Link building is the biggest line item in SEO budgets

Editorial.link's 2025 budget benchmark, drawn from agency and in-house responses, finds that link building is the single largest line item inside the average SEO budget at 32.1 per cent, ahead of technical SEO, content production, on-page work and tooling. Agencies allocate proportionally more to links than in-house teams, who tend to push a larger share into content production they own end-to-end. The dominance of link spend reflects a return to first-principles ranking factors after several years of speculation that on-page signals or AI-generated content could displace backlinks as the lead ranking signal. They have not, and the budget mix proves it.