If you run an SEO agency, backlink work has three predictable phases that repeat every month for every client: acquire, monitor, recover. Most tools cover one of those phases well and the other two badly. Spreadsheets fill the gaps. Your team spends 3 to 5 hours per client per month on manual reporting, outreach, and link-status detective work that does not show up on the invoice.
TraceLinker is built around all three phases with AI-driven automation at each step and white-label client reports your clients can read without logging in to anything. It is not a Swiss-army knife: there is no keyword research, no on-page audit, no PPC. It is the backlink layer of your stack done at agency scale.
Who this is for
You are likely a fit if any of these describe your agency:
- You manage backlinks for 5 to 50 clients and per-seat tool pricing is becoming a real cost line.
- You spend more than 2 hours per client per month on backlink-only reporting.
- You manually copy lost-link source URLs into a spreadsheet, then write outreach emails one by one.
- You screenshot dashboards into Google Slides for monthly retainer reviews.
- Your account managers ask "what's our backlink health?" and the answer takes 20 minutes to assemble.
What an agency week looks like with TraceLinker
Monday - new client onboarding
A new retainer starts. The handover deck includes the client's existing backlink profile (Ahrefs export, Semrush export, or GSC Top Linking Sites). You upload the CSV at /dashboard/audits/new. Within 3 to 8 minutes, the AI has scored every link with reasoning, flagged toxic ones with a Disavow file ready to download, and generated outreach drafts for the salvageable mid-tier links.
You spend 15 minutes triaging:
- Add 50 to 100 high-value links to monitoring at daily frequency.
- Download
disavow.txtand upload to Search Console for the toxic batch. - Skim AI-drafted outreach for 5 to 10 lost links and queue them in
/dashboard/reclaim.
Total onboarding time: 30 to 45 minutes per client. Previously this was a half-day project.
Tuesday through Thursday - reactive ops
Transition emails arrive throughout the week (only on state change, never as a digest). A high-value link from industry-mag.com flips from alive to dead. Open /dashboard/reclaim. The draft is ready, contact extracted from the source page's mailto: link. Edit two sentences. Click Open in Gmail. Send.
Time per lost-link recovery: under 2 minutes. Lifecycle automatically tracked through drafted -> sent -> replied -> closed.
Friday - reporting
For each Agency-tier client, click Share on the latest audit. A public URL renders with your agency's logo, name, and accent color. Send the URL via email or Slack. The client reads on mobile without login.
For clients who require a PDF for procurement filing, click Download PDF. Same branding, same data, formatted for archival.
Total Friday reporting time: 5 to 10 minutes per client. Previously 30 to 45 minutes.
Concrete numbers from the workflow
A typical mid-sized SEO agency tracking backlinks for 15 clients used to spend:
- Onboarding new client: 4 hours of backlink audit work (manual review + spreadsheet + first round of outreach drafts)
- Monthly monitoring + reactive recovery: ~2 hours per client per month
- Monthly client reporting: ~45 minutes per client per month (screenshots + slide deck assembly)
- Toxic link disavow (when needed): 30 to 60 minutes per cycle
Annual time per client: roughly 36 hours.
After the switch:
- Onboarding: 45 minutes
- Monthly monitoring + reactive recovery: ~30 minutes per client per month
- Monthly client reporting: ~10 minutes per client per month
- Toxic link disavow: 30 seconds (one-click download)
Annual time per client: roughly 9 hours.
For 15 clients, that is 405 hours per year saved. At a $75/hour billable rate, that is just over $30,000 in opportunity cost recovered annually, against an Agency tier subscription of $1,188/year.
Why agencies pick us over Ahrefs / Semrush at agency tier
| Need | What we do | What full-suite tools do |
|---|---|---|
| Per-link AI reasoning | One-sentence reasoning + 3-5 actions | Black-box DR/UR/AS score |
| Lost-link recovery | Auto-drafted outreach with contact pre-extracted | Manual research + manual writing |
| Disavow file | One-click .txt with smart grouping |
Manual list curation in proprietary UI |
| Client deliverable | Public URL + branded PDF in 5 seconds | Manual screenshot + slide deck |
| Cost per seat | Single $49/mo Agency plan covers your full team | Per-seat or workspace pricing |
| Embeddable Score badge | Public SVG embed for client homepage | Not offered |
| Onboarding time | 30-45 min per client | 2-4 hours per client |
What the white-label workflow actually looks like
Agency tier ships with three branding settings in /dashboard/settings:
- Agency name (replaces "TraceLinker" wherever the report header would render).
- Logo upload (PNG/SVG, displayed top-left on public reports and PDFs).
- Accent color (HSL or hex; replaces the default brand violet on key surfaces).
Once configured, every public share URL /r/{token} and PDF inherits the branding. There is no per-client setup; the agency-level branding applies to all reports.
For agencies that white-label per client (different brand for each retainer), per-client overrides are on the roadmap. For now, agencies running our tool typically use a single agency brand across all client reports, which is the dominant pattern.
Competitor gap analysis as a sales tool
The competitor gap feature doubles as a sales tool when pitching new clients. During discovery, you ask the prospect for their domain and the top 3 competitors they want to outrank. Run a quick gap analysis on your own free or Pro account against publicly available competitor backlink exports (or upload from Ahrefs if you have access).
Within 5 minutes you have a list of 50 to 200 high-intent prospects that already link to their competitors. Walk into the pitch with that list. Close rate goes up because you arrive with a ready-to-execute plan, not a generic SEO proposal.
Pricing for agencies
The Agency plan at $49/month includes:
- 50 audits per month (covers 15 to 25 clients comfortably)
- 1,000 monitored backlinks across all clients
- Hourly check frequency
- Email transition alerts (never digests)
- White-label public reports with your logo, name, and color
- White-label PDF exports
- Embeddable Backlink Score badge
- 50 competitor gap analyses per month
- 500 outreach drafts per month
- Unlimited share links
There are no per-seat fees, no proposal calls, and no overage surprises. Cancel any time from the billing portal.
Migration from your current stack
Most agencies arriving at TraceLinker are running one of these:
- Ahrefs ($129+) for audits + manual spreadsheet for outreach
- Semrush ($139+) for audits + Google Sheets for reporting
- Linkody ($89-$153) for monitoring + Ahrefs for analysis
- A patchwork of GSC + free tools + manual labor
Migration steps:
- Export your client backlink lists from your current tool (CSV format, source URL + anchor minimum).
- Sign up for the free plan to evaluate. Magic link, no password.
- Run an audit on your single largest client to validate the AI scoring against your gut feel.
- Upgrade to Agency when you are ready to onboard the rest.
- Bulk-add monitoring for the top 100 links per client at daily frequency.
Most agencies stop opening their old tool by the second month, except for keyword research workflows (which we do not replace).
Frequently asked questions
Is the AI scoring auditable? Yes. Every link's score includes a one-sentence reasoning string the AI generated when scoring. You can override scores manually, and the export retains both the AI score and your override.
Do you offer a sub-account / sub-seat structure for client logins? Not yet. The current Agency model is centralized: your team uses one workspace, you share read-only public URLs with clients. Sub-accounts are on the roadmap.
Can I import directly from Ahrefs / Semrush / Linkody? CSV upload only - no native API integration. The CSV upload is fast (30 seconds for 1,000 rows) and handles the mainstream exports without manual reformatting.
What happens to historical data when I cancel? You retain access during your billing period. After cancellation, audits are kept for 30 days then deleted. Export anything you want to retain before that window closes.
Can I run multiple agencies under one workspace? The current model is one agency per workspace. Multi-agency is on the roadmap; for now, run separate Agency-tier accounts for separate brands.
Get started
Start with the free plan - no credit card required. Bring one client, run a real audit, and decide whether the workflow holds for your operation. Most agencies decide by the end of the second week.
If you want a deeper look at specific solutions, see Lost backlink recovery, Disavow file generator, and Competitor backlink analysis.