To find a competitor's new backlinks, pull every link Ahrefs first saw in the last 30 to 90 days for their domain, filtered to one link per referring domain, dofollow, content links only, above a domain rating floor of about 20. Then read the top 40 referring pages and classify how each link was earned: listicle, guest post, resource page, review, editorial mention, directory, syndication, forum, sponsorship or press. That mix is the finding. It tells you which tactic the competitor is running and which asks are realistic for you. Finally, pull referring domains for the competitor and for your own site and diff them. Domains that link to them and not to you, especially ones that link to two or more competitors, are the prospect list. An AI agent with an Ahrefs connection runs the pulls, does the classification with its own browsing, and returns a ranked table of prospects with the suggested ask for each.
TL;DR
| Question | Answer |
|---|---|
| Data source | Ahrefs backlinks, referring domains and top pages by links, plus your own browsing to read the linking pages |
| Window | 90 days by default, 30 in a fast-moving space |
| Filters that matter | One link per domain, dofollow, content only, DR floor of 20, spam excluded |
| The finding | The link-type mix, not the link count |
| The output | 25 to 40 prospects ranked by DR, ease of ask, recency and relevance |
| Playbook | competitor-new-backlinks |
A competitor's newest backlinks are the most useful ones to study. Old links tell you what worked once. Links from the last few weeks tell you which sites are linking to businesses like yours right now, which of the competitor's pages are earning them, and which tactics they are running. Every one of those sites is a prospect with proof attached.
This guide is the procedure Sequel's competitor-new-backlinks playbook gives an agent. You can run it by hand in Ahrefs, or let the agent run it against your Ahrefs account.
What competitor backlink prospecting is
Competitor backlink prospecting is the practice of studying which sites recently linked to a competitor, working out why, and reaching out to the ones that would plausibly link to you for the same reason.
It is still the most-cited link tactic on Reddit. A 2026 thread on r/WebsiteSEO asking how people build links now opens with the same advice: analyse where competitors get links in Ahrefs, then filter by relevance, DR, traffic and spam score. The hard part is not the idea. It is doing the filtering and classification well enough that the list is worth an outreach hour.
Step 1: confirm the competitor and the window
Search competitors are often not the business competitors you have in mind. The site outranking you for your money queries may be a publisher, a marketplace or a tool you never thought of as a rival. If you are not sure, run the competitor-keyword-gap playbook first.
Default the window to the last 90 days. Use 30 in a space where links move fast. Say which you used in the report.
Step 2: see which of their pages earn links
Before pulling individual links, look at the pages. ahrefs.top_pages_by_links with the competitor as target and since set to the window start ranks their pages by new links in the window.
Fetch the top ten with your browser and classify each by format: guide, tool or calculator, research or data, comparison, template, glossary, product page. This tells you what content in your market is worth linking to right now, which is a different question from what ranks.
Step 3: pull the new links
ahrefs.backlinks with the competitor as target and these parameters:
| Parameter | Value | Why |
|---|---|---|
since | Window start | Only links first seen in the window |
one_per_domain | true | A sitewide footer link is one relationship, not hundreds |
dofollow_only | true | Nofollow links are not prospects for equity |
content_only | true | Skips navigation, footers and sidebars |
min_domain_rating | 20 | Raise it for a strong site |
limit | 300 | Enough to see the mix |
order_by | domain_rating_source:desc | Strongest first |
include_traffic | off | Costs ten units per row. Add it later, for the shortlist only |
The agent prompt is one line:
Show me every dofollow link example.com earned in the last 90 days, one per domain, DR 20 and up.
Step 4: classify how each link was earned
For the top 40 by domain rating, read the referring page's title and anchor, then open the page. Assign one type per link:
- Listicle or roundup ("best X tools", "top Y for Z")
- Guest post
- Resource page
- Review or comparison
- Editorial mention
- Directory or citation
- Syndication or scraper
- Forum or community
- Sponsorship or partner page
- Press pickup
Report the mix as a percentage. The mix is the finding. Forty percent listicles means the competitor is pitching roundups and you can too. Forty percent syndication means one article republished by scrapers, and the "new links" number was noise.
Step 5: find sites that link to them and not to you
ahrefs.referring_domains for the competitor, and again for your own site, both with dofollow_only, exclude_spam, a DR floor of 20 and a limit of 1000. Diff on domain.
Domains in their set and absent from yours are prospects. With two or three competitors, a domain that links to more than one is the highest priority. It has demonstrated, more than once, that it links to this kind of site.
Step 6: shortlist and rank
Keep 25 to 40 prospects. Rank by:
- Domain rating, as a tiebreaker rather than the first sort.
- Ease of ask: listicle and resource page first, guest post next, editorial mention last.
- Recency: a page that added a competitor link this month is being actively edited.
- Relevance: a one-line check from your read of the page.
Only now, if you want traffic in the table, rerun ahrefs.referring_domains for the shortlist with include_traffic: true. Pricing the wide list would have cost ten times more for rows you discarded.
The report
Three parts, in this order:
- The competitor's link-earning pages with their format, so you know what to build.
- The link-type mix, with two or three example links per type.
- The prospect table: linking domain, DR, the competitor page it links to, the linking page, why the link exists, the suggested ask, and the page on your site the link should point to.
Set aside sitewide, nofollow and syndication rows in a separate short list so the reader knows they were seen and skipped.
Gotchas that make the list worthless
- "New" means newly found by Ahrefs. The first-seen date is the discovery date, not the publish date. A link can be weeks old before the index sees it.
- One link per domain is on for a reason. Without it, a single blogroll relationship looks like hundreds of links.
- Syndication inflates the count. The same anchor and title across many low-DR domains is one article republished by scrapers. Group by anchor and title before reading the mix.
- A competitor's spam is not a strategy. The spam filter and DR floor exist so the prospect list is not a copy of their link farm. Do not recommend buying links or directory blasts, whatever the competitor did.
- Ahrefs numbers are estimates. DR and traffic rank prospects against each other. They are not a forecast of what a link will do. Never promise rankings from links.
- Relevance beats DR. A DR 35 site that writes about your category is a better prospect than a DR 70 general-news site that linked to a competitor's funding announcement once.
Running it with an agent
Most of the work above is filtering, reading pages and classifying. That is exactly what an agent is good at, provided it has authenticated access to Ahrefs. One r/seogrowth poster described replacing their AI SEO tool stack with Claude and an API key, with competitor backlink audits as the first thing they automated.
Sequel supplies the Ahrefs connection over MCP, alongside Search Console and GA4, and the playbook so the agent follows this procedure rather than improvising a worse one. Install both with one command:
npm install -g @sequelsh/cli@latest
sequel install claude-codeConnect Ahrefs once (the Ahrefs and Claude Code guide shows the steps), then ask:
Which sites linked to competitor.com in the last 90 days that don't link to us? Rank them as outreach prospects.
The agent reads competitor-new-backlinks through sequel_read_skill, runs the three Ahrefs pulls, opens the referring pages with its own browser, and returns the prospect table. From there, backlink-profile-health-check covers your own profile and competitor-top-pages-teardown covers the content side. If you are new to how agents reach these tools, what MCP is explains the plumbing in five minutes.
The prospect list is only as good as the classification behind it. Let the agent do the reading. Get started free.