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This doesn't ring true to me because: There are all kinds of ways you can find links to your site (referring traffic in GA, link analysis sources like moz's own tools, ahrefs, majestic etc, and tools like Google Alerts) You've already got the link in these cases, so you would have no incentive to "bother" the webmasters In general, my experience has been that most providers want to tell you about as many placements as they can! Add to this some of the phrasing (e.g. "webmasters we have" -- emphasis mine) suggests that there may be payments taking place or other schemes afoot that place these well outside the Google guidelines. Per the conversation in the other comments - I would recommend that you get at least a statement of work in place to govern what you are expecting for the money you are paying even if you are not committing to a long-term contract. This could include agreements on any of the above (what information they will provide you with, what you will do with that information etc). At the very least, you should want to understand the techniques in use in order to make your own informed decisions about the risks and rewards. Hope that helps.