How to find your competitors' backlinks

Your competitors have already done the hard part: proving which sites in your niche will link to a business like yours. Here is how to pull that list, read it, tell the useful links from the noise, and turn it into placements you can actually win.

Why competitor backlinks are the best place to start

Most link building fails because it starts from a blank page. You end up pitching sites that have never linked to anyone in your industry and have no reason to start with you.

Competitor backlinks invert that. Every site linking to a competitor has already demonstrated three things: it publishes content in your niche, it is willing to link out, and it considers a business like yours worth citing. You are no longer guessing whether a site is reachable — you have proof. The sites that link to your competitors but not to you are your backlink gap: the shortest, best-qualified list of link targets you will ever assemble.

Four ways to find them

1. A backlink gap tool (fastest)

A gap tool compares several competitors at once and returns the sites linking to them but not to you. This is the only method that filters out links you already have, which matters more than it sounds — on an established domain, most of a competitor's link profile overlaps with yours, and reviewing it manually wastes hours. Feed it three to five real competitors — the domains that rank for your terms, not just your business rivals — and it does the subtraction for you.

2. Search operators

Free, and useful for spotting the obvious placements a crawler may classify oddly. A few that earn their keep:

• "competitor name" -site:competitor.com — every mention of them that is not on their own site.
• "competitor name" (review OR interview OR "guest post" OR sponsored) — the coverage they actively pitch for.
• intitle:"write for us" your niche — sites in your space that openly accept contributed articles.

This will not give you a complete profile, but it is a good sanity check on what a competitor is doing that a bulk export might miss.

3. Their own press and coverage pages

Plenty of companies list their own coverage on an "as featured in" or press page. It is a curated list of media that have said yes to them, published by the competitor themselves. Start there before touching any tool.

4. Which media link to several competitors at once

This is the highest-value signal available to you. A site linking to one competitor might be a fluke — a personal connection, a one-off. A site linking to four of them is systematically covering your market, and the odds it will cover you too are far better. Sort by that count before anything else.

How to read the report

An export of a few thousand rows looks intimidating until you know which columns to look at. Four of them do the work:

• Referring domain, not backlink. Fifty links from one site count as one domain, and Google treats them roughly that way too. Collapse the list to unique domains before you judge its size — a "10,000 backlink" profile is often a few hundred domains.
• Dofollow vs nofollow. Only dofollow links pass ranking signal. A nofollow mention from a major outlet is still worth having for the referral traffic, but do not count it toward closing an authority gap.
• Anchor text. It tells you why the link exists — a branded anchor is a mention, an exact-match keyword anchor is usually a deliberate placement. That is your clue to what the outlet was willing to publish.
• The linking page. Open it. A resource list, a roundup, or a "best of" post is a repeatable format you can pitch into; a one-off news story usually is not.

How to judge the list

A raw list of linking domains is not a plan. Three filters, in order:

• Relevance first. A modest site squarely in your niche beats a large general one. Relevance is what a link is actually for.
• Then reachability. How many competitors does it already link to? More is better — it means the door is open.
• Authority last. Domain rating is a useful tiebreaker, not a starting filter. Chasing only high-DR sites is how people end up with nothing after three months.

One caveat worth stating plainly: not every competitor backlink is worth having. Link farms, expired-domain networks, and paid placements on sites with no real readership will show up in any backlink export. Copying those is copying a liability. If a site's content exists only to host links, skip it regardless of what its metrics say.

From the list to actual links

Finding the gap is the easy half. Closing it means getting the same outlets to link to you, and there are two ways to do that.

The first is to earn it: work the list in order of how many competitors each outlet links to, and pitch something the outlet actually wants — data, a customer story, an expert comment on a beat it already covers. It works, and it is the right approach for the outlets you have a genuine story for. It is also slow, and the hit rate on cold outreach is low, so plan for a long tail of follow-ups.

The second is to place it directly. Many of the media your competitors sit on already publish contributed and sponsored articles as a matter of course, and you can book a placement on them without running the outreach yourself. This is what Bazoom does: it connects you to a marketplace of media that already accept this kind of content, so a target you would otherwise spend weeks chasing becomes a placement you can arrange in a few days. It will not fit every link on your list — a genuine editorial mention still has to be earned — but for the repeatable formats, it is the fastest way from a gap to a live link.

Most sites use both: earn the placements that need a story, book the rest. The gap list tells you where to knock either way.

Keep reading

• How to get your competitors' backlinks — turning the list into placements, outlet by outlet.
• How to steal your competitors' backlinks — the tactics for replacing a competitor's link with yours.