Finding competitor backlinks is the easy part — any link tool exports them in a minute. The problem is what comes back: forty thousand rows, most of them scrapers, syndication and links you could never get. Turning that export into something you can email is where the work is.
Pick the right competitors first
Your business competitors and your search competitors are often different sites, and it is the search ones you want. Take a target keyword, look at who ranks in the top ten, and pick the three that are closest to your size. Analysing a site ten times your age gives you a list of links earned by ten years of brand recognition you do not have.
Two or three competitors is enough. Beyond that the overlap gets large and the marginal new prospects get thin.
Export at the referring domain level
Export domains, not individual links. A single sitewide footer link can appear as thousands of backlinks and will drown everything else. Working at domain level cuts a 40,000-row export to a few thousand and loses nothing you wanted.
Then filter, in this order.
The filters that matter
| Filter | Remove | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Link type | Sitewide, footer, sidebar | Templates, not editorial decisions |
| Domain type | Scrapers, aggregators, mirrors | Nobody chose to link; you cannot ask |
| Relationship | Parent companies, partners, investors | Unreplicable without the relationship |
| Language / region | Outside your market | Real links, wrong audience |
| Page context | Homepage-only links | Usually brand mentions, not opportunities |
What is left after those five filters is typically 5–10% of the original export, and that fraction is the actual opportunity set. If you skip the filtering you will spend a week emailing scraper sites.
Use the intersection, not the union
The highest-value slice is the domains linking to two or more of your competitors but not to you. A site that has linked to two companies in your category has demonstrated both that it covers the topic and that it links out. That is as close to a pre-qualified prospect as link research gets.
Most tools call this a link gap or link intersect report. It is worth running before anything else, because it usually produces fifty to two hundred names that are all worth contacting.
Then ask the question the export cannot answer
For each surviving domain: why did they link? Open the linking page. Was it a roundup, a resource list, a citation of data, a guest post, an interview, a tool mention, a paid placement? The reason determines your approach entirely, and it is the only thing that turns a domain list into an outreach plan.
Roundups and resource lists you can pitch directly. Data citations mean you need comparable data. A guest post means the site accepts contributions. A paid placement means you now know their rate exists, which is useful even if you decline.
Group the survivors and pitch accordingly
Sort the filtered list by that reason, not by authority score. Each group gets a different email, and each email gets written once and personalised per prospect. The structures for each are in the outreach templates guide.
Grouping by reason rather than by metric is what makes a competitor backlink analysis actually convert. A list of two hundred domains sorted by DA is a spreadsheet; the same list grouped into "resource pages", "roundups", "accepts contributions" and "cites data" is four campaigns.
What to do with the ones you cannot replicate
Keep them in a separate tab. Links from a competitor's investors, parent company or long-standing partnerships are not prospects, but the pattern tells you something about where authority in your category comes from — and occasionally reveals a publication type you had not considered at all.
For the broader context on reading what an export is telling you, see the backlink analysis guide; for deciding which of your own pages the resulting links should point at, the strategy guide. Our link prospecting tool handles the filtering and contact-finding stages.
Frequently asked questions
How do I find my competitors' backlinks for free?
Most major link tools offer a limited free tier that will show you the top referring domains for a competitor, which is often enough to identify the pattern. Google Search Console gives you your own links but not theirs. For a first pass, the free tiers plus a manual look at who ranks for your target terms will get you a usable shortlist.
Can I get the same backlinks as my competitors?
Some of them. After filtering out scrapers, syndication, sitewide templates and relationship-based links, you are typically left with 5–10% of the export as genuine opportunities. Those are worth pursuing because the site has already demonstrated it links out on your topic. The rest are not failures of effort; they are simply not available.
What is a link gap analysis?
It compares the referring domains of several competitors against your own and returns the sites linking to them but not to you. The most useful version filters for domains linking to two or more competitors, since those have proven both topical relevance and a willingness to link out. It is usually the fastest route from research to a prospect list.
How many competitor backlinks should I try to replicate?
Work from the gap rather than a fixed number. Compare your referring domain count against the pages ranking for your target term, and treat the difference as the target. Chasing every replicable link is rarely the right use of time; chasing the ones on relevant sites pointed at pages like the one you need to rank is.