8 domains link to every major fintech app (Common Crawl analysis)

Update 2026-08-12: this post originally treated all eight as one kind of link. They are not. Five of the eight are publishing platforms, which cuts the actionable list from eight to three. Original analysis unchanged below, correction in Update: three categories, not two.

Fourth niche, same experiment. Take a category's biggest players, pull every domain that links to them from Common Crawl's open hyperlink graph, keep the ones that link to the whole set. SEO tools gave 37 universal linkers (media). CRMs gave 2 (integration hubs). AI agent frameworks gave 5 (dev platforms). Fintech just gave 8 - and they are the most consistent set yet.

The setup

Eight fintech apps across payments, banking, and spend: Stripe, Wise, Revolut, Plaid, Brex, Ramp, Mercury, Chime. For each, referring domains ranked by authority from the Common Crawl webgraph (120M domains, 4.4B edges), then intersect the eight lists. Stripe is its own planet - 100,000+ referring domains, more than the other seven combined.

The 8 that link to all 8

substack.com, entrepreneur.com, libsyn.com (podcast host), beehiiv.com, pymnts.com, thefinancialbrand.com, spocket.co, coda.io.

Two newsletter platforms, a podcast host, a business magazine, and two dedicated fintech trade publications. Widen to the 7-of-8 club and the pattern gets sharp: github, crunchbase, ycombinator, bvp (Bessemer), contrary, builtin, bankrate, bankingdive, finovate, 11fs. Finance trade press plus startup/VC infrastructure. Almost nothing else.

Update: three categories, not two (2026-08-12)

@mihirkanzariya pointed out in the comments that these eight are not one kind of thing, and he is right.

Five of them are UGC platform domains: substack.com, beehiiv.com, libsyn.com, coda.io and spocket.co. A link from those is not an editorial decision by the platform. It is one person publishing a newsletter, a podcast episode or a public doc that happens to mention the app. You cannot pitch substack.com and you cannot fill in a profile on beehiiv.com. That link shows up only because somebody already wrote about you.

So the universal set splits three ways rather than reading as one list:

The list you can actually act on is three domains, not eight. The full study's overlap pyramid has a "non-platform" column, and for these five it is wrong: that filter stripped the obvious social platforms and stopped there, when it should have stripped the publishing platforms too. Leaving it as published rather than quietly rewriting it.

The more useful half of the correction is what the third category is for. The pitch list and the profile list are things you go and do. The platform cluster is what happens after those work: if Substack and beehiiv start linking to you, the coverage you earned got read by people who then went and wrote their own thing. That makes it the best available proxy for whether the first two are landing, and it is the one part of the set you cannot buy.

It also means the effect scales with how much a category gets written about, which puts an asterisk on the table below. SEO tools gave 37 universal linkers, and some of that is likely the same inflation rather than genuinely broader coverage. Re-running the earlier studies with platform domains split out is on the list.

Four niches, four shapes

The takeaway for anyone building in fintech: you do not earn links with a payments integration. You earn them by being covered (get into PYMNTS, The Financial Brand, Banking Dive, Tearsheet) and by being tracked as a company (complete Crunchbase / Sacra / BuiltIn profiles, land on VC portfolio pages). Mercury has 1,689 referring domains vs Stripe's 100,000+, yet both are reached by the same ten publications and three databases. You don't out-link Stripe; you get on the same shelf.

Full study with the overlap pyramid and downloadable CSV/JSON: 8 domains link to every major fintech app. Method is category-agnostic - it's a backlink gap analysis on Common Crawl data, free.