Collaborator Shortlisted for 2026 Global Digital Excellence Awards

The 2026 shortlist for the Global Digital Excellence Awards is officially out. The winners will be announced later this October, so in the meantime, there’s time to learn a little more about the finalists.

Collaborator, a PR distribution marketplace, was named one of the finalists in the Standout Platform / Technology / Tool category, where judges look at:

• The real problems the platform helps its users solve
• The technology and features that power the product
• The value and results it brings to customers
• New features and developments introduced over the past year
• The qualities that set the platform apart

Let’s take a closer look at why Collaborator was selected as a finalist in this category.

Collaborator Makes Digital PR and Link Building Easier

Finding the right websites for content and link placements can take a surprising amount of time. Marketers and SEO specialists need to consider relevance, audience, traffic, SEO metrics, location, pricing, and other factors before deciding where to place their content. And that’s not even counting the time they spend negotiating placements with website owners. On top of that, managing multiple publications manually can make the whole process even more complicated.

Collaborator was built to bring these tasks together in one place.

What Collaborator Is

Founded in 2017, Collaborator is a digital PR and link building marketplace that helps businesses build their online visibility. Today, it is used by tens of thousands of marketers, SEO experts, and link builders in more than 150 countries, helping them find relevant media outlets and distribute content more efficiently.

Over the past year, Collaborator’s catalog has grown by 5,000+ media outlets.

What Collaborator Offers

Collaborator is a growing marketplace that currently provides access to a large catalog of verified websites that accept guest posts and press releases, along with Telegram channels. Many websites are verified via Google Analytics and Google Search Console.

Users can narrow down the options using over 40 filtering parameters, including:

• AIO, 
• Domain Authority, 
• Domain Rating, 
• Trust Flow, 
• Citation Flow, 
• Traffic, 
• Spam scores, 
• Geographic audience data,
• etc.

For users working on campaigns regularly, the goal is simple: spend less time searching for suitable placements and more time working on the campaigns themselves.

Collaborator Keeps Evolving

Search is no longer limited to traditional results pages, with AI-powered tools and search experiences becoming another part of the discovery journey. The marketplace has continued to develop alongside these changes.

Over the past year, Collaborator has introduced and expanded several tools designed to make finding and evaluating placement opportunities easier.

• AI filtering by keywords helps users discover websites based on the topics most relevant to their campaigns. The marketplace also offers an AI Overviews metric, which shows how many keywords a website is cited for by AI models. It is not intended to be a standalone decision-making metric, but gives marketers another data point when assessing potential placements.
• Automatic competitor analysis lets advertisers add competitors to their projects and see their backlink numbers, key SEO metrics, and potential donor domains available through the marketplace. The Free Backlink Checker provides another way to investigate backlink profiles, while the Link Assistant Chrome extension lets users check backlinks, link attributes, indexation, placement availability, and pricing while browsing.
• Collaborator Backlink Checker is a free tool that lets users quickly analyze a website’s backlink profile. See its strongest and newest backlinks, check referring domains, and get a clearer picture of how competitors build their link profiles.
• Link Assistant is a Chrome extension developed by Collaborator to help SEO specialists check backlinks and link opportunities without leaving the page they’re browsing. It shows link attributes, indexation status, placement availability, and prices, making it easier to assess potential link-building opportunities on the spot. 

These developments reflect a broader shift in the platform. Collaborator is not simply a catalog of websites. It is becoming a more comprehensive workspace for researching opportunities, evaluating potential placements, and managing digital PR and link-building activities.

What Being Shortlisted Means to Collaborator

Being included among the 2026 finalists adds another milestone to Collaborator’s growing list of industry recognition.

For the Collaborator team, the latest nomination is less about a single feature and more about the work that has gone into developing the marketplace over time.

“We’re proud to see Collaborator recognized in the Standout Platform / Technology / Tool category. The marketplace has changed a lot since we started, and this recognition is a great reminder of how much work our team and users have put into that journey. We’re especially grateful to everyone who shares feedback and ideas with us. Many of the improvements we make start with those conversations.”

Mykhailo Shcherbachov, Co-Founder at Collaborator

From expanding its international catalog to introducing new tools for SEO, digital PR, and AI-era search, Collaborator continues to build around the same idea: making online visibility easier to manage without adding unnecessary complexity.