Link building comes inside Workbench

Late January 2026. The link building tooling moved into Workbench, every campaign got a scope catalogue, and the first shareable campaign plan pages went out.

The second half of January had two threads. One was pulling the last outside tool, our link building system, into Workbench. The other was deciding, in data rather than in someone’s head, what a campaign actually includes.

For our partners

1. The first shareable campaign plan pages appeared on the 29th: a link, no login, showing a campaign’s plan the way the team saw it.
2. Discoveries changed hands faster. When the team finished an audit, the delivery email went out from the Portal itself and the campaign’s status updated in the same motion, rather than someone writing the email and someone else updating the record.
3. The Portal gained a Team page listing the people at the agency who have access to the account, and new agencies were asked to complete their profile before going further.
4. Partners with billing access could settle their own invoices from the Portal at the end of the month.
5. Campaign lists could be filtered by the client’s URL, and buttons that do something irreversible now ask first.

1. Shareable plan pages

They were rough and they were mostly sent by hand. They were also the start of the thing that would replace the spreadsheet in April.

2. Discoveries change hands

The packages page and the launch form, the place a partner starts a campaign from a discovery, were tidied: a start date, a proper confirmation, and no launch without a selection.

Behind the scenes

1. The link building tool had lived in its own application since 2025. By the end of the month it had come inside Workbench: the sites, the servers, the plugins, the networks, the issues list.
2. Scope items arrived on the 28th. Until then, what a campaign included was a package name and whatever the manager remembered.
3. On the 23rd campaigns got onboarding and offboarding workflows: when a campaign starts, the first month’s tasks are created; when it ends, the close-out tasks are. Routine tasks started being added to the queue without anyone creating them.
4. Assignments were reworked so a manager could assign specialists to campaigns in bulk, with notifications going out on assignment, and content got its own views in Workbench.
5. The page for walking campaigns out of ClickUp saw its last real use in the final week of the month, sorted by what was not yet complete until nothing was.

1. Link building comes inside

Managing the servers moved inside with it, so a specialist could fix a site without leaving the page they were on. Link tasks started running as an automated workflow on the 23rd, and link reporting followed on the 25th. Terminated sites dropped out of the lists so nobody would build on one by mistake.

2. Scope items

Now each campaign carries a catalogue of items with quantities, packages are built from the same items, and a partner’s own variations are recorded against it. Tasks were classified by type at the same time, and the SEO work split into on-site, on-page and technical queues. This is dry work and it is the foundation for everything that compares planned against delivered later in the year.

4. Assignments and content views

The content views are content tasks, content campaigns, a team resourcing page, a new-content task route, editable content types and templates, and a proper rich text editor. Content optimisation scoring was integrated on the 28th. Discoveries could be downloaded as a CSV.