How to Check Competitors' Backlinks and Reverse-Engineer Their Links

Most link building campaigns start in the wrong place. Teams brainstorm target publications, chase domain authority scores, and pitch cold — without ever looking at where their competitors are actually earning links. The result is outreach that is largely guesswork. A far more efficient starting point is to check your competitors' backlinks first, then build your prospecting list from that data.

Knowing how to check competitors' backlinks gives you something generic outreach never can: proof that a specific site links out to content in your space. That is not a warm lead — it is a confirmed opportunity.

If you're looking for expert help in this area, explore how Indexed's link building services can drive measurable results for your business.

Why Competitor Backlinks Are Your Most Reliable Prospecting Source

A referring domain that already links to a competitor has done something editors rarely do: it has editorially decided that your category is worth covering. That single fact removes the hardest part of cold outreach — convincing a journalist or site owner that the topic is relevant to their audience.

There is a second, less obvious benefit. Competitor backlink profiles reveal how links are being earned, not just from where. A pattern of links clustering around a particular piece of research, a tool, or a specific content format tells you what the market responds to — before you invest a single hour in content production.

The Difference Between a Link Gap and a Link Copy Strategy

A link gap analysis asks: which referring domains link to my competitors but not to me? That is the standard use case for competitor backlink data. A link copy strategy goes further — it identifies the exact page or asset that earned the link, then creates a materially better version of it. The first approach fills gaps; the second one systematically displaces weaker assets with stronger ones. Both are valid, but they require different resource commitments and timelines.

Tools You Can Use to Check Backlinks of Competitors

Several platforms index backlink data at scale. The three most widely used in professional SEO are Ahrefs, Semrush, and Moz Link Explorer. Each crawls the web independently and stores referring domain data in its own index, which means coverage varies between platforms — a link visible in Ahrefs may not appear in Semrush and vice versa.

If budget is a constraint and you want to check backlinks of competitors free, Google Search Console shows the links pointing to your own domain at no cost, and Ahrefs offers a limited free backlink checker that returns the top 100 referring domains for any URL. These free options are useful for orientation but insufficient for a serious prospecting exercise — the data is too shallow and too slow to refresh.

Which Tool to Choose

For most mid-market businesses running competitor analysis for the first time, Ahrefs offers the most accessible combination of index size, interface clarity, and export functionality. Semrush is a reasonable alternative if your team is already using it for keyword research and wants everything in one platform. Moz is worth including as a secondary check if you want to validate high-priority targets across multiple datasets.

How to Check Your Competitors' Backlinks: A Step-by-Step Process

The following process assumes you have access to Ahrefs Site Explorer, though the logic translates to any platform with equivalent features.

Step 1: Identify Your Real Competitors

Your SEO competitors are not necessarily your commercial competitors. Enter your primary target keyword into any major search engine and note which domains consistently appear in the top ten results. These are the sites whose backlink profiles you should be analysing — they have already demonstrated the ability to rank for the terms you want.

Pick three to five competitors. More than five generates diminishing returns at the analysis stage; you can always add more later once you have worked through the initial set.

Step 2: Pull Referring Domains, Not Raw Backlinks

Enter each competitor domain into Site Explorer and navigate to the Referring Domains report rather than the Backlinks report. This distinction matters. A single domain may link to a competitor dozens of times; working from raw backlink counts inflates the apparent size of the opportunity and clutters your prospecting list with duplicate sources. Referring domains give you one row per site — a cleaner working dataset.

Filter by Domain Rating (DR) to set a floor appropriate to your current authority. If your own domain sits at DR 40, a link from a DR 20 site is still useful — but you may want to prioritise DR 50+ initially, where the authority transfer is more meaningful.

Step 3: Run a Link Intersect Analysis

The Link Intersect tool (called Content Gap for links in some platforms) lets you enter multiple competitors simultaneously and filter for domains that link to all of them but not to you. This is the most efficient way to surface high-confidence opportunities: if three competitors have all earned a link from the same publication, the editorial appetite for your category is clearly established.

Export the results as a CSV. You now have a qualified list of prospecting targets backed by real data, not intuition.

Step 4: Classify Links Before You Pitch

Not every link in that export is replicable. Before building an outreach sequence, classify each referring domain by the mechanism that produced the link. The most common categories are:

• Resource page links — editorial lists of useful tools or content; these are pitchable by contacting the page owner directly
• Guest contributions — an author from the competitor brand wrote a piece on that site; this tells you the site accepts external contributors
• Data or research citations — the competitor published original data and earned coverage; replicable only if you can produce comparable research
• Profile or directory links — often low-value and available to any business in the category; easy to replicate but limited authority transfer
• News coverage — triggered by a company announcement or product launch; not directly replicable but may signal a journalist worth building a relationship with

This classification step is where most competitor backlink analyses stall. Teams pull the data and then treat every row as an identical opportunity. Categorising by link mechanism first means your outreach is tailored — and conversion rates reflect that.

The Question Every Analysis Skips: What Earned the Link?

Standard guides to checking competitors' backlinks stop at the referring domain list. The more useful question is: which specific page on the competitor's site is attracting the most links, and what made that page linkable?

In Ahrefs, the Best by Links report inside Site Explorer shows you the competitor's pages ranked by the number of referring domains pointing to them. The patterns here are diagnostic. A competitor earning most of their links to a single data-driven guide, for example, signals that the market values original research more than it values product pages or service descriptions. That insight should shape your content investment, not just your outreach list.

This is the layer of analysis that separates a reactive link building programme from a proactive one. You are not just identifying where to pitch — you are identifying what to build.

Turning Competitor Backlink Data Into an Outreach Campaign

Once you have a classified list of target domains and a clear view of which content formats are earning links in your space, the outreach brief writes itself.

For resource page links: identify the specific page on the target site, confirm your asset is a better or complementary fit than what is already listed, and pitch the page owner directly with a brief, specific rationale.

For guest contribution opportunities: look up the contributing editor or editorial inbox for the publication. Reference the previous contributor from the competitor brand if it is publicly listed — this demonstrates you have done the research and positions you as a peer, not a cold contact.

For data citation targets: you cannot pitch research you have not yet produced. Use the list to brief your content team on what to commission. Then, when the piece is live, send a targeted note to every journalist or editor who previously cited the competitor's equivalent — they have already shown interest in this type of asset.

One process note worth making explicit: keep your outreach tracker linked to the original referring domain data. When a link is secured, mark the domain as converted. Over time, this creates a clear picture of which source categories have the highest conversion rate for your specific domain — and where to focus future effort.

FAQ

How do I check my competitors' backlinks for free?

The most practical free option is Ahrefs' free backlink checker, which shows the top 100 referring domains for any domain you enter. Moz Link Explorer also offers a limited number of free queries per month. Neither free tier provides enough data for a comprehensive prospecting exercise, but both are useful for initial orientation or for validating individual domains before subscribing to a paid plan.

How many competitors should I analyse at once?

Three to five is the practical range for an initial analysis. Fewer than three may miss meaningful opportunities; more than five tends to dilute focus without proportionally increasing the quality of the prospecting list. Once you have worked through the initial set and begun outreach, you can run the same process on additional competitors to refresh your pipeline.

Are all competitor backlinks worth targeting?

No. Links from low-authority directories, forum profiles, and link exchange networks are visible in competitor profiles but carry little value and are often trivially easy to replicate. Focus on editorial links from real publications — news outlets, industry blogs, research sites — where an editor made a genuine decision to link. These are harder to earn but meaningfully improve your domain's authority and topical relevance in search.

Does analysing competitor backlinks work for newer domains?

Yes, and it may be more important for newer domains than for established ones. A newer site has no historical link data to learn from, making competitor analysis the fastest available shortcut to a qualified outreach list. The key adjustment for lower-authority domains is to filter for referring domains in a similar or slightly higher DR range — pitching sites with DR 80+ before you have any brand recognition is a low-conversion exercise. Build the profile progressively, starting with attainable targets.

What to Do This Week

If you have not yet run a competitor backlink analysis, here is a concrete starting point for the next few days:

• Search your primary target keyword and note the top five ranking domains that are genuine competitors (not aggregators or Wikipedia).
• Enter each domain into Ahrefs Site Explorer (free account for limited data, or a paid trial) and pull the Referring Domains report.
• Run a Link Intersect across all five competitors filtered to exclude your own domain. Export the results.
• Open the Best by Links report for each competitor and note which pages have the highest referring domain count. Identify the content format (data study, guide, tool, etc.).
• In your export, classify the first 30 rows by link mechanism — resource page, guest post, citation, or directory. This takes roughly 90 minutes and tells you which outreach approach to lead with.

That process will produce a prioritised, evidence-backed outreach list before the end of the week — and a clear brief for any content your team needs to create to earn citation-style links at scale.

Related Reading

• Paid vs Editorial Backlinks: What Builds Authority
• What Makes a High-Quality Backlink? (And What to Avoid)
• What Is Topical Authority and How Do You Build It?
• How AI Search Engines Decide What to Cite
• Why Does SEO Still Matter in 2026?