8 domains link to every major fintech app (and they are all press or capital)

fourth niche, same experiment: take a category's biggest players, pull every domain that links to them from common crawl, keep the ones that link to the whole set. SEO tools gave 37 (media). CRMs gave 2 (integration hubs). AI agent frameworks gave 5 (dev platforms). fintech just gave 8, and they are the most consistent set yet: finance trade press, newsletters, and the databases where capital keeps score. not a single integration or dev tool among them.

how we pulled this

eight fintech apps across payments, banking, and spend: stripe, wise, revolut, plaid, brex, ramp, mercury, and chime. for each we pulled its referring domains ranked by cg_authority from the common crawl webgraph, then intersected the eight lists.

stripe is its own planet: 100,000+ referring domains, more than the other seven combined. 81 percent of all linkers link to just one app, and most of the time that one app is stripe.

the overlap pyramid

across the eight apps there were 12,106 unique linking domains. the distribution:

among domains linking to four or more apps, 95 percent are real editorial or database sites, not platform noise.

the eight, and the near-universal set

the eight non-platform domains that link to all eight apps: substack.com, entrepreneur.com, libsyn.com (podcast host), beehiiv.com, pymnts.com, thefinancialbrand.com, spocket.co, and coda.io. read that: two newsletter platforms, a podcast host, a general business magazine, and two dedicated fintech trade publications. now widen to the seven-of-eight set:

domains linking to 7 of the 8 fintech apps, by cg authority
(the 8 that link to all: substack, entrepreneur, libsyn, beehiiv,
pymnts, thefinancialbrand, spocket, coda):

github.com (7) 81          hubspot.com (7) 70
crunchbase.com (7) 69      weforum.org (7) 66
ycombinator.com (7) 61     xero.com (7) 60
builtin.com (7) 58         bankrate.com (7) 55
techmeme.com (7) 55        bankingdive.com (7) 47
contrary.com (7) 46        finovate.com (7) 30
bvp.com (7) 53             11fs.com (7) 29

this is where it gets specific. the seven-club is finance trade press (bankrate, bankingdive, finovate, 11fs), startup and VC infrastructure (crunchbase, ycombinator, builtin, bvp = bessemer, contrary), and the general business/tech press (weforum, techmeme, hubspot). widen to six and you add more of the same: tearsheet, paymentsdive, thepaypers, sacra, ibsintelligence. the fintech link graph is journalists and investors, almost nothing else.

update: three categories, not two (2026-08-12)

mihir kanzariya pointed out in the comments that the eight are not one kind of thing, and he is right. five of them are UGC platform domains: substack.com, beehiiv.com, libsyn.com, coda.io and spocket.co. a link from those is not an editorial decision by the platform. it is one person publishing a newsletter, a podcast episode or a public doc that happens to mention the app. you cannot pitch substack.com and you cannot fill in a profile on beehiiv.com. that link appears only because somebody already wrote about you.

which splits the universal set three ways rather than lumping it into one:

so the list you can actually act on is three domains, not eight.

the overlap pyramid above has a non-platform column, and for these five it is wrong. that filter stripped the obvious social platforms and stopped there. it should have stripped the publishing platforms too. we are leaving the original table as published rather than quietly rewriting it.

the more useful half of the correction is what the third category isfor. the pitch list and the profile list are things you go and do. the platform cluster is what happens after those work: if substack and beehiiv start linking to you, it means the coverage you earned got read by people who then went and wrote their own thing. that makes it the best available proxy for whether the first two are landing, and it is the one part of the set you cannot buy.

it also means this effect scales with how much a category gets written about, which puts an asterisk on the cross-niche comparison below. SEO tools gave 37 universal linkers, and some of that is likely the same inflation rather than genuinely broader coverage. re-running the earlier studies with platform domains split out is on the list.

the shape of the niche is the strategy

four niches, four shapes, four different plays:

for CRMs the play is building integrations. for AI agents it is getting into the developer platforms and young directories. for fintech it is neither: you earn links by being covered (get into pymnts, thefinancialbrand, bankingdive, tearsheet) and by being tracked as a company (get your crunchbase, sacra, and builtin profiles complete, get on the VC portfolio pages). fintech is a trust-and-capital niche, and its link graph proves it. a payments integration will not get you into this set; a funding round and a press mention will.

the newcomer proof

mercury has 1,689 referring domains and brex 2,395, a rounding error next to stripe. yet both are reached by the same trade publications and startup databases that link to stripe. you do not out-link stripe. you get covered by the ten finance publications and listed in the three startup databases that define the category, and you are on the same shelf as the giant.

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, an integration niche, a developer niche, or a trust-and-capital niche, and the list tells you exactly who to approach.