Competitor Backlink Analysis (Strategies, Examples, Tools, & More)

If you’re trying to reverse engineer your competitor’s backlink profile, you’re in the right place.

Competitor backlink analysis is one of my favorite aspects of link building. And in this guide, I’m going to teach you my exact process for:

• Analyzing competitor link profiles and their backlink quality
• Categorizing and prioritizing their links and…
• Making a plan to outrank them

This is not your typical “do a gap analysis” advice. This is real, battle tested advice from a link building service that has analyzed hundreds, if not thousands, of link profiles over our years in the game.

Ever since Google baked consensus into the algorithm, prioritized certain domains in a topic’s link graph, and started moving towards AI, understanding which domains power your industry’s rankings in search engines has become more important than ever before.

This guide on competitive analysis will teach you how to reverse engineer the top results, segment links based on link type, analyze anchor text ratios, and build a plan to overtake your competitors.

If that’s what you’re after, please keep reading.

What is Competitor Backlink Analysis?

Competitor link analysis is the process of reverse engineering the backlink profiles of competing websites already ranking for your target keywords to evaluate their link quality, velocity, sources, and overall strategy. 

And the reason you reverse engineer your competition’s link profile is because it helps you uncover easy link opportunities, discover content ideas, plan a link acquisition strategy, and understand what search engines like Google are already rewarding on the SERPs.

In other words, competitive analysis takes the guesswork out of link building. Instead of guessing how to build links, you reverse engineer the authority patterns behind sites that already rank. 

You are not copying your competitors link for link. You’re identifying scalable gaps, authority trends, and link acquisition opportunities that are already working (and are sending the most link equity to your competitors’ key pages). 

For example, if they have multiple editorial links from Forbes, Reuters, and The New York Times pointing to their home page, then you need links from sites like that, too. Do you see why evaluating your competitor’s links matters so much? Reverse engineering their profile shows you the exact gap you have to close.

Competitor link analysis shows you the following invaluable SEO data:

• Referring Domain Quality: You can benchmark your content quality needs. Do they have dozens of relevant, high authority links from real websites? Then you need that too.
• Homepage vs. Inner Page Authority Distribution: Do they have strong root authority? You can glean valuable insight into how they’re building links by doing proper analysis.
• Anchor Text Profile: What is their ratio of branded, exact match, and partial match anchors? Once you know that, you know what Google’s preferred ratio is.
• Pages Competitors Are Powering: Backlink analysis reveals where they’re concentrating authority and revenue focus. You can also gain insight into their tiered link building strategy by seeing which links they have pointing to their tier 1 links.
• Topical and Entity Relevance: You can discover how relevant their backlink profile is. Industry relevance, citations, and trusted entities matter more than raw DR alone in modern SEO. 

What Are the Benefits of Analyzing Your Competitor’s Links?

The main benefit of competitor link analysis for SEO is that it takes the guesswork out of link building and gives you the exact types of links, link partners, anchor text, link velocity, and even target pages you need for your own link building campaigns.

Here’s more on the benefits of reverse engineering your competition’s backlink profile:

• Identifying Ranking Gaps: You can see exactly where competitors have stronger authority signals and which links you need to compete.
• Build a Complete SEO Blueprint: You can analyze which link types, anchors, and pages are helping competitors rank so you don’t have to guess. For example, if you’re wondering, “how many links do I need for a new website?”, reverse engineering the competition answers that for you. 
• Prioritize SEO Resources Better: You can focus your budget and outreach on the links that actually move rankings instead of wasting time on vanity SEO metrics. Or, god forbid, listening to mainstream SEO advice.
• Improve Spending Efficiency: You can avoid overspending on low impact links by seeing what’s working in your niche.
• Benchmark Against Real Competitors: Reverse engineering other sites allows you to measure your authority, link quality, and growth against sites already winning the SERPs to build more realistic SEO strategies.

How to Do Competitor Backlink Analysis Step-by-Step

Next up, I want to show you my proprietary competitor link analysis process. 

If I were taking on a new enterprise link building client, this is the exact process my team and I would use.

Follow this step-by-step competitive analysis blueprint, and you’ll create the ideal link building plan to outrank your competition:

Step 1) Identify Your True Competition

Your first step in competitor backlink analysis is to find a true competitor who’s outranking you. As with all things SEO, you want to Google it and see what’s already working (not what people on social media claim is working).

This is where I see a lot of link builders get it wrong. They just find a big publication in their niche and start with them. This is 100% the wrong way to do link building.

Instead, you want to find a competitor who’s outranking you for your core key terms and is similar to you. You also want them to be within striking distance. For example, if you’re a SaaS trying to build SaaS links, then you want to find a SaaS outranking you that you can reasonably compete with rather than a major review site or mega media site.

Let’s do another quick example…

Say I’m selling running shoes for flat feet and I want to rank my home page for that key term. In that case, I’d look for competitors ranking their home pages, too, rather than some mega site like the New York Times ranking a best running shoes listicle. 

In this case, here are the competitors I’d choose:

Here are the criteria to find your true competitors:

• They rank for your target keywords 
• They are close to your level (or within striking distance)
• They don’t have a moat of un-replicable authority (i.e., not government or mega publishers only) 
• They are building links from real, reachable websites

Got it? Once you find one, here’s what to do…

Step 2) Conduct Top-Level Backlink Analysis on Their Link Profile

Now the real fun begins. It’s time to analyze some backlinks.

Take your competitor websites and enter them into Ahrefs Site Explorer and click the Backlinks tab on the left hand side, then add the filters you see in the following screenshot:

Once you have the list of domains, click Export on the right hand side:

You’ll now have a spreadsheet with all of your competitor’s referring domains.

Before we move on, you should thank the folks behind ChatGPT or Claude, because they’re going to save you countless hours (or even days) of work. What you’re about to read is as easy as clicking a few buttons (obviously, you still need to analyze the data).

I would plug the spreadsheet into an AI project trained on your link building knowledge and ask it to do the following:

• Segment the list by link type
• Analyze anchor text ratio
• Analyze link velocity
• Analyze average DR (domain rating isn’t everything, but it does help)
• Pull links to pages ranking for important key terms
• Map authority distribution (which links are pointing to the home page vs. to other pages)

Here’s what an example link opportunity spreadsheet would look like with green denoting high potential opportunities:

Pro Tip: You could even get AI to help make a plan for you to outrank your competition based on this data.

Step 3) Evaluate Link Quality

Before jumping straight into copying your competition link for link, I recommend you take the time to evaluate your competitor’s link profile for quality links. Just using the filters I gave you above should go a long way. But if you don’t check competitor backlinks in detail, you risk making important decisions based on noise rather than what’s actually improving SEO rankings.

Remember, this is not just “high DR equals good link”. That’s total nonsense. Google is way too smart for that.

Instead, we’re looking for the following in a site’s backlink profile:

• Links that influence rankings
• Links that reinforce trust/entities
• Links that pass topical relevance
• Links that increase crawl/index/distribution signals

Other important high level metrics you should pay attention to are:

• Domain traffic
• Industry relevance
• A high number of quality referring domains to the page that’s linking out

These are the most valuable links in the industry.

Here’s an example of a very high quality link in the SEO niche:

This is an industry relevant publication with some organic traffic and keyword rankings pointing directly to a business’ home page using a branded anchor. 

And note the 230 number to the right. 

That’s the number of referring domains and it’s one of the most important factors for evaluating a competitor’s links. 

The reason for that is because PageRank still matters no matter what Google says. Those 200+ referring domains to this page will pass a lot of link equity to the recipient page.

Once you have the list of high quality links, you know which links to prioritize outreach to.

Pro Tip: This would be painstaking to do manually, so I recommend using AI to help sort through the data. Download the spreadsheet as a CSV and have AI sort by relevance, DR, referring domains, and traffic and only to pages that rank for your most important key terms. That’s the list you use.

Step 4) Run a Competitor Gap Analysis

Competitor backlink gap analysis is when you compare your backlink profile to your competitors in order to identify websites that link to them but don’t link to you. 

I run it on every new campaign because it removes the guesswork and shows you exactly which authority signals are already winning in the SERPs (and which ones you need to build to compete with the top ranking results). 

Remember that links are the most important ranking factor (regardless of what people claim). If you build an equal or better link profile, you will almost certainly outrank the competition or at least get close to them.

You can pull a ton out of a single gap analysis, including: which domains link to your competitors over and over, what link types dominate your niche, what anchors they’re using, and where your competitors have trust signals you’re missing. 

Link gap analysis also tells you whether your competition is winning off homepage authority, inner page links, digital PR, citations, niche edits, guest posts, or resource pages. That’s a full link campaign blueprint in your hands, and it took all of an hour or less.

Here’s how to run a referring domains gap analysis step by step:

First, go to All Tools in the top left of Ahrefs:

Then choose Competitive Analysis:

You’ll now see a window where you can drop your link plus your competitors’ links. Make sure to choose at least 2. For this example, I’ll just put in PressWhizz and two random sites:

Note: Make sure to choose referring domains at the top, because it defaults to organic keywords.

Still with me?

Next, export every domain linking to your competitors but not to you:

 

Step 6) Monitor Your Competitor’s Backlink Profile

Monitoring competitor’s new and lost backlinks helps identify which pages and strategies are gaining authority in your niche. It also helps you identify easy link building opportunities. The logic being, if a competitor builds a link, you can probably build a similar one. And if they lose one, you can reach out to that website and steal the link for yourself.

I also recommend you keep notes on which pages they’re building new links to (commercial, info, or home page).

This is just good backlink management anyway. Make sure you’re tracking link velocity by the month, homepage vs. inner page acquisition, and anchor text distribution to identify aggressive optimization patterns, too. 

Step 7) Begin Outreach

Once you’ve got your competitor link data cleaned up, start building outreach lists around the sites that link to multiple competitors. When sites link to several competitors, they’re easy link targets. I also recommend that you build a list of must-have links on high authority, niche relevant publications with publicly visible contact data. Remember, if they accept guest posts from your competitors, they’ll accept them from you.

My best tip for you here is to use AI for link building outreach. 

Use AI to sort prospects, write personalized intros, and come up with angles based on the site’s content. Then push everything into Pitchbox so follow ups, tracking, and email sequences run automatically and are still personalized. You don’t need a team of a dozen SEO VAs anymore. AI can do most of the “manual labor” for you.

An Example of Competitor Backlink Analysis 

Next up, I want to run you through a quick example of me reverse engineering a competitor’s backlink profile. I’ll include the main things I look for, which tools I use, and how I filter the initial data to avoid noise (and making your life excruciating).

Ready? Let’s examine some backlinks. I don’t know why this makes me so giddy. 

For this competitor backlink analysis example, I’ll use the keyword “AI link building tool”. Here’s the top organic result (that’s not a listicle):

Now, head over to Ahrefs and pop them into Site Explorer and click Backlinks on the left hand side:

Next, set the filters to dofollow, no spam, English only, and one link per domain, so that you clean the data a bit and reduce the noise:

Once you’ve got that, click Export on the right hand side:

Now that we’ve got the links in a spreadsheet, it’s time to categorize them by link type.

Whatever you do, DO NOT skip this. The type of links your competitors have is just as important as the quantity of links…if not MORE important. Google weighs different types of links differently. For example, if they have tons of guest posts but no high authority links, earned media, resource page links, or brand mentions, Google will see that as unnatural (which gives you a big opportunity).

So, take the sheet, pop it into an AI project trained on how to identify different link types, and segment the list into the following types of links:

• Guest Posts: Usually on blogs with an editorial tone, branded author bios, and content with internal links.
• Niche Edits: Look for mid-paragraph links in older posts with no author and context added after publishing.
• Resource Pages: These are lists like “Best Tools for X”, “Top Agencies in Y”.
• PR & News Mentions: Links from news sites, often with branded anchors or quote attribution.
• Directories & Citations: These are easy to spot and common in local link building campaigns.
• Forum / Comment / Web 2.0: Typically low quality unless part of niche communities. We’ve got an entire article on free web 2.0 backlink sites.
• Sponsorships / Scholarships / Events: These are often .edu links or .gov links. Sometimes they are .org sites with high trust metrics.
• Parasites: These are sites like Medium, LinkedIn, Substack, etc. They’re typically used for juicing pages in a tiered link building strategy. 

NOTE: Download your spreadsheet as a CSV file, pop it into ChatGPT or another LLM, and make sure to ask it to segment the links based on the criteria above. Then ask your LLM to display the info in a spreadsheet along with SEO metrics such as KD, linked domains, traffic, and first seen. 

Here’s what the spreadsheet will look like:

By the way, this would have taken a team member of mine at least a day, if not several days to do without AI. This is one of my favorite use cases for AI in link building. Look at all this data we have now.

Once I have this sheet, I of course want to look it over myself to make sure AI got it right. I’ll briefly look for:

• Overall Patterns: Are they building mostly guest posts? How many PR mentions do they have? Stuff like that.

• Did AI Get it Right?: Look at the link types and the referring URL to see if it got the type right.
• Anchor Text: What can I learn from this overview of anchor text? At first glance, they have a lot of branded anchors. Which is not a bad thing.

Next, I’d have AI visualize this for me. Here’s the prompt I’d use:

Take this data and visualize it for me, showing key metrics such as anchor text ratios, link type ratios, target URL ratios, and link velocity based on first seen data. Then, give me a basic monthly plan for outranking this competitor.

Here’s what my custom GPT gives me. It’s literally an entire slideshow:

Look at some of this amazing data we’ve got now. It’s showing link type distribution (mostly guest posts):

And we can also see link velocity. And judging by the big spike in early 2026, I’d say they’re putting more effort and budget into buying links now:

With this AI analysis, we now know that:

• 90% of links go to their home page
• They’re building a ton of guest posts and are in a few resource pages, but they have relatively few editorial links, and they aren’t utilizing parasite SEO on sites like LinkedIn or Medium (this will help us beat them…)
• They have about 50% exact match anchors, which is a great data point for building our anchor text profile. These would be anchors like “best AI link building tool” or “AI link building tool” for links pointing to our home page.

Once I have this data, my first instinct is to go back to Ahrefs and find lost or broken links. 

Why? Because these are links we can steal from our competitors and do double the damage (revenge is sweet…). Not only will you steal a link from your competition, you’ll gain a link to your site. This is a zero sum game, my friends.

Go back to your Ahrefs backlinks report and click the lost links tab at the top:

Export those, then head over to the Broken Backlinks tab on the left hand side and click that:

This competitor only has one broken link currently, but it’s a start:

I wrote an entire guide on link reclamation, so I suggest you take a look at that to learn how to build broken links using modern SEO best practices. 

Once I have this data, I’d repeat it over at least 2-3 more organic competitors and also throw Linkee and others into Ahrefs Gap Analysis tool to see which websites have linked to multiple competitors.

I also would put that into a spreadsheet and run it using the same master prompt I gave you above.

Now that you have all of this data, you can prioritize based on a website’s authority, traffic, relevance, pricing, or whatever metrics are most important to your business and begin reaching out. By the way, metrics may change based on which backlink tools you’re using. If you’re curious about domain rating vs. domain authority, read our guide on it.

Pro Tip: I recommend setting up Alerts in Ahrefs so you receive a notification every time your competitor gains or loses a backlink. 

Head to your dashboard, click on All Tools in the top left, and choose Alerts from the menu:

Once you’re in that window, just click New Alert and you’re good to go.

That’s it! Now that you know how to do competitor analysis the right way, let’s cover some of my favorite tools for competitor link analysis.

The Best Competitor Link Analysis Tools

The best competitor link analysis tools are Ahrefs, Majestic, and SpyFu, but there are plenty of other great tools as well. Let’s cover some of their most important features and how to best use them during your link research campaigns.

#1) Ahrefs

Key Features

• Massive backlink database
• Gap analysis
• Historical link tracking
• Anchor text reporting
• Estimated organic traffic
• Top pages and link intersect tools

Pros

• Industry-leading backlink index
• Excellent competitor analysis tools
• Reliable historical data
• Great UI and export functionality

Cons

• Expensive for beginners
• Traffic estimates aren’t always perfect
• Can overwhelm newer SEOs with data

Ahrefs is the #1 competitive analysis tool there is. Hands down. Full stop. That goes for backlinks, brand mentions, and keyword analysis, too. Name a form of competitor analysis, and Ahrefs is the best. It’s the only tool I use to find keywords and find competitor backlinks.

The biggest advantage is the depth of data. 

You can quickly see which pages competitors are powering, where their authority is coming from, and which links are likely influencing rankings. The link intersect tool alone is worth the subscription if you know how to use it properly. 

If you’re serious about SEO, especially affiliate, SaaS, or lead gen, this should be your #1 tool.

Pricing Starting From: $129/month

Note: For more on my favorite tools, check out my guide on the best link building tools.

#2) Majestic SEO

Key Features

• Trust Flow and Citation Flow metrics
• Topical backlink analysis
• Historical backlink index
• Link neighborhood analysis

Pros

• Excellent for topical relevance analysis
• Great for spotting spam networks and PBNs
• Strong historical data

Cons

• Interface feels outdated
• Smaller feature set outside backlinks

I mainly use Majestic when I want deeper insight into link quality and topical relevance rather than just raw volume. 

Trust Flow is still useful if you understand how to interpret it properly, especially for identifying manipulated link profiles or spotting strong niche relevance. 

It’s also very good for analyzing link neighborhoods, subnet overlaps, and potential PBN footprints. I wouldn’t rely on Majestic as my only SEO tool anymore, but for advanced backlink audits and competitor analysis, it still provides valuable data to help design your link building campaigns. 

Pricing Starting From: $49.99/month

#3) SpyFu (The Best AI Link Building Tool)

Key Features

• Competitor backlink tracking
• Keyword overlap analysis
• Domain comparison tools
• SERP competitor discovery

Pros

• Very beginner friendly interface
• Useful for combining SEO and PPC analysis as well as backlink analytics
• Affordable compared to enterprise SEO tools

Cons

• Smaller backlink database than Ahrefs
• Less granular link analysis
• Historical backlink data can be inconsistent

SpyFu is a link building analysis tool you might not be familiar with. But I still recommend it since it’s got some great AI powered features for evaluating backlinks.  

It’s simple and very effective for quickly understanding competitor strategy without getting buried in endless data. If you want to combine backlink analysis with keyword intelligence and PPC insights in one place, this is the tool for you. The backlink database isn’t as deep as Ahrefs, but it still gives you enough visibility to identify competitor link patterns, authority gaps, and ranking opportunities.

Pricing Starting From: $39/month

Final Thoughts

Competitor backlink analysis is both the first step AND the single most important step in creating a link building campaign that ranks you Page 1 on Google.

The vast majority of SEOs either skip this step entirely or put in half the effort required to actually get SEO results. So, if you nail this step, you’ll win the majority of Google organic traffic.

Think about it this way: If you don’t reverse engineer your competitor’s website’s backlinks, you won’t know:

• What new link building opportunities there are
• Which links are helping competitors rank
• Where their links are pointing
• Roughly how much you’d have to spend on links to outrank the competition
• Proper anchor text distribution

And a number of other important ranking factors.

There’s no reason NOT to do this anymore. With AI, it may only take a day’s worth of work.

Just follow the processes, tips, and prompts I’ve provided in this guide, and you’ll have the exact blueprint you need to outrank your competitors.

I wish you luck.