How to Find Competitor Backlinks (And Replicate the Ones Worth Having)

Competitor backlink analysis is the highest-yield prospecting method in link building, for a simple reason: a site that has already linked to a business like yours has demonstrated willingness to do so. You are not guessing whether a prospect is gettable — you have evidence.

This is the process, including the filtering step that most people skip and that determines whether the exercise is useful.

Step 1: Pick the Right Competitors

Not your business competitors — your search competitors, which are frequently different. The companies you lose deals to may not be the pages ranking for your keywords.

Search your three most valuable commercial keywords and note who ranks in the top ten. Those are your search competitors. Include comparison sites and industry publications if they rank; you cannot beat them on business terms but their backlink profiles are still full of gettable prospects.

Pick three to five. More produces an unmanageable list.

Step 2: Analyse at Page Level, Not Just Domain Level

The common mistake is pulling all referring domains for a competitor's whole site. That returns thousands of links, most pointing at their homepage or their blog, most irrelevant to the page you want to rank.

Analyse the specific page ranking for your target keyword. Those are the links Google is weighing for that query. It is a far smaller and far more actionable list.

Run both if you have time — page level tells you what to build now, domain level tells you where the industry's links come from generally.

Step 3: Find the Link Intersect

The most valuable single report in link building, available in Ahrefs, Semrush and most competitor tools under names like Link Intersect or Backlink Gap.

It shows sites linking to two or more of your competitors but not to you. A site that has linked to three businesses in your industry is dramatically more likely to link to a fourth than a cold prospect. These should be the top of your outreach list, ordered by how many competitors they link to.

Step 4: Filter Aggressively

This is where the exercise succeeds or fails. A raw competitor backlink export is mostly noise — syndication copies, scraper sites, network placements and links nobody could replicate.

Filter out, in this order:

• Sites with no organic traffic. High domain rating and negligible traffic means the rating was bought. This removes the largest share of the list.
• Nofollowed links — unless the site is worth pursuing for referral traffic on its own merits.
• Site-wide footer and sidebar links. Usually a paid arrangement or a supplier relationship, not an editorial decision.
• Obvious network sites. No topical focus, generic authorship, outbound links across unrelated industries.
• Links you structurally cannot replicate. Their own press releases, parent company sites, personal relationships.

A list of 2,000 typically reduces to 60–150 genuine prospects. That reduction is the value of the exercise. The criteria are the same ones in authority backlinks.

Step 5: Categorise by How the Link Was Earned

Each surviving prospect got its link somehow, and the mechanism determines your approach. Look at the actual linking page and sort into:

Resource pages. Curated lists. Approach: have something worth listing and ask.

Guest posts. The competitor wrote an article. Approach: pitch your own, on a different angle. See guest post service.

Editorial citations. A journalist cited their data or quoted them. Approach: you need something citable — this is digital PR territory.

Directory and association listings. Easiest wins. Just join or submit.

Supplier and partner pages. Check whether you share suppliers. Frequently a free link nobody thought to ask for.

Roundups and "best of" lists. Approach: ask to be considered, or pitch why the list is incomplete without you.

Step 6: Look for Broken Links

Crawl competitor backlink profiles for links pointing at pages that now 404 — discontinued products, deleted articles, dead resources.

The pitch writes itself: you are telling a site owner about a broken link on their page and offering a working replacement. It is genuinely useful to them, which is why response rates beat generic outreach. Works best when you already have equivalent content.

Step 7: Track the Gap Over Time

Do this monthly rather than once. New links appearing in a competitor's profile show you what is working in your industry right now — a campaign that just landed, a publication that has started covering your sector, a directory that has become active.

It also tells you the pace you need to match. If a competitor gains fifteen referring domains a month and you gain two, the gap is widening regardless of how good your individual placements are.

Setting a Target From the Data

While you have the data open, do the sizing calculation: pull referring domain counts for each of the top ten ranking pages, discard the outliers, and take the median. That number is your realistic target for that keyword — a far more useful figure than any package size a provider quotes. Full method in how many backlinks do I need.

What This Cannot Tell You

Competitor analysis shows what has already been done, which biases you toward replication. It will not surface opportunities nobody in your industry has taken, and those are frequently the most valuable — an untouched publication, an unclaimed data angle, a community nobody has participated in.

Use it as the reliable foundation of your prospect list, not as the whole strategy. The tactics that generate genuinely new opportunities are in white hat link building.

If you would like this run for you, we do the full intersect and filtering analysis as part of onboarding for link building services — and send the prospect list over before any outreach starts.