LinkHunter has shut down - its homepage just hasn't said so

Open linkhunter.com today and it looks like a working product. The headline still reads "The Fastest & Easiest Way to Build Links", there is a Start My Free Trial button, and the footer says © 2021. The button goes nowhere useful. It points to app.linkhunter.com, which no longer resolves, and the app itself at v2.linkhunter.com answers every page we tried, /signup included, with a Cloudflare 522 error. Both checked on 28 October 2026.

The truth is on the pricing page, where the plan cards used to be: "With a heavy heart, we are announcing the shutdown of LinkHunter, effective immediately." The same notice appears on the case-study page and on the site's 404 page. It carries no date. Wayback Machine copies show it absent on 9 November 2025 and present on 12 December 2025, so late 2025 is as precise as anyone can honestly be.

So this is a review of a tool you can no longer buy. It matters anyway if you were a customer, or if you pay for any prospecting tool that gets its leads from Google. LinkHunter did not fade out. One change at Google removed most of what it could do, and that can happen again.

How LinkHunter worked

The pitch was three steps: Find Sites, Reach Out, Get Links. You started a campaign by picking a strategy, and the strategy decided what kind of site LinkHunter went looking for. The choices visible on the site were:

• Guest post on relevant websites
• Get your products reviewed by influencers
• Find bloggers to write sponsored posts
• Promote your content to influencers
• Upload your own list of links
• Use advanced search operators

Its own case study also shows resource-page campaigns. In that example, after picking guest posting, "Stuart inputted a few topics related to his website", and LinkHunter turned those topics into Google searches and pulled the results in as prospects. Each site came with SEO metrics - Moz on every plan, SEMrush on the two dearer ones - and you could preview a site without leaving the tool.

Finding the email address was outsourced. The case study says it plainly: "189 of them already had a valid email address (thanks to the Hunter.io API)." So the contact data was Hunter.io's, not LinkHunter's. Where no address turned up, LinkHunter could fill in a site's contact form for you. Mail went out from your own mailbox through Gmail, G Suite or SMTP/IMAP, and a Contacted tab tracked who had been pitched and who replied.

Lists could be downloaded "into a spreadsheet" and outreach reports exported, in a format the site never names.

What it cost: the last published prices

None of these plans can be bought. The figures come from the pricing page as the Wayback Machine archived it on 7 October 2025, the last copy before the shutdown notice replaced it.

There was no annual price. "All plans are month-to-month and you can change or cancel your plan at any time," the page said. Starter also listed unlimited total prospects, so the 2,000 was a monthly intake cap, not a storage limit.

The free trial is where the old site contradicts itself. The pricing FAQ promised "full access to LinkHunter for 7 days" and added "Your credit card will not be charged until the end of your free trial" - so a card was required. Markup hidden on the homepage says "14 days free. No credit card required." The archived terms side with the FAQ: "You may be required to enter your billing information in order to sign up for the Free Trial." We cannot tell you which held on the day you signed up. The plan cards are still in the homepage source, commented out.

Why it died: Google's num=100 change

For years, adding &num=100 to a Google search URL returned 100 results on one page instead of ten. Around 10 September 2025 Google stopped honouring it, with no announcement. When Search Engine Land's Barry Schwartz asked, Google said the parameter "is not something that we formally support". For any tool that scrapes results, one request became roughly ten.

LinkHunter's notice names this as the cause: "Google has deprecated a search parameter ( num=100 ) that was essential to LinkHunter's prospect discovery engine. This change reduces the number of prospects we can find by 90%, severely limiting the tool's core functionality." And then: "Continuing to operate a product that is a shadow of its former self is not an option for us."

Rank trackers took the same hit and paid for more requests. LinkHunter closed. Even sites that never touched a scraper saw it: Search Console impressions fell for most of them, and one analysis of 319 sites by the agency Zeo found 87.7% had fewer impressions and 77.6% fewer unique keywords.

The lesson for whatever you use now is one question: where do the prospects come from? If the answer is "Google results", your plan's allowance is a measure of how many searches the vendor can afford to run, and Google sets that price. BuzzStream's Starter plan, for example, counts its allowance in "prospecting searches" - the same kind of resource LinkHunter ran out of.

What the shutdown notice leaves out

The notice offers no refund, no way to export data and no recommended alternative. The only contact it gives is [email protected]; support.linkhunter.com does not exist. With app.linkhunter.com gone from DNS and v2.linkhunter.com returning 522, any prospect list, template or outreach history that was not downloaded before the shutdown is, as far as anyone outside the company can see, gone.

The site had been drifting for a while before that. The latest blog post is dated November 24, 2020. A testimonial heading on the homepage still reads "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet". The privacy policy and terms were last updated on July 22, 2017. Worse, someone injected hidden spam links for "imitation rolex" and "best replica watches" into the site's HTML; they were live in the Wayback copy from 7 October 2025 and are commented out today.

Ownership was never hidden. The privacy policy says "Jeff Oxford Corp DBA Link Hunter" operates the site, and the terms are governed by California law. Jeff Oxford also founded 180 Marketing, a San Diego SEO agency.

As for praise, the only quotes we found are the ones LinkHunter hosted itself. Brian Dean of Backlinko: "LinkHunter is easier to use compared to GroupHigh, BuzzStream etc." Paddy Moogan, author of The Link Building Book, is there too, alongside Tara Desquitado - Link Building Manager at 180 Marketing, the founder's own agency. G2, Capterra, Trustpilot and Product Hunt had no listing we could read. With the app offline, nothing could be tested hands-on either. The screenshots in this review come from LinkHunter's own 2020 case study.

What to use instead

Prices below were checked on each vendor's pricing page on 28 October 2026.

BuzzStream Starter costs exactly what LinkHunter Starter did, and that is where the resemblance ends. LinkHunter promised 2,000 new prospects a month; BuzzStream gives one user 30 prospecting searches and room for 500 contacts. It suits a few careful campaigns, not volume. Paying a year upfront gets one month free.

Pitchbox is the real replacement for a team on LinkHunter's $99 or $199 plan. Pro matches Small Business on outreach (2,000 emails) and adds 1,000 searches a month; Advanced matches Agency's 5,000 emails. Expect to pay two to three times what the matching LinkHunter tier cost, and the lower rates need an annual commitment.

Respona is no longer a tool you log into for outreach. It now sells placements, from $100 to $500 depending on the site's DR, with 10% off at $3k a month and 20% at $5k. If what you wanted from LinkHunter was the links rather than the workflow, that is the honest shortcut. If you only used LinkHunter's email finder, the engine underneath it, Hunter.io, is still sold on its own, and pairs with a sender such as lemlist.

Verdict

Nobody should try to buy LinkHunter. There is nothing to buy: the trial button points at a domain that no longer resolves, and the company announced in late 2025 that it was closing "effective immediately". Ignore the homepage.

If you were a customer, write to [email protected] about billing and about any data you still need, check that the charges have actually stopped, and do not wait for the app to return. The notice gives no sign it will.

For a replacement, choose by budget. A solo site owner at $49 a month should take BuzzStream Starter and accept far fewer searches than LinkHunter gave. An agency that needs volume and several mailboxes should pay for Pitchbox Pro. Anyone who would rather buy links than chase them should price Respona per placement. Whichever you pick, ask the vendor how it finds prospects - LinkHunter's customers learned the answer too late.

LinkHunter (discontinued)