How to find where competitors get their backlinks
Guide · Market Growth · 4 min read · last verified 2026-08-11
To find where a competitor gets their backlinks, run their domain through a backlink index — the datasets behind tools such as Ahrefs, Semrush, Moz, or Majestic — and export their referring domains. Then filter that list down to the links you could realistically earn too: press mentions, guest articles, resource pages, partner and integration listings, and review platforms. The point is not to copy every link, because most of them are noise. It is to find the handful of repeatable sources that explain how the competitor keeps earning links, so you can go after the same ones.
What tools actually show a competitor's backlinks?
Google will not hand you a competitor's link list. Search Console shows the links pointing at your own verified site and nothing about anyone else's. To see a rival's links you need a third-party index — a dataset built by a vendor that crawls the web independently and assembles its own map of who links to whom. Ahrefs, Semrush, Moz, and Majestic each run one.
One thing to hold onto from the start: every one of these indexes is a sample, not the whole web. Each vendor crawls a different slice at a different depth, so their link counts for the same domain rarely match, and none of them sees everything. That is a well-known limitation of the category, not a flaw in any one tool. Read the numbers as estimates.
How do you turn a raw export into a target list?
A referring-domains export can run to thousands of rows. The work is subtraction. A repeatable pass:
- Export at the referring-domain level, not the individual-URL level, so one site counts once.
- Drop the automatic links — the competitor's own properties, social profiles, and sitewide footer or widget placements that anyone gets by default.
- Filter to domains that are actually relevant to your market; an off-topic link is rarely one you would want or could use.
- Tag what remains by type: press, roundup, guest post, review site, partner page, community.
- Sort by pattern. A source type that appears many times is a repeatable channel; a single odd link is usually a one-off you cannot reproduce.
What survives that pass is a short list of places that plausibly hand out links to companies like the competitor — and, therefore, like you.
Which link sources are actually replicable?
| Source type | How to spot it in the export | How you would earn it |
|---|---|---|
| Editorial press and news | News domains, article URLs, dated paths | A real story, data, or expert comment worth quoting |
| Roundups and resource lists | "best", "top", "tools", "alternatives" in the URL | Genuinely belong on the list, then ask to be added |
| Guest contributions | Author bio pages on topical, edited sites | Pitch a real article to sites that accept contributors |
| Review and comparison platforms | Known review-site domains | Claim your profile and earn genuine reviews |
| Partner and integration directories | Vendor and marketplace domains | Build the integration or partnership |
| Community and Q&A | Forum and Q&A domains, often nofollow | Participate honestly; expect little ranking credit |
What does this method miss?
Three things, and each is worth stating plainly. First, the indexes undercount — a source your competitor has that no vendor crawled will never appear in your export, so absence is not proof. Second, some of a competitor's best links are genuinely unrepeatable: a founder's personal network, a one-time viral moment, a legacy relationship. Third, and most important, a count of referring domains says nothing about whether those links actually move rankings — link value is not disclosed by Google, so that leap is a hypothesis. Sorting the list by a vendor's "authority" score does not fix this, because that score is the vendor's own model, not Google's, as covered in why domain authority is a vendor metric. Which links are even worth earning is the subject of what backlinks actually move rankings.
From a competitor's links to your buyers' questions
A backlink audit tells you where a competitor earns authority. It does not tell you which buyer questions they are winning — and those are two different maps. A rival can have an impressive link profile and still lose the searches that decide deals, or win them from a review page you never thought to check. That is why link discovery pays off most when it sits alongside a look at the public pages that actually rank for your buyers' questions, the same reframe as why is my competitor ranking above me on Google.
This is the surface Magrios watches. Instead of a link count, it measures your presence in the top-ranking public sources buyers read when they research your category, and shows which companies appear there and where you are absent. It does not measure rankings or link authority directly; it maps the pages that answer real buyer questions. A competitor's backlinks tell you how they built their reach. The pages that answer your buyers' questions tell you whether that reach is currently costing you deals.