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Nearly every early-stage content team operates under the same assumption: backlinks are a game for brands that already have authority. HubSpot can earn 1,000 referring domains (RDs) on a single page because they’re HubSpot. You can’t, because you’re not.
But that’s just not true anymore. And our data makes it hard to argue otherwise.
We analyzed 12,154 content pages across 24 leading B2B brands spanning 11 verticals and 2.4 million total referring domains. Three distinct authority tiers emerged from the data which we refer to as:
- High-authority brands who earn 300 or more RDs per page
- Mid-authority brands who earn between 100 and 300 RDs per page
- Emerging brands who earn under 100 RDs per page
What we found is that the top emerging brands are investing in two content formats that are likely to earn backlinks regardless of domain authority.
Want to skip straight to good stuff? Download Foundation’s B2B Backlink Intelligence Report for insights from our analysis of 12,000+ B2B SaaS pages earning over 2.4 million referring domains.
Lower Authority Brands Can Win (If They Invest in the Right Formats)
Even within enterprise B2B SaaS, there are big fish and small fish. It’s as true for monthly recurring revenue as it is for domain authority. And the data from our report makes the latter especially clear.
Each Cloudflare page brings in thousands of referring domains, while brands like BambooHR and Deel attract a few dozen (or fewer).
While it’s tempting to look to Cloudflare and Salesforce for strategic insights, it’s actually the emerging brands that B2B marketing departments need to focus on.
Why?
Because you probably don’t have the brand recognition, user base, or budget of a Cloudflare or Salesforce. You need to shoot for more realistic results driven by a content strategy that scales.
BambooHR earns a median of 39 referring domains per page, while Deel comes in at 36. Those are numbers that most B2B marketing departments would brag about, it just gets overshadowed by the results of the High Authority tier.
Our data suggests that one reason for this is content asset allocation. Certain content types earn links at every authority level. We ranked 15 content types based on two primary performance metrics:
- Backlink efficiency score: the ratio of a content type’s share of referring domains to its share of published pages for each brand.
- Fail rate: the percentage of pages within a content type that earn fewer than 50 referring domains
Glossary, definition, and how-to pages stand out above the other content types based on our backlink performance metrics. If you’re not on the level of a Cloudflare or a Salesforce, these are a solid bet for backlinks.
Glossary and Definition Pages: 1.47x Efficiency Score
According to our research, glossary and definition content earns about 1.5 referring domains for every page published. The fail rate is among the lowest of any format at 23%.
What makes this format effective is the simplicity of its impact as a backlink tool: writers need to define terms when they produce blog posts, reports, and articles. They link to the best definition they can find.
Plus, a clear, comprehensive definition of a term people need explained doesn’t go stale the way news does or become outdated the way prediction posts do. It accumulates links over time, meaning the ROI on a well-written glossary page compounds the longer it stays published and up to date.
For an emerging authority brand like BambooHR, that mechanism plays out in the data directly. Their overall median is 39 referring domains per page. Their glossary pages earn 45, beating their own baseline.
A low-authority brand investing in glossary content earns more per page than its domain position suggests it should, because writers searching for definitions don’t care who you are and they care whether your answer is the clearest one available.
How-To Pages: 1.36x Efficiency Score
Across all the brands we studied, each how-to asset returns about 1.4 backlinks.
For Deel, a brand with a median 36 referring domains per page, these pages bring in return of 108 referring domains per page. That’s a 3x performance improvement and a great return on investment for an Emerging Authority brand.
Things get even more interesting when we zoom out how-to page performance across all tiers:
Breakout how-to pages often have almost nothing to do with a brand’s core products.
High-authority and mid-authority brands illustrate this pattern clearly:
- Zapier (Mid-Authority) earns 1,958 referring domains for “How to Copy a Folder in Google Drive,” a task independent of their automation software.
- Shopify (High-Authority) uses a similar playbook, with top pages covering how to shorten URLs (1,653 RD) and find wholesale suppliers (1,023 RD) rather than platform tutorials.
The pattern identified in the report is clear: how-to content that earns links solves real tasks the audience already has, rather than just documenting product features.
What to Do With This Information
If your brand is in the emerging tier, three questions are worth answering before your next content planning meeting.
- What’s your current median referring domain count per page? If you don’t know it, that’s the first problem. Pull the referring domain data for all the published content on your site and divide by the number of published pages.
- What percentage of your content is glossary or how-to format? If it’s under 20%, the format mix almost certainly doesn’t match where backlinks are likely to come from.
- Do your glossary and how-to pages outperform your other content? Pull the median for those formats specifically and compare it to your site-wide median. If they’re not beating your baseline, make sure you’re executing on what makes the format work: clear definitions, audience-task topics, primary sources.
Your Next Content Planning Meeting Needs This Data
The authority tier breakdown is a useful finding, but it’s just one of the 14 in our B2B Backlink Intelligence Report.
The data also surfaces:
- Why developer documentation has a 74.5% floor rate for hitting 200 or more referring domains. and why almost no emerging brand invests in it
- The title decision that produces a 1.4x backlink uplift across every format and every authority tier
- The exact content types that lead in each of the 11 verticals in the study, so you can benchmark against your niche rather than the full dataset
The question isn’t whether an emerging brand can compete for backlinks. Our data shows clearly that they can. The question is whether you’re investing in the formats that make it possible.
Our B2B Backlink Intelligence Report breaks it all down.
[Access the Full Report Now →]
Foundation’s B2B Backlink Intelligence Report analyzed 12,154 content pages across 24 B2B brands. The full report covers all 15 content types ranked by efficiency score, fail rate, and breakout potential — with brand-level benchmarks across 11 verticals, vertical-specific format rankings, and the authority tier analysis that shows exactly where emerging brands win and where they stall.
