RankSupply study: Half of 69,600 sponsored-post sites report little traffic as AI reshapes SEO
Study of 69,597 publisher listings finds traffic tracks guest post prices more closely than Domain Rating; full data published at ranksupply.io
SAN ANTONIO,/ SP Tech Solutions/-Oct. 7, 2026 - RankSupply, a white-label link building provider for SEO agencies, has published a study of 69,597 sponsored-post publisher listings that finds about half of the sites report fewer than 1,000 monthly organic search visits. The full study, with data tables and a downloadable CSV, is at ranksupply.io/blog/guest-post-pricing-2026.
Key figures
RankSupply found that 50.7% of 69,384 sponsored-post sites with traffic data report fewer than 1,000 monthly organic visits.
RankSupply found that 30.4% of 17,442 sponsored-post sites with a Domain Rating of 50 or higher report fewer than 1,000 monthly organic visits.
RankSupply found that organic traffic tracks sponsored-post prices more closely than Domain Rating across 69,353 listings, with a Spearman correlation with price of 0.361 for traffic and 0.204 for Domain Rating.
RankSupply found that the median sponsored-post list price across 69,597 publisher listings is $336.
"Domain Rating tells you about a site's links, not whether anyone finds it in search," said Muhammad Ali, founder of RankSupply and Teck Hustlers. "As AI answers increasingly name brands instead of sending clicks, agencies need to check a publisher's traffic and topical fit before they buy a placement. In our data, nearly a third of DR 50+ sites fail that check."
AI answers change how search visibility is measured
Google AI Overviews, AI Mode, ChatGPT and Perplexity present summarized answers that cite or name a limited set of sources, and recent research indicates these answers affect both click-through and which sites are selected.
A Pew Research Center analysis of the March 2025 browsing activity of 900 U.S. adults found that users clicked a traditional search result in 8% of visits to Google pages that showed an AI summary, compared with 15% of visits to pages without one. Users clicked a link inside the AI summary itself in 1% of such visits.
Ranking on the first page has also become a weaker indicator of being cited. In a study published in March 2026 covering 863,000 keyword results pages and 4 million cited URLs, Ahrefs found that 37.9% of URLs cited in Google AI Overviews also appeared in the top 10 results for the same query, while 31.0% did not appear in the top 100. An earlier Ahrefs study, from July 2025, had put the top-10 share at about 76%; Ahrefs noted that it changed its parsing method between the two analyses.
A separate Ahrefs study of 75,000 brands, published in May 2025, found that the number of times a brand was mentioned across the web had a stronger rank correlation with its visibility in AI Overviews (0.664) than its number of backlinks (0.218) or its Domain Rating (0.326). The authors cautioned that correlation does not establish causation.
What the publisher data shows
The dataset was compiled from third-party vendor price lists, with listings updated between January 2024 and August 2026 across 163 country and regional labels. After duplicates were removed, 69,597 unique domains remained.
Of the sites with traffic data, 19.4% reported fewer than 100 monthly visits, and about 18% reported 10,000 or more. Among listings with a Domain Rating of 50 or higher, those reporting fewer than 1,000 visits had a median list price of $209, compared with $903 for those reporting 10,000 or more.
News and local news sites, a common digital PR destination, made up 22.8% of listings, or 15,895 domains. Of the news sites with traffic data, 41.6% reported fewer than 1,000 monthly visits.
Third-party traffic figures are generally modeled from the search terms a site ranks for, so a low estimate suggests that a site's pages appear for few searches. Taken together with the public research, the data indicates that a single authority score says little about whether a publisher is visible in search.
Methodology and limitations
Prices are vendor list prices for a single placement, not transaction prices. Metrics are third-party estimates recorded by vendors at each listing's update date, and the dataset is not a complete census of publishers. The analysis did not measure whether any listed site is cited in AI-generated answers. Listed sites are not owned or operated by RankSupply. The Pew Research Center and Ahrefs studies were conducted independently.
About RankSupply
RankSupply LLC is a white-label link building company that provides guest posts, niche edits and digital PR placements to SEO agencies in the United States, the United Kingdom and Canada. It was founded by Muhammad Ali, with co-founder Muhammad Qasim leading data and engineering. More information is available at ranksupply.io, and details on its digital PR work are at ranksupply.io/digital-pr.
Media contact
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