Is This Site Worth a Link?
Paste any publication or website URL. We’ll analyze ownership networks, editorial quality, spam signals, algorithm penalty history, and LLM entity salience to give you a clear verdict.
A high Domain Authority score doesn’t mean a link is worth having.
Enter any URL below to find out what DA won’t tell you.
// News outlets, blogs, trade publications, local media, industry sites
Evaluating Site Authority
—
—
—
—
/ 10
Summary
—
Positive Signals
Spam / Risk Indicators
Strategic Recommendation
—
Frequently Asked Questions
A backlink is worth pursuing when it comes from a site with genuine editorial standards, real human readership, and a clean history with Google's core algorithm updates. Domain Authority (DA) alone is not a reliable signal — many high-DA sites have been penalized under Google's Helpful Content Update or Site Reputation Abuse policy, meaning their links pass little to no real PageRank. The best links come from independent, editorially-driven publications with strong entity recognition across Google and AI platforms like ChatGPT and Perplexity.
Site Reputation Abuse is a Google spam policy introduced in 2024 that targets high-authority publishers who host third-party or paid content primarily to pass PageRank — rather than to serve their own readers. Many large newspaper networks, including several Gannett properties, were flagged under this policy. Links placed on these sites through paid or "sponsored" arrangements are now likely discounted or ignored by Google entirely, regardless of the domain's DA score.
LLM entity salience refers to how prominently a website or brand is represented in the training data and retrieval indexes used by AI models like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity. As AI-powered search grows, being mentioned by credible, high-salience sources increases the likelihood that your brand surfaces in AI-generated answers — not just traditional search results. A link from a publication that LLMs recognize and trust is worth significantly more than one from a low-salience micro-site that AI models effectively ignore.
DA and DR are third-party metrics that measure link quantity and historical link patterns — they don't account for algorithm penalties, network-level trust signals, editorial quality, or how Google has actually treated a domain in recent core updates. A site can have a DA of 70 and still be effectively blacklisted by Google's quality systems. This tool evaluates the signals that DA doesn't: ownership networks, penalty history, editorial staffing, and whether links from that domain are likely to be trusted or algorithmically discounted.
Yes — the Heady Link Evaluator is completely free, with a limit of 3 evaluations per day. Each evaluation draws on AI-powered entity research, algorithm penalty history, and network-level trust analysis. If you need unlimited evaluations or a full link audit for an active campaign, get in touch with the Heady team.
No — this tool does not crawl websites in real time. It evaluates based on AI entity knowledge: publication ownership records, algorithm update history, editorial reputation signals, and network-level trust patterns built up over time. For live traffic data and real-time backlink metrics, we recommend cross-referencing results with Ahrefs or Semrush.