Grubhub’s Local Link Building Strategy That Solved the Cold Start Problem

Grubhub pioneered a local link building strategy that fundamentally changed how marketplaces acquire traffic.

This approach turned their marketing budget into a permanent SEO asset, solving the cold start problem that kills most startups.

You launch in a new city. You have no customers because you have no restaurants. You have no restaurants because you have no customers. And Google ignores you because your new city pages have zero authority.

When Grubhub expanded beyond Chicago in 2007, they faced this exact wall.

They needed to launch in New York, San Francisco, and Denver. They needed to do it without burning millions on billboards. Most importantly, they needed to convince Google's algorithm that a Chicago-based startup was the authority on "pizza delivery in Brooklyn."

Their solution was not to write more blog posts. It was to manufacture authority through a clever value exchange.

Casey Winters, the company's first marketing lead, engineered a system that turned marketing dollars directly into search rankings.

Here is the technical breakdown of the link building strategy that allowed Grubhub to dominate local search.

The marketplace cold start problem

Launching a new market is expensive. You usually have to buy demand through paid ads while your sales team scrapes for supply.

For Grubhub, the goal was organic search dominance. They knew that user intent for food delivery is hyperlocal. Nobody searched for "online food delivery" in 2008. They searched for "Thai food near me" or "burgers in Lower East Side."

To rank for those terms, Grubhub needed thousands of landing pages.

But spinning up 10,000 pages for every neighborhood and cuisine creates a new problem of thin content. If you launch a page for "Denver Sushi" but nobody links to it, Google views it as low-quality spam.

You cannot build links to 10,000 pages individually. The math doesn't work. You need a mechanism to acquire high-authority backlinks at scale that lift the entire domain.

Buying backlinks with $10 customer discounts

Winters realized that local press outlets—newspapers, city guides, university blogs—were desperate for content that offered value to their readers.

He stopped pitching launch stories. Journalists don't care that a startup launched. Instead, he pitched a subsidy.

The pitch was simple: "We are launching in your city. We want to give your readers $10 off their first order. Here is a custom link for them."

We can actually see this execution in the Internet Archive. In 2010, Grubhub used pages like grubhub.com/SeattleSneakPeek to host these offers. As seen in this 2010 archive link, the "New users save $10" offer was prominent.

This local link building strategy bypassed the editorial firewall. It wasn't a request for coverage; it was a gift for the audience.

The $10 discount was essentially the Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC), but instead of buying a Facebook ad, Grubhub was buying a permanent asset: a high-DR backlink from a trusted local domain.

Building a hyperlocal site taxonomy for Grubhub

The links were the fuel. The site structure was the engine.

If the press linked to the Grubhub homepage, the value would be diluted. Winters directed these links to specific "Parent City Pages."

Looking back at the historical data, we can see this exact taxonomy in play. In 2008, the parent page for New York was simply https://www.grubhub.com/nyc/. You can see the snapshot of that page here.

This created a massive reservoir of authority at the city level. Then, Grubhub engineered a taxonomy of "Child Pages" beneath that parent:

• Parent: New York Food Delivery

• Child: New York Pizza

• Child: New York Sushi

• Child: Tribeca Italian Food

Because the Parent Page linked internally to all the Child Pages, the "link equity" flowed downstream. One story in the New York Times didn't just boost the main page; it lifted thousands of neighborhood and cuisine pages automatically.

Turning temporary links into permanent assets

Here is the piece most marketers miss: Preservation.

Promotional offers and early city landing pages eventually change or expire. The "$10 off" campaign might end, or the site architecture might evolve.

In a standard marketing campaign, once the offer expires, the landing page is taken down. The user sees a 404 error. The backlink breaks. The SEO value disappears.

Winters ensured Grubhub never lost that equity.

If you try to visit that old 2008 link (www.grubhub.com/nyc) today, it does not 404. Instead, it triggers a 301 redirect to their modern URL structure: https://www.grubhub.com/delivery/ny-nyc.

The link from the local newspaper remains active in the archives. The user who clicks it years later is redirected to the relevant restaurant list. And most importantly, Google continues to count that vote of confidence forever.

Grubhub's legacy SEO leverage

This strategy created a defensive moat that is nearly impossible to cross.

SEO is a compound interest game. A link acquired in 2008 that has survived for 15 years carries immense weight. Competitors can buy ads to appear at the top of the page, but they cannot buy "age" or "trust."

Grubhub planted an orchard while others were buying apples.

The only way to win against a legacy competitor like Grubhub is to be aggressive in marketing, PR, and SEO. All at the same time.

Some of its competitors like Doordash and Uber Eats have surpassed Grubhub in recent years. However, the fact that Grubhub still has some marketshare despite aggressive marketing by competitors shows how far SEO compounds.

The core principles to replicate the local link building strategy of Grubhub are as follows:

• Identify the value exchange: Don't beg for links. Offer something the publisher's audience actually wants (discounts, data, exclusive access).

• Target local relevance: A link from a niche local site is worth more for local SEO than a link from a generic national site.

• Architect for distribution: Ensure your landing pages link down to your specific product/category pages.

• Never 404: Treat every backlink as a financial asset. Preserve it with redirects like Grubhub did with their NYC page.

Growth is not about one viral hit. It is about building systems that turn inputs (discounts) into permanent outputs (rankings).

Top Tweets of the day

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