Dean's Skyscraper outreach turned 160 emails into 17 links and a doubled traffic month

The story

The assigned 2025 Backlinko article, How Brian Dean Would Launch Backlinko in 2026, is staff-written by Leigh McKenzie and last updated 15 July 2025. It is not Dean's 2013 case study. It opens with a founding sentence in third person: in 2012 he launched Backlinko to publish world-class SEO content that ranks, and it worked, a trusted SEO brand powered almost entirely by blog posts and Google traffic. Then the interviewer asks what he would do now. Dean's first quoted line is the brake on that origin myth. Relying 100 percent on Google traffic isn't smart anymore. AI Overviews take clicks. ChatGPT and Perplexity replace Google for early research. Algorithm updates stay volatile. He would still publish SEO posts, the piece says, but he would also build YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, email, and podcasts from day one.

The 2025 article illustrates the multi-channel point with Exploding Topics, another Dean project: a weekly newsletter to 100,000-plus subscribers, threads and carousels on X and LinkedIn, short video on Instagram. Those subscriber and format claims are reported in a Semrush-owned Backlinko article quoting him, not an audited file. The takeaway the writer draws is that SEO still matters but a 2026 brand has to travel. Dean's second quoted recommendation is how to show up in ChatGPT: publish original data, real insights, and unique strategies. Same-as-everyone content gets ignored. The article states Backlinko traffic from LLMs is up 800 percent year over year. That 800 percent is a company blog claim in 2025, not a 2013 ranking-factors chart, and it is not independently verified here.

He also describes a 2026 paradox in a quote: consumer behavior still feels like 2022, but the tools are from the future. Use LLMs to speed research, analyze competitors, rewrite for clarity, test angles. Do not use them to pump generic pages. The final result should be your voice. He closed the chat by asking readers for their AI strategy. The page footer notes Backlinko is owned by Semrush and that unless otherwise noted the content is by an employee or contractor. That ownership line matters for this catalog. The 2025 URL is the assigned first source. The founding motion it cannot replace is the Skyscraper case study Dean wrote in his own name.

That case study, still on Backlinko and updated 20 June 2024, is first person. Too many people think great content is enough and that people will naturally link. On 18 April 2013 he published Google's 200 Ranking Factors: The Complete List. After the Skyscraper Technique, backlinks to that page shot up. Organic search traffic to the entire site, not just that post, doubled in 14 days. That single post, he wrote, has driven more than 2 million referral visitors. Doubling, the 110 percent title, and 2 million referrals are his reported outcomes, not an analytics dump we re-ran.

He named three steps: find link-worthy content, make something even better, reach out to the right people. The skyscraper metaphor is why the name stuck. Nobody wonders about the eighth-tallest building. You find the tallest in your space and slap twenty stories on top. Human nature wants the best. A linkable asset, in his phrasing, is not listicle bait. It is a page useful enough that people open WordPress and add a link. You do not guess whether it will work. You find content that has already generated a ton of links, then beat it on length, freshness, design, and thoroughness at once, so it is objectively clearer that yours is better when you ask for the link.

For ranking factors he decided to list all 200 or die trying. The first 50 were a breeze. Fifty to 100 were really hard. One hundred to 150 were really, really hard. One hundred fifty to 200 were damn near impossible. It took 10 gallons of coffee and 20 hours in front of a laptop, bathroom breaks included. Other lists were outdated and thin on references. He added descriptions and citations. He added a banner. Length alone was not the trick; completeness plus packaging was. That 20-hour figure is a founder work anecdote attached to one URL, not a wage and not a content-team budget.

Email outreach is the linchpin, with a twist on link begging. You email site owners who already linked to similar content. He exported competitor backlinks, weeded out forums, and had 160 prospects. He mailed a short template: I noticed you linked to a favorite article; I made something more thorough and up to date; might be worth a mention. Out of 160 emails he landed 17 links, 11 percent. He called that amazing for cold emails that asked for a link in the first note.

He anticipated the objection: 17 links, that's it? Quality, not quantity. There were gems in the 17. Some of the best links on the ranking-factors page, he said, came from Skyscraper, though a few came organically. The meteoric rise in organic traffic in a short period is the chart he wants readers to look at, still his chart. The 2025 interview does not retire those 160 and 17. It adds a different constraint: even a technique that doubled a site in 2013 is, in Dean's later quote, incomplete if Google is the only pipe. Skyscraper is a link system for a page that already looks like the tallest building. It is not a promise that 2026 traffic mix will look like 2013.

Read in order, the staff 2025 piece is advice about launching now, and the Dean-bylined case study is how Backlinko actually jumped. 2012 blog, Google-first, ranking-factors URL in April 2013, 160 emails, 17 links, 11 percent, sitewide organic doubled in 14 days, more than 2 million referrals to that post over time. 2025: do not rely 100 percent on Google, original data for LLMs, 800 percent LLM-traffic claim on the company blog, 100,000-plus Exploding Topics subscribers as a multimedia example, Semrush ownership. Keep the two years from collapsing. The interview is not a second measurement of the 14-day doubling.

Our editorial suggestion is to treat Skyscraper as qualified outreach on top of a page that already beat the field, not as a synonym for long content, and to treat the 2025 quotes as Dean revising distribution, not as a restatement of 17 links. The 110 percent title and the doubled-in-14-days line are the same founder window. The 800 percent LLM line is a later company claim. None of it is independently audited here. Fail the first five businesses if you must; this record does not have Dean stating that on these two URLs, so that catalog card line stays out.