To find your competitors’ backlinks, you use an SEO tool like Ahrefs, Semrush, or Moz to enter their domain and export a list of all the websites linking to them. The ultimate strategy, however, isn’t just pulling one giant list; it’s about using different “spy” tactics to systematically uncover their most powerful, newest, and most easily replicable links to fuel your own link building campaigns.
Simply copying your competitor’s link profile is a recipe for mediocrity. To truly dominate the search results, you need to become an intelligence agent. You must learn to see the story behind their data, identify their winning strategies, and find the hidden opportunities they’ve missed. These six spy strategies will show you how.
Key Takeaways: Your Intelligence Briefing
- Full Reconnaissance: Start with a domain-level analysis to get a complete overview of your competitor’s backlink profile and overall strength.
- Find Power Players: Identify their most powerful links by analyzing their top-linked pages to see what content earns the most authority.
- Intercept Live Intel: Track their newest links to decode their current, active link building strategy and spot fresh opportunities.
- Exploit Weaknesses: Turn their broken links into your new links by finding their 404 pages and offering your content as a replacement.
- Identify Allies: Use a link gap analysis to find websites that are already linking to your competitors and are likely to link to you too.
A Quick Note on Your Spy Toolkit
Finding a competitor’s backlinks is impossible to do manually. You can’t just browse the web and hope to find them. This mission requires specialized software that constantly crawls the web, indexing trillions of links to create a searchable map of the internet.
This is the job of major SEO platforms. While there are many tools on the market, the industry-standard intelligence-gathering suites are:
- Ahrefs: Known for having one of the largest and most accurate backlink indexes.
- Semrush: A comprehensive toolkit with powerful backlink analytics features.
- Moz: Offers a great suite of tools with a strong focus on link authority metrics.
Choosing the right tool is a key first step. Before you begin your espionage, you need to select your gear. For a full comparison, you should review an in-depth guide to the best backlink checker tools available.
Strategy #1: The Full Reconnaissance (Domain-Level Overview)
The foundational spy tactic is to get a complete intelligence overview of your competitor’s entire backlink profile. This is your 30,000-foot view. It won’t give you specific targets, but it will tell you the overall strength of your adversary and the scale of the mission ahead.
The Process:
- Enter a Competitor’s Domain: Go to the site explorer or backlink analytics tool of your choice and enter your competitor’s root domain (e.g., https://www.google.com/search?q=competitor.com).
- Analyze Top-Level Metrics: Look at the main dashboard. You’ll see several key metrics:
- Domain Rating / Authority (DR/DA): A 0-100 score that estimates the overall strength of their backlink profile. This tells you how authoritative they are in Google’s eyes.
- Referring Domains: The total number of unique websites linking to them. This is often a more important metric than total backlinks.
- Total Backlinks: The total number of links pointing to their site.
This initial reconnaissance provides the baseline intelligence for a full competitor backlink analysis. It helps you understand if you’re up against a new startup with a handful of links or an established authority with hundreds of thousands.
Strategy #2: Find Their Power Players (Top Linked Pages)
Not all of a competitor’s pages are created equal. A small fraction of their pages—their “link magnets”—will attract the vast majority of their high-quality backlinks. Your next strategy is to identify these power players.
The Process: To find their most powerful and authoritative linked pages, you need to sort their content by link metrics. In Ahrefs, this is the “Best by links” report. In Semrush, you can analyze their “Indexed Pages.” This tactic reveals which topics, content formats, and specific articles have been proven to earn links in your niche.
For example, you might discover that your competitor’s 10,000-word “Ultimate Guide to X” has attracted 300 links, while their other 50 blog posts only have a few each. This is a massive piece of intel. It tells you that creating comprehensive, authoritative guides is a winning strategy in your industry. Analyzing these pages is crucial to building a stronger backlink profile for your own site.
Strategy #3: Intercept Live Intel (Tracking New Links)
A competitor’s full backlink profile tells you what worked for them in the past. Their newest backlinks tell you what they’re working on right now. Spying on their new links is like intercepting live intelligence from the field, revealing their current, active link building strategy.
The Process: Every major SEO tool has a “New Links” report that allows you to see the backlinks a site has acquired in the last 24 hours, 7 days, or 30 days.
Check this report weekly for your top competitors. You’ll start to see patterns. Are they suddenly getting a lot of links from tech podcasts? They’ve launched a podcast outreach campaign. Are they getting mentions in news articles? They’re focusing on digital PR. This real-time data is invaluable for staying one step ahead. This tactic is a core part of ongoing backlink monitoring.
Strategy #4: Exploit Their Weaknesses (Finding Broken Links)
One of the most clever spy tactics is to find valuable links that point to pages on your competitor’s site that are now broken (return a 404 “Page Not Found” error). Every broken link is an opportunity.
The Process: You can use your SEO tool to find a competitor’s broken pages that still have backlinks. In Ahrefs, you can run the “Best by links” report and filter by “HTTP code: 404”. This will give you a list of their dead pages that are still holding onto valuable “link equity” from other sites.
Your mission is to:
- Identify a broken page on their site that has high-quality links.
- Create a piece of content on your site that is similar to (or better than) their original dead page.
- Contact the websites that are linking to the dead resource. Let them know the link is broken and kindly offer your working page as a perfect replacement.
You’re not just asking for a link; you’re helping them fix an error on their website. This is also a key reason to perform your own regular backlink audit to find and fix your own broken links before your competitors exploit them.
Strategy #5: Identify Their Recurring Allies (Link Gap Analysis)
The goal of this strategy is to find websites that link to several of your competitors but not to you. These sites are your warmest prospects. They have already demonstrated a clear willingness to link to content in your niche, which means they are far more likely to link to you as well.
The Process: This tactic uses a feature known as “Link Intersect” or “Backlink Gap” in SEO tools. You simply enter your domain and the domains of 2-4 of your top competitors. The tool then generates a list of all the websites that link to them but not to you. For a full walkthrough, you should follow a detailed guide on backlink gap analysis.
Strategy #6: Uncover Their Content Blueprints
Your final spy mission is to discover which specific content formats are earning the most links for your competitors. Is it their blog posts? Their original research studies? Their free online tools?
The Process: Analyze the URLs of their top-linked pages that you found in Strategy #2. Look for common URL structures or “footprints.”
- Are their most linked pages under a
/blog/subdirectory? Their blog is their main link-building engine. - Do they have a
/resources/or/guides/section that attracts a lot of authority? - Do you see links going to pages with
/study/or/research/in the URL? They’re winning with data-driven content. - Do they have a free
/tool/that has earned hundreds of links?
This analysis gives you their content blueprint. It tells you exactly what type of content to invest in to attract the highest quality links. A diverse set of link-earning assets is a key part of any successful internet marketing plan.
Conclusion
Finding your competitors’ backlinks is not the end goal—it’s the critical first step in gathering the intelligence needed to build a smarter, more effective link building strategy. Stop chasing links blindly. Start thinking like a spy.
By using these six strategies, you can move beyond simple imitation and develop a deep understanding of the link building landscape in your niche. You can pinpoint the exact tactics, content formats, and websites that are working for your rivals. This intelligence is the key to building a powerful, authoritative backlink profile that not only competes but dominates.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can I find competitor backlinks for free?
While there are some free backlink checkers, they are severely limited. They show only a small fraction of a website’s total links and provide minimal data. For any serious analysis, a paid subscription to a professional SEO tool like Ahrefs, Semrush, or Moz is essential.
What are unlinked mentions and how do I find them?
Unlinked mentions are online mentions of your brand name or products that do not include a link back to your site. While spying on your competitors, you may find sites that mention them. You can then check if those same sites have also mentioned you without linking, giving you an easy opportunity to reach out and ask them to make the text clickable.
How many of a competitor’s backlinks should I try to replicate?
You should not try to replicate all of them. The goal is quality, not quantity. Focus on the top 10-20% of their links—the ones that come from high-authority, relevant websites. Ignore the low-quality links from directories, forums, or spammy sites.
What do I do after finding their backlinks?
Finding the links is just the intelligence-gathering phase. The next step is to perform a full competitor backlink analysis to turn this raw data into an actionable link building plan.