What we measured
We measured referring domains, how many other websites link to you, across our 1.1 million-site US business corpus, using the Common Crawl webgraph. Typical is the geometric mean, so one giant site cannot carry a whole group, and every site is counted at its own registrable domain, so nothing inherits a bigger parent's links. Then we grouped the same sites two ways: by industry, and by the kind of platform they run on. These are relative comparisons, every group measured the exact same way, so the absolute count any one backlink tool would report does not change the pattern.
Your industry is the real driver
Group by industry and the spread is enormous. A typical SaaS company has around 80 referring domains. A typical real estate agent has around 4. That is roughly a twentyfold gap, and it has nothing to do with anyone's website platform. It is what the business does. SaaS tools get written up, integrated, and reviewed; a local agent gets a line in a chamber-of-commerce directory. The links follow the business, not the build.
Typical = geometric mean over in-graph sites, each counted at its own registrable domain. Source: Stackra corpus via Common Crawl webgraph + HTTP Archive, 2026.
Now hold the industry still
So the fair question is not which platform has the most-linked sites, that just finds whichever platform happens to serve the most-linked industries. It is: within my industry, does the platform change anything. Group by both and the platforms cluster tight. Pick any row, an open-source CMS, a website builder, and a custom build land within a few referring domains of each other.
For the industries most small businesses are in, services, retail, food, healthcare, real estate, the three platform types sit within a couple of referring domains of each other. Whatever is deciding your backlink count, it is not the CMS.
| Industry | Typical | Open-source CMS | Website builders | Custom-built |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| SaaS | 80 | 77 | 67 | 89 |
| Content / media | 44 | 42 | 28 | 83 |
| Professional services | 15 | 17 | 8 | 19 |
| Retail | 10 | 12 | 9 | 13 |
| Home services | 9 | 11 | 6 | 8 |
| Healthcare | 8 | 9 | 6 | 7 |
| Restaurant | 8 | 9 | 8 | 5 |
| Real estate | 4 | 6 | 3 | 3 |
Open-source CMS = WordPress, Drupal and similar. Website builders = Wix, Squarespace, Shopify, GoDaddy. Custom-built = hand-coded sites. Source: Stackra corpus via Common Crawl webgraph, 2026.
The small gaps that remain are the customer, not the platform
Two patterns survive, and both are about who picks each platform, not what the platform does. Website builders sit a little lower in most industries, because a builder is what a brand-new business grabs on day one, before it has earned any links. Custom builds sit a little higher, and pull well ahead in SaaS and media, because paying to build custom is something a larger, more established company does, and that company already had the links. The platform did not create either gap. The business did, and then it chose a platform to match.
Your domain score inherits the same blind spot
A domain authority score, Ahrefs' Domain Rating, Moz's Domain Authority, ours, is this backlink count normalized and dressed up. So it carries the same industry bias. A score of 20 is not weak and a 60 is not strong on their own: a restaurant at the top of its industry and a SaaS company at the bottom of its can post the identical number. The score is real. Read out of context, next to another industry or a global average, it is meaningless, and that is exactly how most people read it.
What to do with this
Your backlink count is set mostly by your industry and how established you are, not by your CMS. Two things follow. First, never benchmark your site against a platform average or against another industry: a restaurant is not behind because SaaS companies have more links. Compare against businesses like yours, same industry, same rough size. Second, choose a platform for what it actually changes, features, speed, how easily you can run it, not for a backlink number it does not control.