ScalelistAutonomous SEO agent
Manual link building stalled at DR 15. The agent took it to 45.
Scalelist sells verified emails, mobile numbers and prospect lists, a category full of well-funded competitors. Arnaud was building backlinks by hand and getting nowhere. He switched to Outrank, and called it the thing he liked most: autonomous.
scalelist.com“It works quite well, it’s autonomous.”
Arnaud Renoux
Co-founder, Scalelist
16 → 45
Domain Rating
Ahrefs, September 2025 → September 2026
+9
DR in the first two months
16 in September → 25 in November 2025
327
Verified backlinks
Placed and checked through the exchange
206
Articles published
Through the WordPress plugin
The challenge
Link building by hand does not scale for a founder
Lead data is a competitive search category. Scalelist had a solid product and a thin backlink profile, and outreach was eating founder time without moving the Domain Rating.
What the AI agent did
Set up once, then left alone
Arnaud connected the WordPress plugin and switched on the backlink exchange. Outrank has published 206 articles since, and 327 contextual backlinks to scalelist.com are verified live.
- 206 articles published
- 327 verified backlinks
- No manual outreach
The results
+29 Domain Rating points in twelve months
Ahrefs recorded DR 16 in September 2025, 25 in November, 33 in January, 41 in April and 45 in August 2026. In the Ahrefs dashboard Arnaud shared, organic traffic was up 2,000 visits and organic keywords up 433.
Domain Rating, monthly
Line marks the month they joined Outrank
Source: Ahrefs, September 2026. Monthly Domain Rating from Ahrefs, an independent third party. Outrank has no control over it.
The screenshot
Straight from Arnaud’s dashboard
In their words
What Arnaud told us
Quotes are taken word for word from the case study form the customer filled in and agreed to publish.
On the first month
“I got a massive DR increase in the first 3-4 weeks of working together.”
Arnaud Renoux
Co-founder, Scalelist
On whether he would recommend Outrank
“I have recommended it already.”
Arnaud Renoux
Co-founder, Scalelist
The honest reading
What this data does not show
- Scalelist has not connected Search Console to Outrank, so we cannot show verified click data here. The Domain Rating numbers come from Ahrefs and the traffic figures from Arnaud’s own screenshot.
- Domain Rating is a third-party authority score, not traffic. It matters because it predicts how easily new pages can rank.
Data and method
Where every number comes from
- Domain Rating: Ahrefs, September 2026, monthly values.
- Articles and backlinks: Outrank platform data. Backlinks count only links our crawler verified live on the host page.
- Quotes and screenshots: submitted by Arnaud Renoux, who agreed to their use in this case study.
Want the bigger picture? Our study of 2,119 sites shows how typical this result is, including the sites that did not grow.
