Guest post prices in 2026: what 670,349 offers tell us

Published 21 October 2026

A guest post on a typical website listed for sale costs $94 if you find the cheapest seller. The same site is often listed by several sellers at once. For more than half of the sites with three or more listings, the highest price is over double the lowest. Many of the sites on sale also have almost no readers: 38% get no organic search traffic at all.

Those are the headline results of the BuyLinks.ai Guest Post Price Index. In October 2026 we collected 682,753 public seller listings for 199,781 websites from more than 50 marketplaces and sellers. After trimming outliers, 670,349 listings for 197,558 sites went into the price figures below. We only publish totals and medians, never prices for individual sites, and every number is based on at least 50 listings.

What does a guest post cost in 2026?

Taking the cheapest listing for each site, the median guest post costs $94. Half of all sites fall between $30 and $262. If you look at every listing rather than just the cheapest one, the median rises to $137.

Averages paint a more expensive picture. The mean cheapest price is $279, because a small number of very expensive sites pull it up. That is why we report medians: a median tells you what a typical site costs.

How much does Domain Rating change the price?

Domain Rating (DR) is Ahrefs’ 0–100 score for the strength of a site’s backlinks. Higher-DR sites cost more, but much less steadily than many buyers expect.

Median price of the cheapest listing, by Domain Rating

From DR 15 to DR 49, prices barely move: the median cheapest listing rises from $73 to $90. The real jump comes above DR 60. A DR 70+ site costs a median $367, almost five times the $76 for a DR 20–29 site.

p25 and p75 mark the middle half of sites: a quarter cost less than p25 and a quarter cost more than p75. Our data starts at DR 15, so there are no figures for DR 0–14.

Does traffic matter more than DR?

Yes. Organic traffic moves price far more than DR does. Sites with no organic traffic have a median cheapest price of $46. Sites with 100,000 or more monthly visits cost a median $630, almost 14 times as much. Across DR bands the gap from bottom to top is about five times.

Median price of the cheapest listing, by monthly organic traffic

Sellers seem to price traffic, and that makes sense. Readers are what make a placement worth having. A high score with no audience is mostly a number.

You might be overpaying: the same site at very different prices

This was the most striking finding. 82% of sites in the index are listed by two or more sellers, and their prices often have little in common.

We looked at the 131,456 sites with three or more listings. For a typical site, the highest listing is 2.1 times the lowest, a median gap of $91 per post. On 54% of these sites the top price is more than double the cheapest. On 31% it is more than three times, and on 15% more than five times.

Gap between the highest and lowest listing for the same site

Even a middle-of-the-road price costs extra. The median listing for a site is typically 40% higher than its cheapest listing. Buy ten posts at typical prices instead of the cheapest, and you pay about what fourteen would cost.

Some of the gap has fair reasons. Sellers differ in what they include: a written article, a longer post, faster delivery or a replacement guarantee. But identical placements on the same site often carry very different prices, so it pays to compare before you buy.

Which niches cost the most?

Here are the 12 largest site categories, ranked by the median price of each site’s cheapest listing. Sports, travel and news sites cost the most. Medicine, community and gambling sites are at the bottom.

Median price of the cheapest listing, 12 largest categories

Two caveats. Categories are as stated on the listings, and a site with several categories counts in each one. These are prices for standard content. Many sites charge extra for gambling, crypto or CBD articles, or refuse them, and those surcharges are not in these figures. The $20 median for gambling sites is the standard listed price on sites in that category. A casino or betting link on the same sites may cost more.

High DR, few readers

Most sites on sale have very little search traffic. Across all 199,781 sites in the index:

• 38.2% (76,279 sites) have no organic search traffic at all.
• 57.0% get fewer than 100 visits a month.
• 72.7% get fewer than 1,000 visits a month.

A high DR does not fix this. 44% of DR 50+ sites (17,614 of 40,079) get fewer than 1,000 monthly organic visits, and so do a third of DR 70+ sites.

Share of sites with under 1,000 monthly organic visits, by Domain Rating

Statistically, DR and traffic are only loosely linked. The rank correlation between them is 0.32 on a scale where 1 would mean they move together perfectly. Knowing a site’s DR tells you little about whether anyone reads it. Our guide on how to check if a backlink is good covers the checks that matter more.

Price by language and country

Language makes a big difference. German and Dutch sites have a median cheapest price of $298 and $270, more than five times the $52 for English-language sites. English has by far the most sites on sale, 52,783, and that supply keeps the cheap end of the market crowded.

Median price of the cheapest listing, 8 largest languages

Country shows the same pattern. Sites listed in Germany and the Netherlands cost the most. Sites in the United Kingdom, France and India cost the least.

Dofollow vs sponsored links

We wanted to compare dofollow and sponsored placements, but the listings we collected didn’t record the link attribute in a consistent way. Rather than guess, we have left this comparison out. Always ask the seller which attribute your link will carry and whether the post will be labelled as sponsored.

Only 1 in 7 sites pass a basic quality bar

We applied a simple, transparent bar to every site in the index. A site passes if it has:

1. a DR of 20 or more,
2. at least 5,000 monthly organic visits, and
3. no gambling or adult category.

28,834 of 199,781 sites pass: 14.4%, or about 1 in 7. Lower the traffic bar to 1,000 visits and 25.2% pass, about 1 in 4.

How many sites survive a basic quality bar

Sites that pass cost more. Their median cheapest listing is $328, compared with $80 for sites that don’t. That’s the real price of a placement with an audience. A cheap post on a site nobody visits is rarely a bargain.

This bar is a rough first cut that anyone can repeat. When we build a plan, every site also has to pass manual checks: a real topic, recent posts, traffic that isn’t collapsing, and not selling links to everyone.

Key takeaways for buyers

• Compare sellers for the same site. On more than half of sites with three or more listings, the highest price is over double the lowest.
• Pay for traffic, not DR. Traffic explains price far better than DR, and 44% of DR 50+ sites get fewer than 1,000 visits a month.
• Use medians as a sanity check. Around $75–$90 for a DR 20–49 site and about $367 for DR 70+ are typical cheapest-listing prices in October 2026.
• Be wary of cheap posts. A $20 post on a site with no readers is not a bargain. Sites that pass a basic quality bar cost a median $328.
• Ask what is included. Check the link attribute, the sponsored label, whether the article is included, and how long the post stays live.
• Look beyond English. German, Dutch and Italian placements cost much more. Budget for that if you sell into those markets.

Methodology

• Source and dates. We collected public guest post listings from more than 50 marketplaces and sellers in October 2026. The snapshot was taken on 20 October 2026. 89% of listings had been updated by their seller in September or October 2026, and every dated listing was updated during 2026.
• Scope. 682,753 listings for 199,781 websites with an Ahrefs DR of 15 or more. Sites below DR 15 are not covered. In the DR 15–19 band, about 4,700 sites with no traffic were not collected, so the share of zero-traffic sites in that band is understated.
• Prices. All prices are in US dollars. The listings we collected were already priced in USD, so no conversion was needed. We used the listed price for a standard guest post. It excludes payment or platform fees, tax, and separate content-writing fees. These are asking prices, not completed sales.
• Outliers. Within each DR band, we removed listings priced below the 1st percentile or above the 99th percentile for that band. This removed 12,404 listings (1.8%). The lower cut-offs ranged from $4 to $10 and the upper ones from $1,678 (DR 15–19) to $18,067 (DR 70+). 670,349 listings for 197,558 sites remained.
• Cheapest and median. Each site is counted once, at its cheapest remaining listing, because that’s what an informed buyer would pay. The DR table also shows the median of all listings. Percentiles use linear interpolation.
• Price spread. Measured on the 131,456 sites with three or more listings after trimming, as the highest listing divided by the lowest. We recorded at most five seller listings per site, so the true spread may be wider.
• Metrics. DR and monthly organic traffic are Ahrefs estimates attached to the listings when we collected them. We did not re-measure them. Language, country and category are as stated on the listings. About 40% of sites had no language and about 26% had no category; they are left out of those breakdowns. The DR–traffic correlation is a Spearman rank correlation across all 199,781 sites.
• Minimum sample. Every published figure is based on at least 50 listings. In practice the smallest group shown has 3,315 sites. We publish totals and medians only, never prices for individual sites or sellers.

Related reading

• What does a guest post cost in 2026? Our guide to guest post prices, with other published studies.
• How to check if a backlink is good before you buy it
• Get a free link-building plan or run a free AI SEO check