only 2 domains link to every major CRM (and that is the lesson)

we keep running the same experiment on different niches: take a category's biggest players, pull every domain that links to them from common crawl, and keep the ones that link to the whole set. SEO tools gave 37. project management tools gave 35. CRMs just gave us the most extreme result yet: only two domains link to all eight. that is not a bug in the data. it is the lesson.

how we pulled this

eight CRMs: hubspot, zoho, pipedrive, freshworks, close, copper, attio, and salesflare. for each we pulled its referring domains ranked by cg_authority from the common crawl webgraph, then intersected the eight lists. the per-domain numbers:

the overlap is a pyramid, but a steep one

across the eight CRMs there were 9,910 unique linking domains. the shape is the familiar pyramid, just steeper at the top than any category we have measured:

78 percent of linking domains link to only one of the eight CRMs, the highest single-link share we have seen. only two non-platform domains link to all eight. and among domains linking to four or more, 95 percent are real editorial or product sites, not platform noise.

the two, and the near-universal set

the two domains that link to all eight are zapier.com and ringcentral.com. both are integration hubs: they connect to every CRM because that is their business. widen the net to domains linking to seven of the eight and the pattern holds hard:

domains linking to 7 or 8 of the 8 CRMs, by cg authority
(only zapier and ringcentral link to all 8):

zapier.com (8) 67           ringcentral.com (8) 54
github.com (7) 81           zendesk.com (7) 69
entrepreneur.com (7) 66     gitbook.io (7) 62
monday.com (7) 59           business2community.com (7) 59
clickup.com (7) 58          n8n.io (7) 57
benchmarkemail.com (7) 57   powr.io (7) 57
smallbiztrends.com (7) 57   cognitoforms.com (7) 56
fivetran.com (7) 55         yesware.com (7) 55
geekflare.com (7) 55        leadsbridge.com (7) 55

read that list. it is automation and integration platforms (zapier, n8n, fivetran, leadsbridge, powr, cognitoforms), adjacent SaaS that integrates with CRMs (zendesk, monday, clickup, yesware, benchmarkemail), and a thin layer of business media (entrepreneur, business2community, smallbiztrends, geekflare). almost no pure press. the CRM niche is held together by integrations, not by journalists.

the shape of the niche is the strategy

this is why the experiment is worth running on your own niche. compare two results from the same method:

for SEO tools, 37 domains link to the whole category and nearly all are media and best-of roundups, so the link play is pitching writers and getting into listicles. for CRMs, only two link to the whole category and the near-universal set is integrations, so the link play is the opposite: build the integrations, get listed in the automation directories, and partner. same data, same method, completely different move. you cannot know which one you are in until you look.

the newcomer proof

attio has 1,031 referring domains and salesflare 1,168, a rounding error next to hubspot. yet both are reached by the same integration hubs and directories that link to the giants. you do not out-link hubspot. you get into the handful of integration and automation platforms that define the category, and you are on the same shelf.

how to do this for your own niche

the method is category-agnostic. pick your two or three closest competitors, pull their referring domains, and keep the ones that link to several of them but not to you, sorted by overlap and then authority. that is exactly what a backlink gap analysis does, free, on the same common crawl data we used here. the shape it returns tells you whether you are in a media niche or an integration niche, and the list tells you exactly who to approach.