agentlinkopsHow to review link insertion opportunities
Review a request to add your link to an existing article: name the paragraph that lacks a source, read the page as it stands and keep paid insertions separate.
A link insertion opportunity is an article someone else already published, on your subject, with a paragraph that would serve its readers better if it pointed at your page. The review job is to name that paragraph, show what it lacks, read the page as it stands today, learn how the publisher treats outbound links, and separate an editorial suggestion from a paid placement.
This guide is one of the discovery use cases. It is different from broken link building, where a cited destination has died, and from a guest post, where you write the article. Here nothing is broken and the article is not yours.
The line between an insertion and a purchase
Google's spam policies define link spam as "the practice of creating links to or from a site primarily for the purpose of manipulating search rankings", and the examples include exchanging money for links or for posts that contain links. Much of what is sold as a "niche edit" is that exchange. A paid insertion is an advertisement, and Google's guidance says to mark advertisements with rel="sponsored"; links with that attribute "will generally not be followed".
An editorial insertion has a different shape. The article makes a claim, gives a step or names a resource, and your page is the source or the resource. The publisher adds the link because the paragraph reads better with it. Nobody pays. Record which of the two you are looking at, and record the fee if there is one. The owner decides whether an advertisement is worth buying; this guide only makes sure the record says what it is.
Find candidates with the files you already have
A competitor export, read at page level. A supplier export of a competitor's backlinks lists the articles that already cite them. AgentLinkOps imports seven supplier layouts and a generic CSV through presets, and any other column layout through an explicit column map. Keep the page URL, not only the host: the same host can carry a tutorial that fits and a profile page that does not. The referring domains guide explains why the count you sort by changes the answer.
Your own search for the claim. Search for the specific sentence a reader would need your page for, not for your product's category. An article that explains a procedure and cites nothing for the hard step is a stronger candidate than a roundup that already links five sources.
A Search Console performance export. Query rows tell you which of your pages already earn impressions for the subject. Choose the destination page from that evidence rather than from the page you most want traffic to. The local context host can import a Search Console handoff into your repository and keep its date window and aggregation beside the rows; see repository context.
A citation you already know is good. The owned citation scan described below shows which sources several publishers chose independently. Articles on the same subject that cite none of those sources, or cite a weaker one, are where an insertion is plausible.
Qualify with evidence you can point to
The product's campaign templates use three verdicts and no score: satisfied, not_satisfied and agent_judgement. For an insertion, most criteria are judgement and the software hands them over with the evidence attached. A useful record has six fields:
| Field | What to record | Who supplies it |
|---|---|---|
| Article and paragraph | The URL and the exact sentence or step | Your agent, from a complete read |
| What the paragraph lacks | No source, an outdated source, or a source that does not answer the reader's question | Your agent proposes, you confirm |
| What your page supplies | The specific fact, step or dataset, with its own source | You |
| Page state today | Fetch date, HTTP status, redirect chain, whether the read was complete | AgentLinkOps observation |
| Link policy on the page | The rel tokens on the page's existing outbound links | AgentLinkOps observation |
| Route and basis | The published contact route, and whether the publisher sells insertions | Your agent finds, you decide |
The link policy row is the one most reviews skip. The verifier extracts every link occurrence with its raw rel tokens. If every outbound link on the article already carries sponsored, the publisher marks insertions as advertisements and an editorial request will get the same treatment. If the tokens are mixed, look at which links are qualified and why. That reading takes a minute and it changes what you ask for.
Anchor text belongs to the publisher. Google's guidance asks for anchor text that is "descriptive, reasonably concise, and relevant to the page that it's on". Suggest the resource name and let the editor write the sentence.
The contact rule. The hosted contact tool returns addresses and contact-page URLs the publisher explicitly published, from the latest saved copy of the page, and it never checks or implies deliverability. An editor's name on a byline with no published address is a lead for your agent's browser, not a route.
What an owned citation scan showed
On September 11, 2026 the citation module scored the outbound links an owned crawl had already stored: 1,993 readable pages from 24 publishers, 30,153 outbound links, with no new fetches. It found 11,450 distinct editorial destinations. Of those, 76 were cited by two or more independent publishers, and 9 by three or more. One example from the top of that list: three separate publishers chose the same IRS publication page as the source for the same fact.
Two of 11,450 is the honest shape of insertion research. Most citations are one publisher's choice. A destination that several publishers chose independently is the kind of source an editor adds without being asked, and that is the bar your page has to meet for the paragraph you picked. The count was keyed on the exact URL, never the host, because a library's own social profile is a different URL on every site while a canonical source is the same URL everywhere. The same probate corpus, re-read under the opportunity library's rules with the edges inverted so that each record is the referring page, produced the held candidates counted on the US probate niche page; none is published, and the selection has not been blind-scored.
The same run then checked 60 of those destinations once each. Thirty-nine were healthy, one was suspected unavailable, and 20 could not be concluded: robots refusals, render-required pages, login walls, 403 responses and one network error. One in three could not be read on a single pass. If that ratio holds for the article you want to be inserted into, a third of your candidates will need a browser before you know their current state.
What your agent does and what you decide
Agent work, with your tools: read the article completely; quote the paragraph; check whether the existing source answers the reader's question; note the newest date on the page; read the rel tokens on existing outbound links from the observation; find the published contact route; prepare a suggestion that names the paragraph, the resource and the reason, for your review.
Your decisions: whether the paragraph really lacks something; whether your page supplies it without stretching; whether a fee turns this into an advertisement; and whether the suggestion goes out. The local next-action vocabulary cannot express a send. The outreach handoff shows the reviewed draft.
How AgentLinkOps records the result
If the editor adds the link, register the article and your page as a source-and-target pair. The candidate starts not_checked; one explicit selection creates a paused watch and a single metered check. The observation carries a hash of the fetched bytes, the robots posture, the redirect chain, the HTTP status and the standing note that JavaScript execution and visual visibility were not checked. Page HTML never enters your repository. The recall, verify and monitor pipeline carries a whole shortlist through that check in one bounded batch and converts a present result into a watch that keeps its candidate lineage.
Destination health is a separate watch with its own checker: it fetches only your target URL, its robots file and validated redirects, and healthy means a complete accessible response, never that any backlink exists. Keep both watches when the destination is a page you might later move. The evidence guide explains what each state supports.
What can go wrong
The article is rendered by JavaScript. A plain fetch sees the shell. The check returns unknown with the reason possible_render_required. Have your agent open the page in a browser and record what it saw and when. On the September 11, 2026 benchmark, 42 of 1,922 pages (2.2 percent) could not be read by a plain fetch.
The publisher blocks fetches or the robots file cannot be read. The verifier follows RFC 9309: a robots file that returns a 4xx other than 429 imposes no restriction, while 429, 5xx and a robots file served as HTML are refusals. RFC 9309 says a crawler facing an unreachable robots file "MUST assume complete disallow". Either way the result is unknown with a reason. As the documentation puts it, "An unknown result is never a removal finding."
The paragraph you quoted has changed. Editors rewrite. Store your quote with the fetch date and re-read before sending anything older than a few weeks.
The link exists in a script or a comment. The verifier commits to absent when the only occurrence of a target is inside a comment or script string, because a reader cannot see it. Your review should hold the same line: a mention in the page source that never renders is not a link.
The article already links to you. In the owned mention scan of 140 pages, four of the seven pages that named a target already linked to it. Read the observation before asking for something you have.
Where this sits in the product today
Imports, selected candidate checks and placement monitoring run in the invitation-only pilot. Live supplier discovery is disabled in this build and stops with PROVIDER_NOT_CONFIGURED. The citation scan and campaign qualification are local research modules validated against real pages, not all of them callable through the hosted endpoint; check the capability status first. AgentLinkOps sends nothing.
When the page you are reviewing is a ranked roundup, use the listicle and review guide instead. When it is a curated list of resources, the resource page checklist applies.
Sources
- Spam policies for Google web search · Google Search Central · 2026-08-28
- Link best practices for Google · Google Search Central · 2025-12-10
- Qualify your outbound links to Google · Google Search Central · 2025-12-10
- RFC 9309: Robots Exclusion Protocol · IETF · 2022-09-01
- Read evidence without turning uncertainty into loss · AgentLinkOps documentation · 2026-09-15