Building a Backlink Prospector with Node.js and Exa AI

Cold email outreach for backlinks has a 0% reply rate in my experience (53 emails, 0 replies). So I built an automated prospector that finds link opportunities using Exa AI neural search. How It Works // backlink-prospector.mjs const prospects = await exa . search ( " Kazakhstan travel resources links " , { numResults : 50 , type : " auto " } ); // Filter by: has outbound links section, DA < 40, relevant content const targets = prospects . filter ( p => p . text . includes ( " resources " ) && p . score > 0.7 ); Strategies Strategy How Success Rate Resource pages Find pages with link lists, pitch inclusion ~5% Broken links Find 404s on competitor backlinks ~8% Guest posts Pitch unique angle to travel blogs ~2% Web 2.0 GitHub repos, Dev.to, gists 100% (self-serve) What Actually Worked GitHub + Dev.to gave me 70+ backlinks from DR 90-95 in one day. Cold outreach gave 0 in 2 weeks. Lesson: self-serve platforms beat outreach for new sites with DR < 5.