the 27 domains that link to every major website builder

last week we mapped the backlink overlap of the top project management tools and found 35 domains that link to all of them. we ran the exact same analysis on the eight biggest website builders to see if the pattern holds. it does, but the universal linkers are a completely different crowd, and that difference is the whole point.

how we pulled this

eight builders: wordpress, wix, squarespace, weebly, webflow, framer, ghost, and carrd. for each one we pulled its top 2,000 referring domains ranked by cg_authority from the common crawl webgraph, then intersected the eight lists. here are the headline numbers (four of them are capped at 100,000 referring domains, so read those as "100,000 or more").

backlink overlap is a pyramid (again)

across the eight builders there were 9,189 unique linking domains, and the shape is almost identical to the project management study:

67 percent of linking domains link to only one of the eight builders. only 27 non-platform domains link to all eight. and, exactly like last time, the overlap is clean: among domains linking to four or more builders, 98 percent are real editorial sites, not cdns or platforms. two unrelated categories, same structure. this is not a coincidence, it is how the web links to a category.

the 27 domains that link to all eight

here is the thin top of the pyramid, the domains that link to every one of the eight builders, by authority:

domains linking to ALL 8 website builders, by cg authority:

wordpress.org       85     mozilla.org         82
github.com          81     shopify.com         79
substack.com        75     berkeley.edu        74
hubspot.com         70     ubc.ca              69
creativebloq.com    66     habr.com            65
jotform.com         64     smashingmagazine    63
webflow.io          62     gitbook.io          62
dev.to              62     freecodecamp.org    61
ycombinator.com     61     gumroad.com         59
libsyn.com          59     elementor.com       59
webfx.com           59     beehiiv.com         58
builtin.com         58     tistory.com         57
hypothes.is         57     logrocket.com       56

27 domains link to all eight.

a different category, a different playbook

for project management tools the universal linkers were integration hubs and product communities. for website builders they are something else entirely, and reading the list tells a founder exactly where to get covered:

web design and front-end publications (creativebloq, smashingmagazine, webfx, builtin, logrocket). this is the standout cluster. the design press links to builders as a matter of course, and it is missing from the PM list completely. education and learning (berkeley.edu, ubc.ca, freecodecamp). courses and student resources point at the tools people learn to build on, which is a rare source of genuine .edu links. developer platforms and docs (github, gitbook, dev.to, mozilla.org, ycombinator). adjacent and integration tools (shopify, jotform, gumroad, elementor, webflow.io), and publishing and creator platforms (substack, beehiiv, libsyn, wordpress.org).

if you build in this space, that is your media list. you do not guess which publications matter, the overlap tells you: the sites that already link to all your competitors are creativebloq, smashing magazine, and webfx, so that is where a feature or a tutorial actually moves the needle.

the newcomer proof: carrd

carrd has 25,033 referring domains. wordpress and wix have more than 100,000 each, at least four times as many. and yet carrd sits on the same all-eight list, reached by the same universal linkers. the lesson repeats across every category we test: you do not need to match the incumbent on link volume, you need the few hundred domains that link to your category as a habit. that gap is short and specific, not an ocean.

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. the top of that list is your warm outreach sheet and your media list at the same time, pre-filtered to the domains that cover your category for a living.

that is exactly what a backlink gap analysis does, and you can run it free on the same common crawl data we used here. enter your domain plus a few competitors and you get the ranked, noise-filtered overlap in seconds. the free tier shows your top gaps; the lifetime plan unlocks the full list, csv export, and an api.