Two link practitioners, two very different businesses, and a standard that lines up almost exactly.

Two Practitioners, One Standard

Bradley Benner runs Semantic Links, a white-label off-page fulfilment service. He arrived at his position after what he describes as “months and months of testing”:

“it’s not some stupid third party metric like DA or DR or trust flow or anything else that matters about whether a link is valuable or not. What matters is whether it’s relevant.”

— Bradley Benner, Semantic Links

Kristiyan Yankov of Above Apex was asked, in the opening seconds of his interview, why anyone should trust him. His answer was to reject the premise:

“you shouldn’t trust anyone. You should verify. You should verify, especially in our industry.”

— Kristiyan Yankov, Above Apex

One is a standard for what counts. The other is a standard for how you know. Run without the second, the first degrades into a vibe.

What A Relevance-First Audit Looks Like

Benner is not a metrics abolitionist, and it is worth being precise about that, because the caricature of his position is easy to argue against and is not what he said:

“if you want to use a third-party metric like DA, DR, Trust Flow, whatever, as kind of a secondary metric after determining that a potential link source is relevant to what it’s going to be linking to, then fine.”

— Bradley Benner

So the order is the whole argument. Relevance is the gate; the score is a tiebreak among things that already passed. Most audits invert that, sort by DR descending, and never get to the gate at all.

His reasoning for why relevance won is mechanical rather than mystical: “we’re in the AI era where language models run everything… it’s all based upon what they understand about our language, which means relevance.”

Verify, Do Not Trust

Yankov’s line is a procurement instruction. In practice it means checking the things a vendor’s dashboard will not show you: whether the page will still exist in six months, whether the site’s outbound profile is coherent or a car crash of unrelated verticals, and whether the traffic figure describes humans.

Benner’s own catalogue is a useful reminder of how wide the surface is — his fulfilment covers “link building, citation building, branded assets, press releases.” Each of those needs verifying differently, and a single quality score across all of them is not telling you anything.

Rewriting A Link Brief Around It

How we write briefs here, rather than a prescription from either guest: name the topic the link has to be relevant to, in the client’s language, before naming a target count. Set a floor for relevance and a ceiling for volume, not the reverse. Require a screenshot or archive of the live placement. And record who verified it.

See SEO Isn’t Dead: What Still Works for the wider argument and our services for how we run it.

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