Since link-building can be incredibly time-consuming and challenging, it’s no wonder that so many marketers want to automate it with AI tools.
However, most AI-powered link-building tools either:
- Miss the mark entirely
- Require too much human oversight to actually save time
That’s not to say that there aren’t high-quality AI tools out there that will help you build links. There are plenty of them, you just need to know how to cut through the hype, which is why we’re here.
In this guide, we’ll look at the top link-building AI tools that are actually worth your time in 2025. We know they’re top-notch because they’re the tools we actually use to enhance our link-building campaigns, so we have first-hand experience with them.
Here’s an overview of what we’ll cover:
- The types of AI tools that mesh well with link-building campaigns
- What actually works (and what will just waste your time)
- Our process for using AI link-building tools internally
What Types of AI Tools are Used in Link-Building?
Let’s make something clear right off the bat: you should steer clear of AI tools that will ‘auto-build’ links for you. While it may be tempting to place your entire link-building strategy on autopilot, automated link-building tools aren’t very reliable.
Instead, it’s best to use AI tools to enhance and speed up certain aspects of your link-building process.
Accordingly, we’ll categorize the AI tools we cover by the link-building tasks they assist with, like email outreach and link prospecting.
Link prospecting tools
First, let’s look at some AI tools that simplify and speed up the prospecting process.
We’ll start by mentioning two SEO staples that you probably already use, Semrush and Ahrefs. While they offer a plethora of other SEO capabilities, they both have outstanding features for finding backlink opportunities.
Specifically, Semrush’s Link-Building Tool has a dedicated Prospects tab:
Once you set up your website as a new project, Semrush automatically detects and lists domains that link to your competitors but don’t link to you.
Further vetting is required for each prospect, but it’s an extremely quick and handy way to build a list of viable backlink opportunities. Semrush’s Copilot AI can also chime in with prospecting ideas, so pay attention to its personal recommendations for your website. Copilot will also notify you whenever you lose backlinks, so it’s also good for retaining the links you already built:
You can use Ahrefs’ Content Explorer to find unlinked brand mentions by searching for your brand, but make sure to hit the ‘highlight unlinked’ filter and to exclude your own website from the results. Its
Some other notable AI tools for link prospecting include:
- Linkee.AI – This tool uses contextual relevance to find backlink prospects in your niche, which is important for AI SEO
- Postaga – Great for finding content-based backlink opportunities (like guest posts, infographics, and podcasts)
Email personalization tools
Outreach is one of the areas where AI can help the most, but you have to be selective about how you use it. Once again, you shouldn’t let AI take the wheel here. The smart play is to let AI handle the repetitive stuff so you can focus on personalizing your pitches.
For example, hunting down site admin contact information is a notorious time waster. With a tool like Hunter.io, you can quickly find the email address associated with any domain. This will speed things up without sacrificing the quality of your outreach emails.
Hunter Campaigns takes things a step further by assisting with cold outreach emails. Its AI writing assistant is great for brainstorming subject lines and generating detailed templates that you can then personalize.
Mailshake is an honorable mention here. While it performs a lot of the same functions as Hunter, it does feature native A/B testing with automatic split and winner selection. This will help you craft the most effective outreach emails for your prospects, which can raise open rates.
Anchor text and link placement vetting tools
Anchor text ratios matter in SEO and AI SEO, so you need to regularly audit your backlink placements and anchors. Ideally, you want a balanced mix of branded, exact-match, and partial-match anchors (with an emphasis on branded anchor text for improving AI search visibility).
The only problem is that auditing anchor text is complicated and time-consuming.
Alli AI is a great tool for A) speeding up the process and B) uncovering valuable insights. It uses AI to audit your backlink anchors and the backlink anchor text profiles of your competitors.
It also identifies strategic gaps by pinpointing thematically appropriate websites where optimized anchor text would improve your site’s online visibility.
Indexing and tracking tools
AI tools are also great for tracking your campaign progress and speeding up the indexing process. While we already mentioned Semrush and Ahrefs for prospecting, they’re both fantastic tools for monitoring your backlink campaigns.
For example, setting up Ahrefs Alerts will notify you via email whenever you gain a new backlink or lose an existing one.
Semrush’s Backlink Analytics tool serves as a central hub for everything related to your link-building campaign, including your authority score, total backlinks, organic traffic, and more.
You can also see detailed breakdowns for things like backlink types, geographic distribution, and link attributes (follow/nofollow).
For speeding up indexing, Giga Indexer ensures that all your links get crawled within 72 hours. The best part is that if they don’t meet the 72-hour deadline, you receive a full refund.
AI Link Building Tools: What Works and What Doesn’t
AI tools are great for scaling outreach and knocking out cumbersome tasks like finding site admin email addresses.
What they aren’t good for is replacing the vetting process. We recommend that you still manually vet all your backlink placements.
In the current era, that means placing more emphasis on things like contextual relevance and topical alignment than raw DA/DR scores. Authority still matters, but it’s best measured by things like:
- Citation frequency (do other websites in your industry cite the website often?)
- Content quality/answer completeness (do they publish high-quality, truly helpful content?)
- Do they appear in resource lists and on reputable websites?
If the answer is yes to these questions, the domain is highly authoritative to LLMs and search algorithms, so it’s a suitable target. Many tools that automate the vetting process place too much emphasis on DA/DR scores and ignore things like relevance and content quality.
How We Use AI to Assist with High-Level Link-Building
Whenever we use AI link-building tools to assist with our link-building campaigns, we always blend them with an expert review. This ensures that we get the best of both worlds by saving time AND ensuring the quality of our work.
Our typical workflow goes something like this:
- Use tools like Hunter.io and Semrush to find backlink prospects and contact information
- Manually vetting each prospect to ensure topical authority and relevance
- Using a tool like Hunter Campaigns or Mailshake to initiate email outreach campaigns
- Personalize each email template (making use of our outreach expertise and experience)
- Engage in A/B testing (via Mailshake) to improve engagement and open rates
- Use Alli Ali to develop ideal anchor text ratios and link placements
- Monitor campaign progress using Semrush and Ahrefs Alerts
- Use a tool like Giga Indexer to make sure new link placements go live as soon as possible
As you can see, we still retain full control over the campaign; we just use AI tools to speed up a few processes (and optimize them).
To summarize, we recommend that you focus on strategy and not just automation. Use automated tools to reduce the monotony so your team can focus on the fun stuff (like personalizing emails and vetting prospects).
Do you need help developing an effective link-building campaign for the current AI-infused search landscape?
With ABC Plus, you can leave the link-building to our trained team of high-level experts so that you can focus on running your business.