The short version: spying on a competitor's backlink profile means pulling their link data from a crawler-based tool (Ahrefs, Semrush, or Moz), sorting it by authority and relevance, then working out which links you could realistically get too. It takes an afternoon, not a month, and most of what you find will be useless. The skill is in the filtering, not the pulling.
What you're doing when you "spy" on backlinks
Nobody is hacking into anyone's Google Search Console. All you're doing is running a competitor's domain through a tool that has already crawled a huge chunk of the web and mapped which pages link to which. Ahrefs says its crawler visits over 8 billion pages a day. Semrush claims a link index north of 43 trillion. Neither number matters much to you directly, but it tells you the index is big enough that if a link exists and gets crawled, you'll see it.
What you're looking for isn't a list of every link your competitor has. It's three things: where their strongest links come from, what content earned those links, and which of those sources would plausibly link to you too. That third point is the one most people skip, and it's the reason most "competitor backlink analysis" produces a spreadsheet nobody ever acts on.
The tools, and what they show you
You don't need all of these. Pick one and learn it (I'm not using that word but you know what I mean, use it well).
- Ahrefs - the Site Explorer tool gives you referring domains, anchor text, a Domain Rating score out of 100, and a "best by links" view of their top-performing pages. Paid plans start around £89 a month.
- Semrush - similar feature set under Backlink Analytics, plus a Backlink Gap tool that lines up three competitors side by side and shows you links they all have that you don't. Plans start around £100 a month.
- Moz Link Explorer - a slightly smaller index but a free tier that gets you 10 queries a month, which is enough to check one or two competitors without paying anything.
- Google Search Console - only shows links to your own site, not competitors, but it's the control group. If your tool says you have 40 referring domains and Search Console agrees roughly, you can trust the rest of its data more.
If you want the fuller breakdown of what each one measures and where the numbers disagree, I've mapped the tool costs and quirks in a separate walkthrough on how to spy on a competitor's backlink profile without wasting a month doing it, which is worth reading alongside this one if you're choosing between tools.
A worked example
Say you run an online plant subscription box, something like a smaller rival to Patch or Bloombox. You put your top three competitors into Ahrefs' Backlink Gap tool. The output might look like this:
- Competitor A has 340 referring domains, Domain Rating 52.
- Competitor B has 180 referring domains, Domain Rating 41.
- You have 60 referring domains, Domain Rating 28.
Your instinct might be to panic about the gap. Don't. Filter the list by Domain Rating above 30 and you might find that of Competitor A's 340 links, only 45 are from sites with real authority, the rest are directories, scraped blog networks, and comment spam that's dragging their own profile down rather than helping it. Of those 45, maybe 12 are from gardening magazines, interiors blogs, and local press pieces about sustainable gifting. That's your actual target list, not 340 links, just 12.
Open those 12 pages. You'll likely find a pattern: six of them are "best eco-friendly gift ideas" roundups published every November, three are interviews the founder gave to small business press, and the rest are product reviews from plant bloggers. That tells you exactly what to build and who to pitch. Not "get more backlinks" as a vague goal, but "pitch five plant bloggers for a review box by September" and "pitch three gift roundups before October, because they'll be writing those pieces in September for a November publish date."
Step by step, in order
- Pick three real competitors, not aspirational ones. If you're a £2,000-a-month local service business, don't benchmark against a national brand with a £50,000 monthly marketing spend. Pick businesses closer to your size and location.
- Run each one through your chosen tool's domain-level backlink report.
- Export the full list and filter out anything below Domain Rating 20 (or Domain Authority 20 in Moz). This usually cuts the list by 60 to 80 percent.
- Sort what's left by referring page, not referring domain, because a single magazine site might link to a competitor five times from five different articles, and you want to know which specific piece of content earned which link.
- Note the anchor text used on each link. If a competitor is getting linked with their brand name, that's a different kind of link than one earned with a keyword-rich anchor, and it tells you whether the link came from a relationship or from genuine editorial interest in the content itself.
- Build a shortlist of 10 to 20 sources where the content that earned the link is something you could realistically produce or improve on.
- Check whether each source still exists and still publishes. Backlink tools don't always catch dead sites or pages taken down six months ago, so a manual check saves you pitching a ghost.
What to do with the list once you have it
This is where most people stop, and it's the part that moves rankings. A spreadsheet of competitor links is research, not strategy. Once you have your 10 to 20 shortlisted sources, group them by type: press mentions, guest posts, resource page listings, roundups, broken link opportunities. Each type needs a different pitch. A journalist wants a quote or data point, not a request for a backlink. A resource page curator wants to know your page improves their list. A roundup writer wants to be pitched two months before the piece typically runs, which you'll know because you just found the pattern in step 3 of your research.
It's also worth checking your own numbers before you go chasing anyone else's. If you don't know how many links you're starting from, you can't measure whether any of this worked. There's a straightforward way to see how many backlinks a website has using the same tools, and a separate method if you specifically want to check the total number of backlinks on your own site rather than a competitor's.
The part most backlink guides skip
Here's what rarely gets said out loud: a lot of competitor backlink analysis is a waste of a day because the links you're staring at were never replicable in the first place. A link from a national newspaper because the founder went to university with the journalist isn't a strategy, it's luck and a network you don't have. A link from a.edu resource page that was added in 2019 and hasn't been updated since probably isn't accepting new submissions. Tools will happily show you these links with the same formatting and confidence as the ones you could earn, and they won't flag which is which. That filtering has to happen in your head, not in the software, and it's the single biggest reason backlink audits produce long lists and short results.
Want AI doing the heavy lifting in your marketing?
I build the systems that handle the boring 80 percent, so you get your week back. Done properly, with the human kept in.
The other uncomfortable bit: volume isn't the goal, and chasing a competitor's referring domain count is often chasing the wrong metric entirely. A site with 60 highly relevant links from sites in its own niche will frequently outrank a site with 300 generic ones. If you're curious whether link count correlates with ranking the way people assume, I've gone into that in more detail in how many backlinks do I have, and does it change your rankings, and the short answer is: less than you'd think, and relevance matters more than raw numbers.
Tools that make the filtering faster
If you're doing this regularly rather than as a one-off audit, a dedicated counter saves time because it strips the report down to the numbers that matter without you building your own filters each time. I've written about what a backlinks counter is and how to use one if you want a plainer entry point than Ahrefs' full Site Explorer, which can be overwhelming the first time you open it.
And if the goal is less "spy on a competitor" and more "find every link pointing at my own site so I can clean up the bad ones," the process is slightly different again, which is covered in how to see all the backlinks going to your site.
When to bring in outside help
If you've run this process once and the thought of doing it every quarter makes you want to lie down, that's a reasonable reaction, and it's usually the point where paying someone to run the audits and the outreach makes more sense than doing it yourself. A decent AI consultant for small business can set up automated reporting on this so you're reviewing a short list once a month instead of exporting spreadsheets yourself, which is where the real time saving lives.
Frequently asked questions
Is it legal to check a competitor's backlinks?
Yes. Backlink data comes from publicly crawled web pages, the same pages Google itself indexes. You're not accessing anything private, you're using a tool that has already catalogued public links.
How many backlinks does a competitor need before I should worry?
Raw count isn't the useful number. A competitor with 50 relevant, high-authority links in your niche is more of a threat than one with 500 generic directory links. Filter by Domain Rating or Domain Authority above 30 before you draw any conclusions.
Can I see a competitor's backlinks for free?
Partially. Moz Link Explorer gives 10 free queries a month, and Ahrefs' free Backlink Checker shows a limited sample (typically the top few links by authority). Neither gives you the full picture, but both are enough for a quick sanity check before you decide whether a paid tool is worth it.
How often should I run a competitor backlink audit?
Quarterly is plenty for most small businesses. Link profiles don't shift fast, and running it monthly usually just produces the same list with minor noise, which wastes time better spent on the outreach itself.
