External Linking

Overview

External Linking automatically finds and inserts relevant outbound links to authoritative external sources in your generated articles. This improves SEO by signaling topical relevance to search engines, adds credibility by citing trusted sources, and provides additional value to readers.

Configure external linking in the External Links settings drawer of your workflow editor.

How it works

External linking runs as a post-processing step after your article is generated. It uses a two-pass approach:

1. Search pass: An AI model analyzes your article, identifies distinct topics and claims that would benefit from external citations, and searches the web to find the best authoritative source for each topic. Each topic gets its own targeted search query, ensuring diverse results across different parts of the article.
2. Insertion pass: A second AI call takes the found sources and inserts them naturally into the article HTML as anchor links, placing each near the relevant passage.

External linking is independent of web search on workflow steps. Even if your workflow steps don't use web search, external linking makes its own search calls to find citation sources.

Configuration

Search Provider & Model

Select which AI provider and model to use for finding external sources. Only providers that support web search are available: OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, Perplexity, and Grok / xAI. You must have the corresponding API key configured in Settings. The estimated cost per article is displayed based on your selected provider and max links setting.

Min / Max Links per Article

Set the target range for outbound links. The system requests roughly 2x the max number of sources to account for dead links and deduplication, then caps at your max setting. If the article doesn't have enough distinct topics to support the minimum, fewer links will be inserted — quality is prioritized over hitting the minimum.

Blocked Domains

A list of domains to never link to (one per line). Useful for excluding competitors, low-quality sites, or domains you don't want to associate with. Both the search and insertion steps respect this list.

Rel Attribute

Controls the rel attribute on inserted links:

• Follow (default): Standard links that pass SEO value. Uses rel="noopener".
• Nofollow: Tells search engines not to follow or pass value. Uses rel="noopener nofollow".
• Sponsored: For paid or promotional links. Uses rel="noopener sponsored".

Open in New Tab

When enabled (default), external links include target="_blank" so they open in a new browser tab instead of navigating away from the article.

Link Placement

Controls how links are distributed in the article:

• Natural (default): Places each link near the relevant passage in the article where it fits best contextually.
• Spread evenly: Distributes links throughout the article to avoid clustering in one section.

Prefer Authoritative Sources

When enabled (default), the search step prioritizes well-known, high-authority domains such as .edu, .gov, established news outlets, academic publications, and recognized industry authority sites.

Cost

External linking uses your own API keys. Each article requires 2 LLM calls: one web search call to find sources, and one call to insert the links. The estimated cost is displayed in the settings drawer based on your selected provider and max links setting.

Typical costs range from ~$0.005 per article (Gemini) to ~$0.03 per article (OpenAI/Anthropic), depending on the provider, model, and number of links.

Tips

• Start with 3-5 max links per article. Too many outbound links can dilute your own page's SEO value.
• Use nofollow for affiliate or promotional content, and follow for genuine editorial citations.
• Add competitor domains to the blocked list to avoid linking to direct competitors.
• External linking works with all content types: single articles, batch, YouTube-to-article, and news.
• Links are inserted after internal linking and before the table of contents, so both link types coexist naturally.

Troubleshooting