56% plan to increase link building investment

BuzzStream's 2024 outlook survey shows fifty-six per cent of practitioners planning to increase link-building investment over the next twelve months despite acknowledging rising costs and tougher editorial conditions. The signal is meaningful: more than half the industry is doubling down on the tactic rather than diversifying away from it. The implied collective bet is that link authority remains the dominant ranking signal in both classical search and the emerging AI-search surfaces, and that paying a higher unit cost for quality placements is still the most efficient defensive investment available against competitors making the same calculation.