How to Find Your Competitors’ Best Backlinks

Building backlinks from nothing is slow work. You write something genuinely good, promote it, and then hope the right site notices. Sometimes it works. Often it doesn’t, and you’re left wondering whether the content was the problem or you just never got in front of the people who’d link to it.

There’s a faster way in: look at who’s already linking to the sites ranking above you. Someone else has done the discovery work. Your job is figuring out which of those links you can realistically get too, and which aren’t worth chasing.

That’s competitor backlink analysis, and the goal isn’t to clone somebody else’s link profile domain for domain. It’s to understand why they earned certain links, so you can go after the same kind of opportunity with something that actually deserves it.

Why This Works Better Than Cold Prospecting

Say three or four companies in your space have all picked up a link from the same industry newsletter or trade publication. That single data point tells you something useful: that outlet covers your market, has linked to businesses like yours before, and is at least open to the idea again.

You’ll see this pattern show up in resource pages, software directories, comparison posts, podcast show notes, “best of” roundups, and the occasional research citation. None of it guarantees you a link. But it narrows a nearly infinite prospecting list down to sites that have already shown interest in your kind of company.

The part people skip is asking why the link exists in the first place. If a competitor picked up links because they published original survey data, sending that same publisher a generic “we’d love a mention too” email probably won’t land. You’d need something comparably citable. If they’re sitting in a software roundup, the real question is whether your product actually fits the list’s criteria, not just whether you can get someone to add your name.

Treated this way, competitor backlink research stops being a spreadsheet of URLs and starts being a read on what your industry actually finds worth linking to.

Get the Competitor List Right

Before you touch a tool, be honest about who belongs on this list  because your business rivals and your SEO rivals are frequently not the same companies.

A mid-sized SaaS product might compete commercially against two or three direct alternatives. But the search results for its target keywords are just as likely to include comparison sites, review platforms, agencies, and educational blogs that have nothing to do with the product itself, yet rank right alongside it.

Pick three to five keywords you actually care about ranking for, search them the way a customer would, and note whichever domains keep showing up. That’s your real SEO competitor set, whether or not you’d ever call them a rival in a pitch deck.

If you’re running campaigns across the US and Europe, do this separately for each market. A site dominating US search results for a term might barely register in Germany or France  different publications, different search habits, sometimes a completely different competitive landscape.

Pull Their Backlink Data

With your list set, run each competitor through a competitor backlink checker. Ahrefs and Semrush are the two most commonly used here, and both let you research any competitor’s referring domains, individual linking pages, and anchor text without needing access to that site. Tools like SE Ranking and lighter options such as DataWise or Linkody cover similar ground if you don’t need a full research suite.

Resist exporting ten thousand rows and firing off outreach emails immediately. Open the actual pages first. Where does the link sit  in a body paragraph, a sidebar, a footer directory? What’s it pointing to? Why would that publisher have mentioned this specific competitor?

Authority scores are useful for a first pass, but don’t lean on them too hard. Ahrefs’ Domain Rating, Moz’s Domain Authority, and Semrush’s Authority Score are each calculated differently and aren’t directly comparable, even though people talk about them as if they’re interchangeable. A mid-authority site with a genuinely engaged, relevant audience is often a better prospect than a high-authority site that has no real connection to your industry.

Run the Backlink Gap Analysis

This is where the process turns into an actual to-do list. A backlink gap analysis  Ahrefs calls its version Link Intersect, Semrush calls it Backlink Gap  compares your site against several competitors at once and shows you every domain linking to them but not to you.

Most tools cap this comparison around five competitors per run, which is roughly the right number: enough to catch domains linking to multiple rivals (your strongest prospects) without drowning the list in one-off, low-value links.

Don’t chase the longest list first. Chase overlap. A domain linking to four of your five competitors is worth far more attention than one linking to a single competitor and nothing else in your space. Beyond overlap, weigh relevance  does the site actually cover your topic, or is it a catch-all resources page that links to anyone who asks  and whether there’s a plausible, non-transactional reason it linked to your competitor in the first place.

Treat the output as a prospecting list that still needs a human to sort through it, not a finished plan.

Figure Out What Kind of Link You’re Looking At

Not every link on that list is winnable, and lumping them together wastes outreach effort. A few patterns to watch for:

Editorial mentions usually happen because a competitor offered something genuinely citable  original data, an expert quote, a useful stat. You can’t copy this directly, but you can pitch your own research or commentary to the same outlet.

Guest posts are often replicable if the site accepts outside writers and your pitch fits its editorial bar  though turning guest posting into a volume play, churning out contributions purely to plant links, creates more SEO risk than reward these days.

Directory and roundup listings  “best tools for X,” regional business directories  are usually the lowest-effort wins if the site has a real audience and you’re a legitimate fit. Low-quality directories that exist purely to farm outbound links aren’t worth the time.

Partnership or sponsorship links are the trickiest. If a competitor’s link exists because of an actual business relationship, cold outreach probably won’t get you the same result.

A few minutes on the actual linking page, rather than just the export row, is usually enough to tell which bucket you’re in.

Prioritize What’s Actually Worth Pursuing

Once you’ve filtered the raw gap list, rank what’s left by more than authority score alone. Relevance first  a site with a real, engaged niche audience typically outperforms a high-DR site with no topical connection. Then ask whether there’s a genuine, explainable reason that the publisher would want to feature you. If you can’t answer that in a sentence, the prospect needs more digging.

For US and EU work specifically, don’t assume a country-code domain automatically means audience relevance. A .de site isn’t inherently useful for every German campaign, nor a .co.uk site for every UK business  check who’s actually reading it, not just where it’s registered. Weighing relevance, editorial backlink quality, traffic, replicability, and geographic fit together gives your team a shortlist worth working through, instead of a spreadsheet nobody opens twice.

Replicate the Strategy, Not the Link

The mistake that sinks most competitor backlink campaigns is treating the whole exercise as a copy-paste job  emailing a publisher to say “you linked to our competitor, please link to us too.” That rarely works, because it gives the editor no actual reason to say yes.

Instead, work out what earned the original link and build toward something comparable. If it was original research, aim for something more current or more specific. If it was a free tool, ask whether you can offer something meaningfully different, not just a clone. If it was a roundup inclusion, check honestly whether your product meets that list’s actual criteria before pitching.

Use competitor backlinks as a signal for what your market values, not a checklist to tick off one by one.

Turning This Into an Ongoing Habit

A single analysis gives you a useful burst of prospects, but competitor-referring domains shift constantly, new content goes up, old pages get pruned. Rerunning the gap analysis every quarter, or setting up alerts through whatever tool you’re using, keeps that list current instead of stale within a few months.

It’s worth watching which competitor pages attract the most links over time, too. A homepage might collect a handful, but a statistics page or in-depth industry report often tells you more about what earns links in your space. And when a publisher recently linked to a competitor, that’s a sign they’re actively covering your industry right now, a good moment to be on their radar.

The point was never to match a competitor’s link count. It’s to find the realistic, relevant opportunities that fit your business  and to understand, along the way, what your industry’s publishers actually consider worth citing.