The 50 Best Bootstrapped Backlink Builders in 2024

Bootstrapped businesses generally don't have huge budgets to spend on marketing, so any strategy these small-but-mighty companies use to improve their organic growth is something that you can take inspiration from, too.

We used the Ahrefs API to pull a list of live referring domains for each company in September 2023 and September 2024.
Companies were ranked by referring domain growth as a percentage of their initial referring domains. We’ve set a minimum starting threshold of 1,000 referring domains.
We've reported on referring domains instead of backlinks, because 1,000 referring domains are much, much harder to get than 1,000 backlinks.

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Rank	Company	Referring Domains 2023	Referring Domains 2024	Referring Domain Growth	Change	Estimated Revenue
1	Elfsight	7,657	33,610	25,953	339%	$8.0M
2	Short.io	5,709	18,573	12,864	225%	$0.5M
3	Gymdesk	1,325	3,052	1,727	130%	$5.5M
4	Helpjuice	4,015	8,672	4,657	116%	$6.0M
5	AlsoAsked	1,602	3,343	1,741	109%	$0.5M
6	Stripo	2,304	4,420	2,116	92%	$5.5M
7	Clearscope	1,883	3,580	1,697	90%	$5.5M
8	Surfer	5,815	10,899	5,084	87%	$37.5M
9	Wordtune	2,877	5,347	2,470	86%	$1.0M
10	Crowdin	4,818	8,919	4,101	85%	$17.5M
11	Socialinsider	3,264	6,007	2,743	84%	$0.8M
12	SpyFu	8,101	14,821	6,720	83%	$2.0M
13	Pentest-Tools.com	1,543	2,779	1,236	80%	$5.5M
14	Canny	4,411	7,675	3,264	74%	$5.5M
15	Surfshark	13,898	24,056	10,158	73%	$20.0M
16	Sitebulb	1,232	2,093	861	70%	$0.5M
17	Seobility	3,496	5,900	2,404	69%	$5.0M
18	SpyCloud	1,192	1,987	795	67%	$14.0M
19	MxToolbox	10,718	17,736	7,018	65%	$9.0M
20	Shiftbase	1,077	1,780	703	65%	$17.5M
21	Signaturely	1,113	1,839	726	65%	$0.5M
22	Lemlist	1,613	2,654	1,041	65%	$6.0M
23	Sitechecker	5,938	9,732	3,794	64%	$6.1M
24	SavvyCal	1,272	2,070	798	63%	$5.5M
25	Statusbrew	2,750	4,470	1,720	63%	$14.0M
26	Wisepops	1,291	2,086	795	62%	$3.0M
27	Glassnode	5,041	8,123	3,082	61%	$5.5M
28	DeviceAtlas	2,765	4,442	1,677	61%	$19.0M
29	Float.com	1,021	1,638	617	60%	$5.5M
30	RTINGS.com	8,601	13,779	5,178	60%	$6.3M
31	Smallpdf	13,953	22,264	8,311	60%	$17.5M
32	Clockify	6,109	9,733	3,624	59%	$5.5M
33	Mailtrap	3,162	4,991	1,829	58%	$5.5M
34	BambooHR	8,511	13,410	4,899	58%	$237.8M
35	Setapp	13,178	20,696	7,518	57%	$15.0M
36	WebCEO	2,495	3,891	1,396	56%	$25.0M
37	Visme	10,354	16,135	5,781	56%	$1.0M
38	UpLead	1,823	2,833	1,010	55%	$17.5M
39	Slickplan	1,345	2,086	741	55%	$1.0M
40	Jotform	45,485	69,553	24,068	53%	$21.0M
41	Wiza	2,013	3,070	1,057	53%	$5.5M
42	Ahrefs	52,536	80,036	27,500	52%	$100.0M
43	Plausible Analytics	6,084	9,251	3,167	52%	$5.5M
44	Creately	7,816	11,844	4,028	52%	$12.0M
45	Homerun	2,040	3,068	1,028	50%	$38.4M
46	Yardi	1,928	2,880	952	49%	$5500.0M
47	Infinite Campus	1,029	1,534	505	49%	$56.0M
48	Filemail	3,829	5,694	1,865	49%	$1.0M
49	LiveAgent	4,740	7,034	2,294	48%	$5.0M
50	Semaphore	2,727	4,025	1,298	48%	$4.0M

Want to work out how virtually any company builds its best backlinks? Here’s how I do it in Ahrefs.

I usually start with the Overview report in Site Explorer to get a quick overview of the website’s referring domain growth. Here’s the chart for our #1 company, Elfsight:

Impressive! Next, I use the Anchors report to quickly understand the types of links being built: are they all brand mentions, or links to blog content, or free tools?

In Elfsight’s case, the vast majority of their referring domains (well over 60%) have anchor text containing the word widget:

Looking at some of these links, it’s clear that the company offers free website widgets that also include a link back to Elfsight:

For some websites, anchor text won’t be so revealing. Here’s the Referring Domains report for a SaaS company I excluded from this article. At first glance, they seem to be doing well, with over 100,000 new backlinks acquired in the past year:

But digging into the most common anchor text, it becomes apparent that these are almost all spammy links (advertising Korean business massages).

You can exclude spammy links like these using our Best links filter. By default, the “Best links” filter will only show links that are:

Dofollow,
In the page content,
On a referring domain with a DR of at least 30,
With estimated organic traffic to the page of at least 500/m.

If you have different criteria for defining a “best” link, you can customize the filter yourself:

With the filter applied, if we run the Anchors report again, we can filter out all of those spam links, and get a clearer picture of the good quality links this website has acquired. Far, far fewer:

Lastly, I like to visit the Best by links report to see the individual pages that have acquired the best links.

Here’s an example from another one of our top 50 websites, Clearscope. Aside from common “utility” pages like their homepage, pricing page, and sign-in page, their most linked-to pages are all thought leadership blog posts—opinions, predictions, and research studies:

Not every company can build links by offering tons of free tools or widgets, but thought leadership content is a link-building strategy that's much easier for other companies to emulate.