second to 7.6%. The lift is real but small in this window — 434 prospects and 33 total replies is not enough to say with confidence how much of that first-follow-up lift will hold as volume grows, but it's already enough to say the first follow-up is worth sending.