Competitor Backlink Analysis: 100 Gap Links, 11 Worth It

Any backlink tool will hand you a competitor's links in under a minute. The list is the easy part.

The hard part is knowing which ten links on it deserve an email.

So I ran one on this site. I took the two sites that rank above theguidex.com for "find competitor backlinks", ran a backlink gap against them, and read all 100 rows it gave back. Every row had a domain authority of 80 or more. Only 11 were worth a pitch.

In this guide, I'll break down:

• What competitor backlink analysis and a backlink gap actually are
• What my own gap turned up, row by row, and why the authority column misled me
• Which tools find competitor backlinks, what they cost, and what you can do for free
• The step-by-step process, and the five checks that turn 100 rows into a short list
• The links you should never copy, and the outreach numbers to plan around

It is written for site owners and in-house SEOs who do their own link building, not for agencies selling link packages.

What is competitor backlink analysis?

Competitor backlink analysis is the process of studying the links that point to the pages outranking you, then earning the ones you can.

The idea is simple. Google still treats a link from a trusted, relevant site as a vote. Across 11.8 million search results, the number one page had 3.8 times more backlinks than positions two to ten.

So when a page sits above yours, its link profile is a map of the votes you are missing.

The analysis has three parts:

• Pull the referring domains of the pages that outrank you
• Compare them with your own to find the gap
• Filter the gap down to links you can earn honestly

Most guides spend their time on the first two. In my experience, the third is where the campaign is won or lost.

What does a backlink gap mean?

A backlink gap is the list of sites that link to your competitors but not to you.

Every major tool has a report for it. Ahrefs calls it Link Intersect, Semrush calls it Backlink Gap, SE Ranking has a Backlink Gap Analyzer, and Ubersuggest calls it Backlink Opportunity.

You enter two or three competitors on one side and your own domain on the other. The tool returns every referring domain that links to them and not to you.

Why it works: these sites have already linked to a page like yours. They know the topic, they link out, and they cite sources. That makes them far warmer than a cold list built from a keyword search.

There is one more useful view. Some tools show how many of your competitors each site links to. A site that links to all three of your rivals is a stronger prospect than one that links to only one. It has shown, three times over, that it covers your topic.

What happened when I ran a backlink gap on this site?

I picked the two sites that outrank us for "find competitor backlinks" in the US: seoreviewtools.com (Ubersuggest DA 43, 6,252 referring domains) and morningscore.io (DA 33, 3,354 referring domains). For comparison, theguidex.com sits at DA 32 with 1,662 referring domains.

I ran Ubersuggest's Backlink Opportunity report with both as competitors and theguidex.com excluded. It sorts by authority, so I took the first 100 rows and labelled each one by hand.

The authority column was the most misleading thing on the screen.

A throwaway page on play-store-indir.vercel.app showed DA 93. So did a page on a random netlify.app subdomain. These pages borrow the score of the platform they sit on. A filter of "DA 80+" would have kept every one of them.

Then I cut the 34 real articles down. Ten were "free SEO tools" roundups. They link to these two sites because both are SEO tools, and a guide cannot earn that link the same way. Six were in Danish, Spanish, Indonesian, German, Polish or Japanese. Seven were off topic, like a Chron piece on push and pull marketing.

That left 11. A HubSpot guide on blog SEO, a WordStream post on content audits, a University of Alaska Fairbanks page of SEO guidelines and a Search Engine Watch piece on paid links were among them. Those are pages where a useful, specific pitch has a real chance.

Which tools find competitor backlinks?

You need two things from a tool: a large link index and a gap report. These four have both. I checked each price on the vendor's own pricing page.

I used Ubersuggest for the gap above because it was already open for keyword research. For a bigger campaign, I would still reach for Ahrefs Link Intersect, mostly for the way it shows how many competitors each site links to.

Ahrefs also has a $29 Starter plan. It caps every report at 250 rows, which is fine for a quick look at one competitor and tight for a full gap.

Prices on these tools move often. Check the plan page on the day you buy.

How can you find competitor backlinks for free?

You can get a first look for free. You cannot run a proper gap for free.

Here is what the free routes actually give you:

• Semrush free account: 10 reports a day across its tools, with no card needed. Enough to open the backlink report for two competitors.
• Free backlink checkers from Ahrefs, SE Ranking and SEO Review Tools: a sample of a site's strongest links, not the full list.
• Ahrefs Free (Ahrefs Webmaster Tools): full link data, but only for sites you have verified as your own. It will not show a competitor's links.
• Google Search Console: your own links only.

The common mistake is signing up for Ahrefs Webmaster Tools to spy on a competitor. It will not let you add a site you cannot verify.

My advice: use the free reports to confirm who your real competitors are and what kind of links they have. Then pay for one month of a tool, run the full gap, export it, and cancel if you do not need it again.

How do you run a competitor backlink analysis, step by step?

This is the order I follow. Most of the value sits in steps three and four.

Which competitor backlinks are worth copying?

These are the five checks I ran on my own gap. Each one cut real rows from it.

1. Is it a page a real person would read?

Open the linking page itself. Do not trust the authority score.

Example: in my gap, a vercel.app page showed DA 93. It was an auto-generated page with no author and no readers. Pages on vercel.app, netlify.app, jimdo, mystrikingly and similar hosts borrow the platform's score. Thirty-two of my 100 rows failed this check.

2. Is it on your topic?

A link from a page about your subject is worth far more than a famous site writing about something else.

Example: a Chron article on push and pull marketing linked to one of the competitors. It is a real site with real readers. It is also not about backlinks, so a pitch would make no sense to its editor.

Which leads to the next check.

3. Can you earn it with what you have?

Some links exist because of what the competitor is, not what they wrote.

Example: ten of my 34 real articles were "free SEO tools" roundups. They link to the competitors because both are SEO tools. A guide like this one cannot earn those links. A free tool could.

4. Does it link to more than one competitor?

A site that links to several of your rivals has shown it covers your topic and links out freely.

Example: if a marketing blog cites both of your competitors in the same post, a pitch that says "here is a newer source with original data" fits the way that writer already works.

5. Is it in your readers' language and market?

A strong Danish or Japanese article is still a weak prospect for an English site aimed at the US.

Example: six of my real articles were in other languages, including a Shopify Denmark post and an ascii.jp article. They would only make sense if we had a page in that language.

What should you never copy from your competitors?

A competitor outranking you does not make every one of their links safe. Some are liabilities.

Leave these on the competitor's profile:

• Paid links and sponsored posts. Google's link spam policy names buying or selling links for ranking. Copying a bought link buys the same risk.
• Press releases and coupon pages. My gap had crypto press releases and a coupon page. They were bought or placed, not earned.
• Forum and comment links. Fifteen of my rows were forum threads. Dropping your link into old threads is spam, not link building.
• Private blog networks and link swaps. They work until they do not, and the fall is steep.
• Links from friends. If the link came from a relationship you do not have, it is not a tactic you can repeat.

If the only way to get a link is to break a guideline, let the competitor carry that risk.

How many replies should you expect from outreach?

Fewer than you hope. A study of 12 million emails found that only 8.5% of outreach emails get a response. Replies are not links, so the link rate is lower again.

Example: my filtered list has 11 prospects. At 8.5%, that is about one reply.

The same study found two things that move the number. A personalised email body lifted responses by 32.7%. A single follow-up lifted replies by 65.8%.

So the honest plan looks like this:

• Run the gap with more than one pair of competitors, so the filtered list reaches 30 to 50 prospects
• Write each email around the specific page you are pitching to
• Follow up once, and stop there

A small list of real prospects and a page worth linking to beats a big blast of templates. The filter is what makes the outreach work.

Do competitor backlinks still matter for AI search?

Yes, but they are not the whole story.

Answer engines lean on the same trust signals as search when they choose sources. Most AI search tools also pull from a search index first, so the page has to rank somewhere before it gets cited.

Mentions matter even more. Across 75,000 brands, Ahrefs found that branded web mentions correlated with AI Overview visibility at 0.664, against 0.218 for backlinks.

That changes what I look for in a gap. An article that names a competitor without linking is still a prospect: the pitch is a mention, not a link. That is the same groundwork behind generative engine optimization. The fundamentals did not change. The surfaces did.

How often should you run it?

Once a quarter is enough for most sites. Between runs, set an alert for new links to your two closest competitors so you see a campaign while it is happening.

Run it sooner in three cases:

• You publish a major page and need its first links
• A competitor jumps above you without an obvious content change
• You move into a new topic with a different set of competitors

Watch the pace, not just the total. A steady trickle of new referring domains usually means links earned through content. A sudden spike usually means a launch, a study, or a bulk buy. The pattern tells you whether their growth is something you can match or something rented.

For the wider set of tactics these prospects feed into, my link building strategies guide covers each one in detail.

Final take

A backlink gap gives you a list in a minute. Turning it into links takes judgement.

My own gap had 100 rows, all with high authority scores, and 11 worth an email. That ratio is normal, not a failure.

Run the gap, open every page yourself, and pitch only what you would link to if you were the editor.