How to Spy on a Competitor’s Backlink Profile (Without Wasting a Month Doing It)

Straight answer: to spy on a competitor’s backlink profile, run their domain through a backlink checker like Ahrefs or SEMrush, sort by referring domains and dofollow links, then use a backlink gap report to see which sites link to them but not to you. The tools take five minutes to set up. Working out which of those links are worth chasing takes longer, and that second part is where most people waste their time.

Why bother looking at a competitor’s backlinks at all

Backlinks are still one of the clearest signals Google uses to work out who to trust, and they’re the one part of a competitor’s SEO strategy you can see in full. You can’t see their conversion rate. You can’t see their ad spend. But you can see almost every site that links to them, when that link appeared, and roughly how strong that linking site is. That’s a huge amount of free intelligence sitting there for anyone willing to click through the reports.

I’ve written before about what competitor tracking involves for SEO, and backlinks are usually the first place clients want me to look, because a link gap is easy to point at and explain. “They have 340 referring domains and we have 60” is a sentence a business owner understands instantly, unlike a lot of SEO reporting.

The tools that do the actual spying

You don’t need anything exotic. Three tools cover 95% of what anyone needs:

• Ahrefs – the deepest backlink index of the three, plans start at $129 a month for Lite, but the free backlink checker shows the top 100 backlinks for any domain with no login required.
• SEMrush – slightly friendlier interface, plans start around $139.95 a month, and the Backlink Gap tool lets you compare up to five domains side by side in one view.
• Moz Link Explorer – the cheapest of the three, useful if budget is tight, though the index is smaller so you’ll see fewer links than Ahrefs or SEMrush for the same domain.

If you’re not ready to pay for any of them yet, I put together a bigger list of 25 tools to spy on your competitors that includes free options and tools that go beyond backlinks into content and ad tracking too.

Step by step: how I run this for clients

Here’s the process I use, in order, every time a new client asks me to look at their competitors:

1. Pick three to five real competitors, not the aspirational giant everyone names first. If you’re a 20-person B2B software company, don’t run this on Salesforce. Pick the companies beating you for your target keywords in Google right now.
2. Drop each domain into the Site Explorer and pull up the full backlink report, not just the summary numbers.
3. Sort by Domain Rating (or Authority Score) and referring domains, not total backlinks. A site with 900 backlinks from 12 domains is far weaker than a site with 200 backlinks from 150 domains.
4. Filter for dofollow only. Nofollow links can still send traffic and brand mentions matter, but if you’re chasing SEO value specifically, filter them out first so you’re not wasting time on links that pass no authority.
5. Open the “Best by links” or “Top pages” report. This shows you exactly which pages on their site attract the most backlinks, which usually points straight at their strongest content or their most linkable asset.
6. Check the anchor text cloud. If half their anchors say “project management software” and yours are all branded, that’s a gap worth noting.
7. Run a backlink gap report comparing your domain against two or three competitors at once. This surfaces every site that links to them but not to you, sorted by authority, and it’s the single most useful report in this whole process.
8. Export the list and prioritise by relevance first, authority second. A DR 40 industry blog that writes about your exact niche is worth more than a DR 70 general news site that will never link to you.

A real example from a client I worked with

A few years ago I was helping a B2B software client work out why a much smaller competitor kept outranking them for a handful of high-value keywords. On paper the client had more content, a bigger team, and had been trading longer. When I ran the backlink gap report, the answer was almost embarrassingly simple: the smaller competitor had appeared in a single “best tools for remote teams” roundup published by a mid-sized tech publication, and that one article had been picked up and referenced by 38 other sites over the following year. One well-placed mention had snowballed into 38 referring domains, most of them relevant, several of them strong.

We didn’t try to copy every link on their profile. We pitched the same journalist directly, with a different angle, and got a mention in her next roundup piece three months later. That single placement brought in 11 new referring domains within the following six months. The lesson wasn’t “get more backlinks.” It was “find the one link that’s doing the heavy lifting and go after the source, not the copy.”

What most people get wrong when they do this

Here’s the part most guides on this topic skip over. When you open a competitor’s backlink report for the first time, it looks impressive. Hundreds, sometimes thousands, of referring domains. The instinct is to try to get every single one of them.

Don’t. A large chunk of any established site’s backlink profile, in my experience often 50% or more, is dead weight. It’s expired domains still showing in the index, scraped directory listings nobody clicks, link exchanges from a decade-old SEO fad, or spammy foreign-language sites that got swept up when a competitor bought a cheap link package in 2019 and never cleaned it up. Chasing these links is a waste of a week. Worse, some of them sit on domains that could hurt you if you built the same links, because Google has gotten far better at spotting low-quality link patterns since then.

The useful part of a competitor’s backlink profile is usually a small fraction of the total, the 10 or 20 links that came from real editorial coverage, genuine partnerships, or content people chose to reference because it was good. Find those. Ignore the rest. Anyone telling you to “replicate their entire backlink profile” is giving you a to-do list that will burn a month for very little return.

Digging past the tools: manual checks worth doing

The software gets you 90% of the way, but a few manual steps sharpen the picture:

• Read the linking content, not just the report line. A link buried in a footer is worth almost nothing compared to a link inside a paragraph that’s directly recommending the page.
• Check the date the link appeared against any traffic or ranking spikes you can see for that competitor. A cluster of new links right before a jump in visibility is a strong signal that particular campaign worked.
• Look at who’s writing about them and whether that journalist or blogger covers your space too. This is where competitive research turns into an actual outreach list rather than just a spreadsheet of numbers.

I’ve covered the wider ethics and boundaries of this kind of research in what are the legal ways to spy on competitors’ websites, which is worth reading if you’re ever unsure where research ends and something dodgier begins. Everything described here is entirely public data. There’s no hacking, no scraping behind a login, nothing that touches a grey area.

Turning the research into action

Once you’ve got your prioritised list, group the opportunities into three buckets: sites you could realistically pitch this month, sites that would need a stronger asset first (a study, a tool, an original piece of research), and sites that aren’t worth pursuing at all. Most people spend all their time in the first bucket and never build anything for the second, which is a shame because that’s usually where the biggest wins sit.

This kind of ongoing competitor research shouldn’t be a one-off. I’d rather clients check their top three competitors’ backlink profiles once a month than do one huge audit and never look again. My broader piece on the how, what and why you should spy on competitors goes into how to build that into a regular habit rather than a one-time project, and there’s more detail on what to learn from competitors more broadly in 10 things your competitors can teach you about SEO.

Frequently asked questions

Is it legal to check a competitor’s backlink profile?

Yes. Backlink data is pulled from publicly crawled web pages, the same pages Google itself indexes, so checking a competitor’s backlinks through a tool like Ahrefs or SEMrush is entirely legal and doesn’t involve accessing anything private or restricted.

What’s the best free tool to see a competitor’s backlinks?

Ahrefs’ free backlink checker shows the top 100 backlinks for any domain without needing a paid account, which is usually enough to spot patterns and identify the strongest links worth investigating further before you commit to a paid tool.

How many backlinks do I need to match a competitor?

There’s no fixed number, and chasing volume is the wrong goal. A domain with 60 highly relevant, dofollow referring domains will often outrank one with 400 low-quality links, so focus on closing the gap in relevant, authoritative links rather than matching the total count.

Can a competitor tell that I’ve looked at their backlinks?

No. Checking someone’s backlink profile through a third-party tool doesn’t touch their website or their analytics in any way, so there’s no notification, log, or trace that shows up on their end.

Related reading: Are You Wasting Ad Spend on Unengaging Social Profiles? and How to Find Freelance Work (Without Wasting Six Months on Dead Ends).

If you want the full breakdown, here is everything I know about SEO.