Find a competitor's new backlinks and turn them into prospects

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.

Ahrefs supplies the link data. Reading the linking pages to classify how each link was earned uses your own browsing.

Steps

1. Confirm the competitor and the window. If the user has not named a competitor, ask; search competitors are often not the business competitors they have in mind. Default the window to the last 90 days, or 30 days for a space where links move fast. Say which you used.

2. See which of their pages are earning links. ahrefs.top_pages_by_links with the competitor as target and since set to the window start. It ranks their pages by new links in the window. Fetch the top ten with your browsing and classify each by format (guide, tool or calculator, research or data, comparison, template, glossary, product). This is what content in this market is worth linking to.

3. Pull the new links themselves. ahrefs.backlinks with the competitor as target, since set to the window start, dofollow_only: true, content_only: true, one_per_domain: true, min_domain_rating: 20 (raise it for a strong site), limit: 300, order_by: "domain_rating_source:desc". Leave include_traffic off for now; it costs ten times as much per row and is only worth spending on the shortlist.

4. Classify how each link was earned. For the top 40 by domain rating, read the referring page's title, anchor and links_external, and fetch the page. Assign one type: listicle or roundup ("best X tools"), 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: it says which tactic the competitor is running and which asks are realistic for you.

5. Find the gap: sites that link to them and not to you. ahrefs.referring_domains for the competitor and again for the user's own site, both with since set to the window start (or omitted for the whole profile), dofollow_only: true, exclude_spam: true, min_domain_rating: 20, limit: 1000. Diff on domain. Domains in the competitor's set and absent from ours are prospects. With two or three competitors, a domain that links to more than one is the highest priority: it demonstrably links to this kind of site.

6. Shortlist and price the shortlist. Keep 25 to 40 prospects. Rerun ahrefs.referring_domains for those domains only with include_traffic: true if the user wants traffic in the table, or skip it and say so. Rank by domain rating, then link type ease (listicle and resource page first, guest post next, editorial mention last), then recency (a page that added a competitor link this month is being actively edited), then a one-line relevance check from your fetch.

7. Report. Three parts. First, the competitor's link-earning pages with their format, so the user knows what to build. Second, the link-type mix with two or three example links per type. Third, the prospect table: linking domain, DR, the competitor page it links to, the linking page, why the link exists (type), the suggested ask, and the page on our 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. Continue with backlink-profile-health-check for the user's own profile and competitor-top-pages-teardown for the content side.

Gotchas

• "New" means newly found by Ahrefs. first_seen_link is the discovery date, not the publish date. A link can be weeks old before the index sees it, and the index lags more on small sites. Treat the window as approximate.
• One link per domain is on for a reason. A sitewide footer or blogroll link shows up on every page of the referring site. Without one_per_domain a single 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, not many endorsements. Group by anchor and title before reading the mix.
• A competitor's spam is not a strategy. exclude_spam and the 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.
• Units add up. Every Ahrefs row costs units, and traffic_domain costs ten per row. Pull the wide list without traffic, then price only the shortlist.
• 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 the user's category is a better prospect than a DR 70 general-news site that linked to a competitor's funding announcement once. Say which is which.