How to Find Where Competitors Get Their Backlinks

Pick the three to five sites that actually outrank you for your target terms, run each through a backlink tool to export their referring domains, then run a link gap analysis — an intersect report showing domains that link to two or more competitors but not to you. Sort that list by relevance, discard everything you can't realistically get, and you have a prospect list built from proven demand rather than guesswork.

The reason this beats brainstorming is simple: every domain on the list has already demonstrated it will link to a site like yours. You're not testing whether the link is possible. You're only testing whether you can earn it.

Step 1 — Pick the right competitors

The most common mistake is analysing business competitors instead of search competitors. The company that beats you in sales calls may have no organic presence at all, and the site outranking you may be a blog with no product.

Build the list from the SERP. For each of your five most important target keywords, note who occupies the top five results. The sites appearing repeatedly across several of your keywords are your real search competitors, and they're the ones worth analysing.

Three to five is the right number. More produces a prospect list too long to act on and dilutes the signal that makes the gap analysis useful.

Choose sites in roughly your weight class, too. A site twenty times your size gets links from sources you have no path to — coverage in national press, links accumulated over fifteen years, mentions driven by a brand nobody has heard of in your case. Their profile is interesting but it isn't actionable.

Step 2 — Export their referring domains

Run each competitor through a backlink tool — Ahrefs, Semrush, Moz or a free alternative — and export referring domains, not backlinks. You want one row per linking site.

For each domain, keep: the linking domain, the competitor page it points to, the anchor text, whether it's followed, and the tool's authority score. That last column is the least important one on the sheet, and it's the one people sort by first.

Sort by the competitor page instead. A cluster of links pointing at one page tells you which of their assets earns links, and that's often the single most useful output of the whole exercise — it shows you what your niche links to, not just who links.

Step 3 — Run the link gap analysis

A link gap analysis is a comparison that surfaces every domain linking to your competitors but not to you. Most tools ship it as a "link intersect" or "link gap" report: enter two to four competitor domains plus your own, and it returns the difference.

The key setting is the intersect threshold — how many competitors a domain must link to before it appears:

Threshold	What it surfaces	Best for
Links to 1+ competitor	Everything. Huge, noisy list.	Exhaustive prospecting when you have time
Links to 2+ competitors	Sites that link to your niche more than once	The default. Best signal-to-noise.
Links to 3+ competitors	Directories, roundups, aggregators, industry hubs	Quick wins and structural gaps

Start at 2+. A domain that has linked to two separate competitors is demonstrably willing to link to sites in your category, which is a far stronger prospect signal than authority score.

The 3+ list deserves its own pass. When a domain links to nearly everyone in your niche except you, that is rarely an editorial judgement — it's usually a directory, a comparison roundup, a "best tools for X" list, or an industry resource page you simply never asked to be on. These are the fastest wins in the entire exercise.

No paid tool? Search Console shows your own links but not competitors'. Free routes are covered in how to find backlinks to your website; most free tiers cap results, so analyse one competitor at a time and build the intersect manually in a spreadsheet.

Step 4 — Filter for what you can actually replicate

This is the step that separates a useful prospect list from a spreadsheet nobody opens again. Classify every domain:

Replicable — editorial. A blog post, roundup, resource page, or article that mentions them. You can plausibly earn the same. Highest priority.
Replicable — self-service. Directories, listings, profiles, communities. Low value individually, but cheap and fast, and they're why competitors' domain counts look intimidating.
Replicable — relationship. Partner pages, integration listings, customer stories, podcast appearances. Slower, needs a real relationship, often the highest quality links on the list.
Not replicable. Their own properties, parent company sites, investor and portfolio pages, press coverage tied to funding or a founder's reputation, links from ten years ago on sites that no longer publish.
Do not replicate. Paid placements, PBNs, link farms, obvious guest-post networks. Distinguishing these is the point of what is a bad backlink and what is a PBN in SEO.

That last category matters more than it looks. A competitor's link profile is not a validated strategy — it's a record of what they did, including the things that are quietly hurting them. Copying a profile wholesale means copying its mistakes, and "my competitor did it" has never been a defence under Google's link spam policies.

Step 5 — Prioritise the survivors

Score what's left on three things, in this order:

Relevance. Would a real reader of that site plausibly be interested in yours? This outranks every metric on the sheet.
Attainability. Do you have an asset, an angle, or a relationship that makes the ask reasonable? A resource page needs a resource; a roundup needs you to fit the roundup's criteria.
Authority. Only as a tiebreaker between two otherwise equal prospects.

Then work the list in order rather than by volume. Twenty well-matched prospects worked properly beat two hundred blasted with a template — backlink outreach that gets replies covers what the ask should look like, and a competitor link is the easiest possible opening because you can name the exact page and the exact reason you belong alongside it.

What competitor backlink data never tells you

Worth stating plainly, because the data looks more complete than it is:

No tool sees the whole link graph. Every crawler has its own index, and none of them matches Google's. Two tools will give you two different answers for the same competitor.
You can't see what it cost. A link that appears "earned" may have been paid for, traded, or arranged through a relationship you can't observe. Assume nothing about how it was won.
You can't see what failed. You're looking at the successes. The two hundred pitches that went nowhere aren't in the export.
You can't see which links did anything. Presence in a profile is not evidence a link moved rankings. Plenty of links in every profile are inert.
Old links may be unrepeatable. A 2016 placement on a site that stopped accepting contributions in 2019 is a historical artifact, not a prospect.

Treat the output as a well-evidenced hypothesis list, not a plan.

When the gap is real but the answer isn't outreach

Sometimes the gap analysis produces an honest and unwelcome result: competitors have hundreds of relevant referring domains, most look genuinely editorial, and there's no shortcut visible. That's a supply problem, and no amount of further analysis closes it.

The routes that do are earning links with something worth citing, asking for them through sustained outreach, and trading them directly with other site owners. Backlinkster is the third — one-for-one in-content swaps with real sites in related niches, each placement verified live by code. Five a month on the free plan; see the plans. It won't replicate a competitor's decade of press coverage, but it closes the ordinary, unglamorous part of the gap that most of these lists are actually made of.

Frequently asked questions

How do I find where my competitors get their backlinks? Identify the three to five sites that outrank you for your target keywords, run each through a backlink tool and export their referring domains, then run a link gap analysis to find domains linking to multiple competitors but not to you. Filter that list for links you can realistically replicate, and prioritise by topical relevance.

What is a link gap analysis? A link gap analysis compares your backlink profile against two or more competitors and returns every domain that links to them but not to you. Most tools call it a link intersect or link gap report. Setting the threshold to domains linking to at least two competitors gives the best balance of volume and signal.

Can I find competitor backlinks for free? Partly. Google Search Console only shows your own links, so you need a third-party crawler for competitors. Most offer limited free tiers or trials that let you analyse one domain at a time — enough to build an intersect manually in a spreadsheet, though the result caps out well below a paid export.

How many competitors should I analyse? Three to five search competitors, chosen from who actually ranks for your target keywords rather than who competes with you commercially. Fewer than three makes the intersect meaningless; more than five produces a list too long to act on and dilutes the signal.

Should I try to copy every competitor backlink? No. A competitor's profile records what they did, including paid placements, PBN links and tactics that may be actively hurting them. Replicate editorial links, directories and partnership links; skip anything bought or manufactured. "A competitor did it" is not a defence under Google's spam policies.

Why do different tools show different competitor backlinks? Each tool runs its own crawler with its own index, refresh rate and inclusion rules, and none of them is Google's index. Running the same domain through two tools routinely produces different totals. Use one tool consistently for trend tracking, and cross-check with a second when building a prospect list.

The bottom line

Competitor backlink analysis is prospect research, not a blueprint. Pick genuine search competitors, export referring domains, run the intersect at a 2+ threshold, and spend most of your effort on the filtering step — because the value isn't in the size of the list, it's in the twenty rows you can honestly do something about. Then check the 3+ list first: the roundups and resource pages that link to everyone in your niche but you are the closest thing to a free win this exercise produces.