Backlinks

This folder documents the Backlinks feature of Leadmetrics — an AI-driven pipeline for discovering link-building prospects, crawling contact information, and generating personalised outreach at scale.

Related: Campaigns — Campaign and CampaignEmail models shared with backlink outreach | Agents — AI workers | SEO — broader SEO feature set

Contents

• Overview
• Acquisition Methods
• Current Pipeline — email outreach (live)
• Opportunity Database — directory DB + self-serve link building (to build)
• Data Model
• AI Agents
• API Routes
• UI
• Acquisition Methods Roadmap
• Missing: Reply Tracking — options for auto-detecting prospect replies

Overview

The Backlinks feature automates link-building — one of the most time-intensive and high-impact activities in SEO. Leadmetrics breaks the workflow into discrete AI-assisted stages so the DM team reviews and approves at every gate before outreach is sent.

Design principles:

• AI does the grunt work: Prospect discovery, contact crawling, and email drafting are all agent-handled. Humans review, approve, and send.
• Unified Backlink entity: Both cold outreach and self-serve directory opportunities are Backlink rows. The sourceType field (outreach | directory_opportunity | competitor_gap) determines which pipeline and UI mode applies.
• One list, one detail page: The /seo/backlinks page in both dashboard and DM portal shows all types together. The detail page renders context-aware panels — outreach email for outreach rows, step-by-step instructions for opportunity rows.
• Admin-managed directory database: Superadmins seed and maintain the BacklinkDirectory table in the Manage portal. Entries are tenant-agnostic; the opportunity-matcher agent filters and scores them per tenant.
• Crawl cache is shared: The CrawlCache table is tenant-agnostic with a 14-day TTL so crawling the same domain twice (across different clients) reuses the result.
• Status lifecycle is explicit per type: Outreach rows use prospecting → outreach_sent → agreed → published; opportunity rows use opportunity → in_progress → completed.

Acquisition Methods

Leadmetrics currently implements email outreach as the primary backlink acquisition channel. Five additional methods are planned:

See Opportunity Database for the directory DB spec and Acquisition Methods Roadmap for all other methods.