You find backlinks to a website on Google by combining search operators such as “link:domain.com”, brand name searches, and quoted phrases from their content to spot who is linking to them. This won’t show every link Google knows about, but it catches mentions, guest posts, and press coverage that dedicated backlink tools sometimes miss. I use it alongside Ahrefs or Semrush to cross check gaps. It works best on smaller, less competitive sites with fewer results to wade through.
The short version: you can find a good chunk of your competitor’s backlinks using free Google search operators like intext, inurl and exact-phrase searches, without paying for Ahrefs or Semrush. It won’t give you the full picture (Google killed the proper link: operator years ago), but it will surface guest posts, resource page mentions and unlinked brand mentions you can turn into your own links within a day.
Why bother with Google search when there are backlink tools
I get asked this constantly by small business owners who see a Semrush or Ahrefs subscription and wince at the £99 to £399 a month price tag. Here’s my honest answer: if you’re running a one-person business or a small team, you don’t need a full paid tool on day one. You need to know, quickly, where your three biggest competitors are getting links from, so you can go and get some of the same ones.
Google search does that job for free. It’s slower than a crawler-based tool, it misses links that are nofollowed or hidden behind JavaScript, and it will never show you domain authority scores. But it will show you the actual pages, the actual anchor text, and the actual context, which is more useful for outreach than a spreadsheet of metrics anyway.
I wrote about this trade-off in more depth in what your competitors can teach you about SEO, and the short version is this: the data matters less than what you do with it.
The search operators that reveal where competitors get linked
You won’t find these in a single dropdown menu. You have to build search strings yourself, one at a time, and read the results like a detective rather than a dashboard. Here are the ones that work.
1. The unlinked mention search
Type this into Google, replacing the details:
"Competitor Name" -site:competitorname.com
This pulls up every page that mentions your competitor by name but isn’t their own website. Scroll through and you’ll find roundups, guest posts, press mentions and directory listings, some of which link to them and some of which don’t. The ones that don’t link yet are gold, because you can pitch that same site for a link to you instead, or ask them to add one.
2. The exact-phrase syndication search
Pick a distinctive eight to twelve word sentence from a competitor’s best-performing blog post or case study. Put it in quotation marks and search it. Any page that quotes that phrase is either syndicating their content or referencing their research, and most of the time there’s a link attached because they’re crediting the source. This is one of the fastest ways to find who considers your competitor an authority in a specific subtopic.
3. The guest post footprint search
"write for us" + your niche keywordintitle:"guest post guidelines" + your niche keyword"contributed by" "Competitor Name"
These find the sites that accept guest contributions in your industry, and the last one specifically finds bylines your competitor has already placed. If they got published there, there’s a decent chance you can too, especially if your pitch is sharper or more current.
4. The resource page search
inurl:resources + your niche keywordintitle:"useful links" + your niche keyword"helpful resources" "Competitor Name"
Resource pages are underrated. A university department, an industry association or a well-established blog often has a page listing useful tools or reading, and getting added to one of those is a solid, durable link that rarely gets removed.
5. The competitor’s own footprint search
site:competitorname.com inurl:blog "guest post" OR "written by"
This searches inside their own site for pages where they credit outside contributors, which tells you who they’ve built relationships with, and sometimes those same contacts will work with you too.
Step by step: doing this in one sitting
Here’s the exact process I run through with a new client, usually inside 90 minutes:
- List your three closest competitors by search visibility, not by size. The company outranking you for your target keywords matters more than the biggest brand in your sector.
- Run the unlinked mention search for each one and log every result on a spreadsheet with three columns: site name, has a link or not, contact email if visible.
- Pull their top three blog posts (use Google’s
site:competitorname.complus a keyword to find them) and run the exact-phrase search on one strong sentence from each. - Run the guest post footprint search using your shared niche keyword and cross-check which of those sites already feature your competitor.
- Sort the spreadsheet by “no link yet” and start outreach with the easiest wins first, usually directories and resource pages, since they need almost no persuasion.
Done, this process usually surfaces between 20 and 40 usable leads per competitor in a single afternoon. Not all of them will convert into a link, but a realistic conversion rate on cold outreach for this kind of low-friction ask is somewhere between 8 and 15 percent, which still beats most cold email campaigns I’ve run for anything else.
The story that taught me this method works
A few years ago I was helping a small project management software company based in Leeds, maybe fourteen people, competing against much bigger names with six-figure marketing budgets. They couldn’t justify an Ahrefs subscription at the time, so I ran the whole audit using nothing but Google search operators and a Sunday afternoon.
I took their biggest competitor’s flagship blog post, a guide to remote team management, and searched an exact phrase from its introduction. That single search turned up 11 sites quoting or referencing the post, six of which linked to it and five of which just named the company without a link. I emailed those five, offered a more current statistic to update their article with, and three replied within a week. Two added a link to my client’s site instead of the competitor’s, because the outreach email arrived at the right moment with something useful to offer them.
That’s 2 backlinks from one search string, in one afternoon, at zero tool cost. Multiply that across ten or fifteen searches and you start to see why this method, unglamorous as it is, still earns its place next to the paid platforms.
Where Google search runs out of road
Here’s the bit most people writing about this topic skip over, because it makes the free method sound less impressive: Google’s link: operator, which used to show you every page linking to a given URL, has been effectively broken for external sites for over a decade. Try link:competitorname.com today and you’ll get a handful of results at best, often none, and Google itself confirms this operator is unreliable for anything beyond a rough spot check. If you want a full inbound link list for your own site, Google Search Console is the only place Google will show you that data directly, and even then only for domains you’ve verified ownership of.
What that means in practice is that manual Google search finds you the links that are indexed, quotable and public-facing, mostly editorial mentions, guest posts and directories. It won’t show you the thousands of low-value directory links, expired domain redirects, or private link networks that make up a large chunk of a well-established competitor’s backlink profile. If a competitor has 4,000 referring domains, you might surface 40 to 80 of them through manual search in a day. That’s not nothing, but it’s not the whole map either.
This is exactly why a paid crawler-based tool earns its cost once you’re past the startup phase. I’ve written in detail about how Ahrefs built its brand around this exact data, and how Semrush approaches the same problem with a slightly different index. Neither is cheating. They’re just crawling the web at a scale a person typing search strings into a browser never will.
Turning what you find into actual links
Finding a competitor’s backlinks is the easy half. Getting your own version of that link is where most people give up, usually because they send a generic “I noticed you linked to X, please consider linking to me too” email that gets ignored, and rightly so. What worked in my Leeds example, and in every campaign since, is offering something the site owner needs anyway: an updated statistic, a broken link fix, a quote from a named expert, or a more recent version of whatever they originally linked to. The ask becomes an afterthought attached to a genuine favour.
If you want a wider set of tools to run alongside this manual method, I put together 25 tools for spying on competitors, including free options, and a broader walkthrough on how and why to spy on competitors in the first place, which covers what to do once you’ve got the data rather than just how to collect it.
What to track once you start winning links back
Backlink research isn’t a one-off audit, it’s a habit. Once you’ve landed a few links using this method, keep an eye on whether they hold, whether your rankings for the target keyword move, and whether the referring site sends any direct traffic. Rank tracking tools help here far more than backlink counts do, since a link is only worth chasing if it eventually moves a keyword you care about.
The practical guide is using an SEO spy tool on a competitor.
Building links for a client? This site accepts sponsored guest posts and link insertions in most business niches, and the posts stay live. Start with the write for me page, then email [email protected] with what you have in mind.
You can put your own domain, or a competitor, through the free backlink checker to see referring domains and the dofollow split.
See also Instant Approval Guest Posting Sites: What’s Real, What’s a Waste of Time, and Where to Submit.
For the full guide on this topic, see find backlinks using google search.
I built a free tool that estimates a site’s Google traffic for exactly this.
Frequently asked questions
Can I really find competitor backlinks in Google without paying for a tool?
Yes, partially. Exact-phrase searches, unlinked mention searches and guest post footprint searches will surface real, usable backlink opportunities for free, usually 20 to 40 leads per competitor in an afternoon, but you won’t see the full backlink profile the way a paid crawler tool shows it.
Does the Google link: operator still work for checking competitor backlinks?
Not reliably. Google’s link: operator has been effectively limited for external domains for years and returns only a small, incomplete sample of results, so it’s not a substitute for a dedicated backlink index.
How many backlinks does my site need to compete with a bigger rival?
There’s no fixed number that guarantees anything, since link quality and relevance matter more than raw count. A smaller site with 50 highly relevant, editorially placed links can outrank a bigger competitor with 500 low-quality directory links for a specific keyword.
What’s the fastest way to turn a found backlink opportunity into my own link?
Offer the site owner something useful attached to your ask, an updated statistic, a fix for a broken link, or a fresher resource than the one they currently link to. Cold outreach that leads with a favour converts far better than outreach that just asks for a link.
Have a case study on this? You can become a SEO contributor.
