10 min read · Link Building · Last updated July 2026
Quick answer: Competitor backlink analysis finds sites that already link to your competitors — proving they’re interested in your topic — and turns them into outreach targets. Ahrefs’ Link Intersect tool makes this scalable. The best opportunities are high-DR sites that link to multiple competitors but not to you.
Introduction
The fastest path to a qualified link prospect list isn’t brainstorming who might link to you. It’s finding who already links to businesses like yours — because they’ve already demonstrated interest in your topic, and your absence from their link is the gap you’re filling.
This is the underlying logic of competitor backlink analysis. Your competitors have spent years building link profiles that act as your prospect roadmap. You don’t have to figure out who links to industry content from scratch — you can start with a pre-validated list.
What you’ll learn:
– How to set up a competitor backlink analysis in Ahrefs
– How to use Link Intersect to find the highest-priority targets
– How to qualify and prioritize the opportunities you find
– The outreach approach for competitor link sources
– Common mistakes that make the analysis less useful
Table of Contents
- Identifying Your Competitors for Link Analysis
- The Three-Step Ahrefs Analysis
- Link Intersect: Your Highest-Priority Targets
- Qualifying and Scoring Opportunities
- Outreach Strategy for Competitor Links
- Replicating Competitor’s Best Links
- What Competitors’ Links Tell You About Content
- FAQ
1. Identifying Your Competitors for Link Analysis
Not every business competitor is a useful backlink competitor. You want competitors who:
– Rank for the same keywords you’re targeting
– Have a similar content focus (not just the same industry)
– Have been around long enough to build a real link profile
Two ways to find your best backlink competitors:
Method 1 — Ahrefs Organic Competitors:
Enter your domain in Site Explorer > Organic Competitors. Ahrefs shows you sites that compete for the same organic keywords and sorts them by overlap. These are your best backlink competitors — they target the same audience and the same search queries.
Method 2 — Manual Search:
Google your target keywords. The sites appearing consistently on pages 1–2 are your ranking competitors. Their backlink profiles are your target.
For most analyses, 3–5 competitors is enough. More than 5 starts producing redundant data.
2. The Three-Step Ahrefs Analysis
Step 1 — Export individual competitor backlinks
For each competitor:
1. Ahrefs Site Explorer > enter competitor domain
2. Backlinks > filter: Dofollow only, one per domain
3. Export full list
Repeat for all 3–5 competitors. You now have 3–5 separate files.
Step 2 — Combine and deduplicate
Merge all exports into one spreadsheet. Add a column marking which competitor each link came from. Deduplicate on the “referring domain” column to get unique domains.
The result: a master list of all unique domains linking to at least one of your competitors.
Step 3 — Filter by quality
Apply these filters to reduce to your highest-value targets:
– DR 25+ (minimum quality threshold)
– Organic traffic to referring domain: 100+ monthly visits (means the site has a real audience)
– Dofollow links only
– Not linking to you already (check against your own Ahrefs backlink export)
What remains is your prioritized outreach list.
3. Link Intersect: Your Highest-Priority Targets
Ahrefs’ Link Intersect tool finds domains that link to multiple competitors but not to you — the “gap” in your link profile compared to the competitive landscape.
How to use it:
1. Ahrefs > Link Intersect
2. Enter your URL in the top field (“I want to check…”)
3. Enter 3–4 competitor domains below (“…but NOT these”)
4. Run the analysis
The result: domains sorted by how many of your competitors they link to. Sites linking to all four of your competitors are your highest-priority targets — maximum likelihood of interest, maximum link equity potential, and clear evidence they cover your topic.
4. Qualifying and Scoring Opportunities
After running Link Intersect, score each opportunity by:
Priority 1 — Links to 3+ competitors:
These sites have clearly established they cover your industry and link to multiple players. Your absence is notable. These deserve personal, specific outreach.
Priority 2 — Links to 2 competitors:
Strong prospects. They’ve linked in your space twice; they might link again.
Priority 3 — Links to 1 competitor:
Worth pursuing, but less certain. Filter these more aggressively by DR and topical relevance before outreaching.
Filter out:
– Sites with DR under 25
– Sites with no organic traffic
– Sites that look like link farms (even if they’ve linked to competitors — that’s a signal of competitor risk, not opportunity)
– Sites that are direct competitors themselves (they won’t link to you)
5. Outreach Strategy for Competitor Links
The competitor angle is not your pitch. Never say “I noticed you link to [Competitor X] — you should link to us instead.”
Instead, use the competitor analysis as prospecting intelligence, then pitch based on the specific page and context — identical to any other outreach campaign:
- Resource page with competitor? → Resource page template
- Article linking to competitor’s guide? → Skyscraper or niche edit pitch
- Competitor’s tool linked from a blog? → Pitch your tool as an additional resource
The insight from competitor analysis is who to reach out to. The pitch is still value-first, specific to the linking page.
6. Replicating Competitor’s Best Links
Some competitor links are one-of-a-kind (earned by the competitor being the first to publish something, or through a personal relationship). Those can’t be replicated.
Others are fully replicable:
– Industry association membership links
– Chamber of commerce listings
– Industry directory listings
– Media mentions earned through outreach
– Resource page inclusions
– Scholarship links (if still using them)
Sort your competitor link export by link type. For replicable types (directories, associations, resources), reach out immediately — these are often no-outreach-required — just list your business.
7. What Competitors’ Links Tell You About Content
Beyond finding individual link targets, competitor backlink analysis reveals content patterns:
What types of content attract the most links in your niche?
Sort competitor links by the type of page they’re linking to. Are most links going to guides, tools, data studies, or product pages? This tells you where content investment produces the most link equity.
What topics attract the most referring domains?
Look at which competitor pages have the most unique linking domains. These are the topic areas worth creating content around in your own link building strategy.
What publications cover your industry?
Analyzing competitor links identifies every publication that’s ever cited a business like yours. This is your media target list for digital PR campaigns.
FAQ
Q: How often should I run a competitor backlink analysis?
A: Quarterly for active campaigns. Competitors continuously earn new links; running analysis regularly keeps your prospect list fresh.
Q: Should I include my SEO competitors or my business competitors?
A: Both, but weight toward SEO competitors (those ranking for your target keywords). Your business competitor might sell the same service but target different search terms and have an irrelevant backlink profile.
Q: What if all my competitors have very few links?
A: This is actually good news — your niche hasn’t been heavily link-built, meaning fewer links are needed to compete. Focus on the best available opportunities and even a modest link building campaign can move rankings significantly.
Q: Can I buy links from sites that link to my competitors?
A: No. If the site sells links, that’s a paid link without disclosure — a violation of Google’s policies regardless of whether your competitor is also buying links there. If your competitors are doing this, they’re taking on risk you shouldn’t match.
Q: Is it unethical to target the same sites as competitors?
A: Not at all. The web is an open publishing system. Any site that links to content worth linking to will receive pitches from multiple businesses in the same space. Your job is to earn the link on merit, not to carve up territory.
Conclusion
Competitor backlink analysis is the fastest way to build a qualified link prospect list. It removes guesswork about who links in your niche and gives you a prioritized, pre-validated outreach target list based on real linking behavior.
Run the analysis, prioritize by Link Intersect overlap, qualify by DR and relevance, and outreach with value-first pitches.
Let Us Do the Competitor Analysis and Outreach for You
We run full competitor backlink analyses and turn them into executed link building campaigns.
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Written by the Ignited Nepal SEO team. ignitednepal.com