A heat exchanger unit coupling and linkage forced evolution strategy, guided by low-load hot utility, was proposed to address the issue of insufficient optimization accuracy in heuristic algorithms for optimizing large-scale heat exchanger networks. This strategy focused on constructing a linked heat exchanger unit loops under the guidance of low-load hot utility, adjusting heat exchanger unit loads within the loops while ensuring consistency with units outside the loops. The goal was to maximize stream energy recovery and reduce costs associated with low-load hot utility usage. When applied to the random walk algorithm with compulsive evolution on two cases, the total annual costs (TACs) for cases H8C7 and H10C10 were 1495292 $/a and 1713637 $/a, respectively. Compared to previous results, TACs achieved a savings of 7466 $/a and 7533 $/a. In comparison to the best literature solutions, TACs observed reductions of 2033 $/a and 1450 $/a, demonstrating the efficacy of this strategy.