80.9% expect link building to get harder

Editorial.link's 2025 forward-look survey finds that 80.9 per cent of practitioners expect link building to get harder over the next twelve months, citing rising costs, stricter editorial standards, intensified editor scepticism around AI-assisted submissions, and Google's continued algorithm churn. The figure is consistent across agency-side and in-house respondents, which suggests the difficulty signal is structural rather than perspective-driven. For anyone running budget planning, the expectation alignment between the people doing the work and the conditions they predict is the strongest available leading indicator: 2026 link programmes should be sized to deliver against a harder market than 2025's already-tough conditions.