Links vs coverage: are we measuring value or just what is convenient to count?

I recently came out of a pitch follow-up feeling a bit daft.

We’d been talking to a software company about growing their organic visibility. The initial pitch had gone really well.

In the follow-up, I found myself being grilled on Domain Rating (DR). It felt like 2014, and to be fair it was my fault.

We’d included an authority score in the deck. The prospect’s was 4/100. One competitor was in the low fifties; another was in the mid sixties. The point of the slide was to illustrate a competitive gap and explain why we believed PR needed to be part of the campaign.

Instead, the number became the conversation.

I found myself defending a metric while telling the prospect not to get distracted by it. Which is a slightly awkward position to find yourself in when you’re the person who signed off the slides.

What I said was: “The KPI in this campaign is increasing the number of enquiries you obtain via organic. The KPI is not to increase the DR.”

I stand by that. But it made me question how we talk about links, coverage and the numbers we use to demonstrate their value.

A supporting metric can become the objective

First, a definition: Domain Rating (DR) is Ahrefs’ metric. Ahrefs describes DR as a measure of the relative strength of a website’s backlink profile on a hundred-point scale.

It’s a third party measure. It’s not like Google hands out an out-of-a-hundred score to every domain.

The score can provide useful context when comparing the strength of a competitor’s website. It can prompt you to investigate their links and understand what you might be up against. But it cannot tell you, on its own, whether a campaign is succeeding commercially.

After that pitch, my instinct was to tell the team we should stop talking about Domain Rating altogether. Our PR team quite reasonably pushed back: what about using these metrics when assessing the publications we’re targeting?

I get that. There is a role for them. My concern is the weight we give them.

A supporting metric should help inform a decision. Once improving it becomes the reason for the decision, we need to ask whether we’re still working towards the client’s objective.

Coverage does not become worthless because it has no link

This comes up regularly with prospects. We talk about our PR team securing coverage in relevant publications, and the question follows: will there be a link?

It’s a reasonable question, especially given how much SEOs have been banging on about links for hundreds of years. Links are useful. I’m not arguing that we should stop pursuing them.

But some publications have editorial policies that restrict links. Should that automatically make them less desirable places for a client to appear?

One of our clients is a storage company with sites around London. In a recent ChatGPT response to a search for storage in one of its South London locations, it appeared as the top recommendation. The answer referred to coverage in Property Week whilst justifying that recommendation.

That coverage was unlinked.

Now, I want to be precise about what this tells us. We saw the publication mentioned in the answer. That does not prove that this one article caused the recommendation, or that the same answer would appear for everyone asking the question.

But it is a concrete example of unlinked coverage appearing in the explanation a prospective customer received. A report concerned only with acquired backlinks would miss that.

It would also be a mistake to turn this example into a new universal rule that coverage is always more valuable than links. We haven’t established that either.

What are we encouraging agencies to do

If you hold an agency to a link target above everything else, you give it a reason to favour websites that will provide links.

Sometimes those will also be excellent places for your business to appear. Sometimes a better or more relevant publication will refuse to link.

I don’t want our team dismissing the second opportunity simply because it won’t add another backlink to a report. I want us to be able to explain why that publication, that audience and that story matter to the client.

There is an uncomfortable point here for agencies, too. Being judged on coverage rather than links could be quite convenient for us. We can’t use that change to make our work harder to scrutinise.

“We got you mentioned” is not, by itself, an adequate explanation of value either.

We should be able to discuss whether the coverage reached a relevant audience, what it actually said about the business, and what evidence we have of a useful response. A passing namecheck and a substantial piece explaining why a company is worth considering are different things. A domain score won’t tell you that.

Evidence without pretending we know everything

This is where I think good agencies need to be more comfortable saying what they know and what they don’t.

At Go Up, we have experience of campaigns where links have moved the needle, and campaigns where we believe coverage has made a meaningful contribution. We have plenty of examples of our clients’ websites well outranking competitors with higher DR scores in both traditional and generative search. The responsibility is to show the evidence behind those judgments.

What changed? When did it change? What else were we doing at the time? How confident are we that the activity contributed?

Those questions matter because an improvement after coverage is published does not automatically prove that the coverage caused it. Equally, an inability to attribute a precise number of enquiries to one article does not establish that the article had no value.

For a client buying an organic discoverability campaign, enquiries remain central. Alongside that, we need to explain the progress we can observe: relevant visibility, the quality of the coverage, and any identifiable customer response. Those measures will not all carry the same weight, and we should say so.

What bugs me is when agencies present something as fact when we simply don’t know it’s fact.

It’s fine not to know the complete answer. It’s reasonable for prospects to ask difficult questions. Our job is to give them the clearest answer the evidence supports, including where our confidence ends.

What I want us to be held accountable for

I don’t think we should let the presence or absence of a hyperlink decide whether coverage was worth securing. Nor should we let an authority score become a substitute for the commercial goal.

Links can be valuable. Relevant coverage can be valuable. A responsible agency should be able to explain why it is pursuing each, show what happened, and change its approach when the evidence calls for it.

The question I want clients and agencies to ask is whether the numbers in the report help us understand that value.

Or whether we’ve become attached to them because they’re convenient to count.