How to find competitor backlinks you're missing
Compare linking sites across two or three rivals, keep the ones that skip you, and sort them by whether the link is open to you at all.
By ClaudeGPT Si Newsroom, Editorial team··4 min read
The fastest way to find competitor backlinks you are missing is to compare linking sites, not individual links. Take two or three rivals that rank for the searches you want, list the sites that link to each, and keep the ones that link to at least two of them and not to you. That short list is your link gap. The rest of the work is deciding which of those links you could earn and asking for them in a way an editor will answer.
Start with the right rivals
Pick competitors by search results, not by who your sales team loses deals to. A company you meet in every pitch may barely rank, while a publisher or a comparison site may hold the top spots for your terms and collect the links that come with them. Two to four domains is enough. More than that and the overlap step gets noisy.
If you are not sure who your search rivals are, Competitor Finder lists the 30 sites that share the most Google keywords with a domain in one country, for 38 credits.
Count sites, not links
A rival with thousands of backlinks may get them from a few hundred websites. One sitewide footer link can show up as thousands of rows. What you can act on is the site, because each site is one editor and one relationship. So work with referring domains: one row per linking site.
Use the same data source for every domain, your own included. Each backlink index crawls differently, and mixing them means a site can look missing from your list only because the other tool never saw it. You can also pull your own linking sites from the Links report in Google Search Console, which is free but limited to your verified site and to tables of 1,000 rows.
Expect gaps and stale rows in any third-party data. For a shortlist, that does not matter.
Build the intersect
Put each rival's linking sites in its own column and yours in a fourth. Reduce every entry to the root domain and remove "www." so the same site matches across columns. Then, for each unique domain, count how many rival columns contain it and whether your column does. Keep rows where the rival count is two or more and your count is zero.
A site that links to several of your competitors already writes about your subject and already links to companies like yours. That makes it a better lead than any single high-authority link to one rival.
Sort the gap by link type
Open each page that carries a link and ask what kind of page it is. The type tells you whether the link is open to you.
| Page type | Your odds | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| Edited industry directory | Good | Submit a listing |
| "Best tools for X" roundup | Fair to good | Ask to be considered at the next update |
| Resource or links page | Fair to good | Suggest a guide or tool that fits the list |
| Guest article | Mixed | Pitch a subject the site has not covered |
| Mention of your brand without a link | High | Ask the writer to add the link |
| News story | Low | Make news first |
| Partner, customer or investor page | None | It reflects a business deal |
| Sponsor, award or event page | Only by paying or entering | Judge it as a marketing cost |
Skip directories that accept everyone. Google names low-quality directory and bookmark links as link spam. A listing is worth having when real people edit the directory and turn some sites away.
Ask well, once
Write to a person who edits the page. Name the page, say where your link would fit, and give one concrete reason: a missing tool on their list, a newer figure, or a broken link you found. Follow up a week later if there is no reply, then move on. Most emails go unanswered, and that is normal.
Do not try to close the gap with money. If a competitor has guest posts on a dozen unrelated blogs with the same keyword link text, those were probably bought. Google treats paid links that pass ranking credit as spam, including links traded for free products. Paid placements are acceptable only when the link carries rel="sponsored" or rel="nofollow".
Do the pulling in one run per domain
seogeoaeo.ai's Backlink Finder takes any domain and returns the 100 strongest sites linking to it, strongest first. Each row shows a link rank from 0 to 1,000, how many links the site gives, when its first link was seen, a spam score out of 100 and the share of its linking pages that are followed. Sites scoring 40 or more are marked likely spam. It also groups the 50 link texts those sites use and gives the total count of linking sites.
Run it once per competitor and once on your own domain, paste the four lists into the spreadsheet, and you have the intersect. At 70 credits a run, a three-rival comparison costs 280 credits. On the Indie plan, $29 a month for 2,000 credits, that fits seven times over.
Be clear on the limits. It covers whole domains, lists the strongest 100 sites rather than every link, gives no contact details, and cannot say which links Google counts. If you need every linking site for a large rival or a built-in gap report with history, a full suite such as Semrush or Ahrefs is the better fit. For a focused list of who to ask, start with a Backlink Finder run on your closest rival.