Start here: two ways to get your first backlinks
There are two ways to run HeyLinks: press one button and let Autopilot do the legwork, or walk the pipeline yourself, one page at a time. This article helps you pick.
Updated July 15, 2026
The two routes
HeyLinks earns you backlinks through cold outreach: it finds pages that already link out to a competitor in your topic, then helps you email each page's owner and ask them to add your link too. Everything in the app exists to run that loop well.
You can run the loop two ways, and they end in the same place: a batch of ready-to-send emails waiting for your review.
- Press Start and it runs Discover, then Qualify, then Draft, end to end
- Shows each phase live, with progress like "12 of 25 sites vetted"
- The run size is capped to your remaining monthly credits
- Ends with staged, ready-to-send emails for your review
- Tunable with advanced settings, but the defaults work
- You walk the sidebar yourself: Link Discovery, Link Extraction, Qualify sites, Review leads, Draft emails, Send emails
- You decide which competitor to pull, which sites to qualify, and which leads move forward
- You see exactly what each stage produces before the next one runs
- Also the route for bringing your own list via Import CSV
The pipeline they both run
Under the hood, both routes are the same pipeline. Autopilot just presses the buttons for you on the first stretch:
The blue stages are the ones Autopilot runs for you in one click. Reviewing and sending are always yours.
After sending, follow-ups go out automatically on a schedule, replies collect in your Inbox, and the Link tracker confirms when your link is actually live on a page.
Which one should you pick?
Pick Autopilot if you want results fast and hands-off. It is the quickest path from a fresh project to a batch of reviewed-and-ready emails. You still approve everything before it sends, so "hands-off" never means "out of your hands."
Pick the manual pipeline if you want control, or you want to learn the machine. Walking each stage yourself shows you exactly what a qualification credit buys, what a grade means, and what the generator writes and why. Many people run the pipeline manually once, then switch to Autopilot for every run after that.
There is no lock-in either way. The two routes feed the same leads, drafts, and sending queue, so you can mix them freely.
What you need before starting
Three things, and all of them live in the app:
- A project. Your site, what it does, and a little about you. The email generator uses this to write outreach that sounds like you.
- A connected mailbox. HeyLinks sends from your own email account (connected with Google sign-in), not from a shared address. Nothing can send without one.
- A competitor. The whole approach starts from pages that already link to a competitor in your niche. If you run a directory of retro arcades, a rival arcade finder is a perfect pick. If you would rather bring your own list of pages, the Import CSV page covers that instead.
What "ready to send" means
Both routes end with drafts staged for review, not with emails already sent. Each draft is a real, editable email written for one specific page. You read it, change anything you like, and approve it. Only then does it enter the sending queue.