Backlink & Mentions Audit
Links still decide who ranks in competitive niches, and brand mentions on trusted pages now decide who AI assistants recommend. A messy link profile can hold you back or even trigger penalties, while the right placements can move you past competitors. This audit shows both: what to clean up and where to grow.
What's included
- ✓Full review of your backlink profile and anchor text
- ✓Toxic, spammy and negative-SEO link detection
- ✓Link gap analysis against your top competitors
- ✓Brand mention review on the pages AI answers are built from (reviews, listicles, comparisons)
- ✓Manual action and spam policy risk check
- ✓Assessment of past link-building work
What you get
- →A disavow file and cleanup plan, if needed
- →A prospect list of sites that link to competitors but not to you
- →A list of high-value pages where a brand mention would matter for AI answers
- →A link-building strategy with realistic targets
Timeline
7–10 business days. Price: Request a quote
How it works
- 1
Collect
I combine Ahrefs
- 2
Clean
Risky links are reviewed by hand
- 3
Compare
Your profile is benchmarked against the competitors you lose to.
- 4
Grow
You get prospects and a strategy for links and mentions.
Results
FAQ
Do I need to disavow links?
Usually not. Google ignores most spam on its own. A disavow makes sense after a manual action, a clear negative-SEO attack, or a history of paid links, and I only recommend it when the evidence is there.
Why do brand mentions matter now?
AI assistants build answers from pages they trust, often review sites, listicles and comparisons. Being mentioned there can matter as much for AI visibility as a classic backlink does for rankings.
Can you build the links too?
Yes. Link building is available as a separate service that starts from this audit's prospect list.
How do you check link quality?
By hand, on top of tool metrics: relevance, real traffic, editorial standards and whether the site sells links to everyone.
We were hit by a spam update. Is this the right audit?
If links are the suspected cause, yes. If you are not sure why traffic dropped, start with the Traffic Drop & Google Update Recovery audit.