SayNine alternative: a field guide to a link agency with an elephant on its homepage

Look for the elephant first. A blue, cross-legged 3D elephant in a yellow tank top lettered 'Backlinks', a small chain-link creature perched on one hand. The logo is lower-case: saynine. The headline reads 'Backlinks that move rankings for SaaS companies' and the only button says 'Book a call'.

Second mark: the client strip on a dark navy band. EasyDMARC, clearout, BrandCrowd, DesignCrowd, Vitally, Acrobits, and one pill that says 'YOUR LOGO'.

Third mark: the claims. The site says 60k+ links built, 400+ companies helped, 4k+ partners. These are the agency's own figures. Treat them as the species' self-description, not as a measurement.

Habits of the species, in brief:

• It sells links, not software.
• It sells to SaaS.
• Its main call to action is a booked call.

The about page calls it 'a link building agency of skilled link builders, content, and data automation specialists'. Chief executive Georgi Mamajanyan is named there. Third-party listicles date the company to 2021 and place it in Yerevan; the footer address is in Wilmington, USA. The agency does not state a founding year itself.

You can read a habitat from the referrers. SayNine's live on SaaS blogs: predis.ai, screenapp.io, cloudtalk.io, recruitcrm.io, pointerpro.com, taggbox.com, tagshop.ai, motaword.com. These are the same kind of sites the agency sells placements on.

The terrain is flat. In a sample of 100 referrers, 76 fall between DR 30 and 49, 14 between 15 and 29, 3 between 50 and 69, one above 70. No .gov or .edu domains. Referring TLDs: .com 69, .io 9, .ai 8, then a few singles.

One oddity. ahrefs.com links to saynine.ai 11 times, none dofollow, with the anchor 'SayNine Yerevan, Armenia Visit website'. That reads like an agency directory listing, and it is one of the places the Yerevan location shows up. penaltyhammer.com adds 18 links, also with zero dofollow.

You can walk the whole territory yourself in the free explorer, no sign-in.

Three foods, all sold per link. The pricing page prints them in a comparison table:

A link insertion adds your link to an article that is already live and indexed. A listicle is a new one, written with your brand at number one. A brand mention gets your brand referenced across relevant sites; the agency says mentions help AI recognise and trust a brand. Every placement is permanent and dofollow, one link per domain, on a site with 1,000+ monthly visits.

The packages bundle these:

• Starter: 20 links, 15 insertions plus 5 listicles, all DR 50+.
• Growth: 29 links, adds DR 70+ items and 3 brand mentions.
• Premium: 45 links: 20 DR 50+ and 5 DR 70+ insertions, 10 DR 50+ and 5 DR 70+ listicles, 5 brand mentions.

Arithmetic from the published prices: Starter at $4,500 for 20 links is $225 a link. Growth at $9,350 for 29 is about $322. Premium at $14,250 for 45 is about $317. The lower figures need a 12-month term, billed monthly. A single month with no contract is $5,500, $11,100 or $17,000. The pricing page says it does not include 'Approvals or lists of domains'.

The sequence is short. Pick a package. Send target pages and anchor text. Get access to a client portal. Receive a monthly report.

That report covers DR and traffic change, links delivered against links agreed, ranking results from Ahrefs, and growth in AI citations. Growth adds a competitor backlink gap analysis and AI visibility tracking. Premium adds a location-driven custom report and hands-on SEO support. The audit cadence rises by plan: one-off, quarterly, monthly.

There is no free trial of the service. Checkout asks you to sign in with Google. The quality promise is a 12-month free link replacement.

What we could not find: how long a link takes to land, which publisher sites are used, what the portal exports, the price of the 'Full SEO' option or of custom plans, and any refund terms. We list these as not published rather than guess.

The same discipline applies to the case studies on the homepage. SuperAnnotate from DR 39 to 72, EasyDMARC from DR 66 to 79, Telnyx 'Increased AI Visibility by 18% in Just One Month'. They are the agency's claims about its clients, reported in the agency's DR.

Every placement leaves a track, and the anchor is the footprint. SayNine's anchors, top of the list:

Two readings. First, the profile is commercial: the money phrases outnumber the brand name. Second, the site's own blog pulls links through informational anchors, such as 'SEO glossary' (28), 'how to check Google rankings' (24), 'keyword density' (17). The top linked pages follow suit: the homepage (196), /link-building-services/ (141), /blog/white-hat-link-building/ (119), /blog/link-building-outreach/ (98).

There is also a misspelling in the wild, 'SaynNine.ai' (9 links). Small, harmless, and a useful reminder that anchors are typed by people.

This is what you can do with an agency's output when you hold the data: sort a client's anchors, see which pages carry the weight, and decide what to ask for next.

Naturalists note timing. Our first sighting of a link to saynine.ai is dated 2024-07-12. ranktracker.com follows on 2024-07-16 with the anchor 'SayNine.ai' and goes on to send 47 links. Among the top referrers, the next first sightings come a year later. The bulk of them arrive in a burst from August 2025: predis.ai on the 3rd, recruitcrm.io on the 6th, pointerpro.com on the 7th, screenapp.io on the 8th. cloudtalk.io follows in September, zoviz.com in October.

Read as behaviour: the link growth we can see is concentrated in about the last 14 months. Either the agency's own link building picked up then, or our crawls simply caught more of it. We cannot tell which. Both are plausible, and a crawl sample cannot settle it.

The practical lesson is for buyers. A delivered link is not visible the day it goes live. If you pay for 20 links in a month, expect to wait several crawl cycles before an independent index shows all of them. That is true of every index, ours included, and it is why the agency's own portal matters.

Be plain about this. apibacklinks places no links. It does not write articles. It has no outreach, no portal, no monthly report to forward to your CEO. If the job is 'get 20 DR 50+ links on real sites this month', SayNine can do it and we cannot.

Stay with SayNine if:

• You are a SaaS company with budget and no in-house link builder.
• You want placements picked, written and tracked by someone else.
• You care about AI visibility work: listicles and brand mentions are part of the offer.
• You want a replacement guarantee. We have no such thing; we sell data.
• You need Ahrefs-style reporting. Our DR is a different metric.

It also publishes its prices. The per-link figures are on the page, which makes any quote checkable. The 60k+ links and 400+ companies are the agency's figures, and an interview in the Armenian Weekly (2025-10-28) describes a team of about 45 and over 95% of revenue coming from outside Armenia, primarily Australia, Canada and the UK.

apibacklinks is a JSON API over our own link graph: 181,132,097 domains and 2,774,625,913 domain-to-domain links, built from Common Crawl. It is a sample, refreshed roughly monthly, so a new link can take weeks to appear. It has no alerts, no spam score and no historical charts. It will not tell you what you bought; it will tell you what a crawl can see.

Three jobs where it sits beside an agency:

1. Plan. Call intersect on 2 to 10 competitors to find referring domains they share. Use that list as the target pages and sites you hand over.
2. Vet. Run bulk_dr on up to 2,000 candidate domains in one request. Our DR is our own, so use it for ranking prospects against each other, not for checking the agency's DR 50+ claim.
3. Report. After delivery, call backlinks filtered by source domain and see whether the link is visible, its anchor, its rel. Missing after a few crawls means ask.

Price: 1 credit is $0.0001, lookups cost 1 credit, list calls 2. From $0.10 per 1,000 calls, with $100 free credit on first sign-in. Compare that with a single $250 link insertion and you see it is a different line item. The endpoints are in the API docs.

Looking at other agencies the same way? The SirLinksAlot page uses the same method, and the hub lists the rest.