How to find lookalike prospects for link building campaigns

Executive overview

Most link prospecting stops at seed prospects — pages that link to a competitor for a specific reason. Lookalike prospects extend that seed into a much larger list by finding a common footprint and searching for it at scale.

Three tools drive this: Ahrefs (Site Explorer, Content Explorer, Batch Analysis), Google, and the Scraper Chrome extension.

The footprint is the key: identify the shared pattern in your seed, then use it to find hundreds or thousands of similar pages.

Finding footprints in competitor backlink profiles

• Analyse a competing page's anchors report in Site Explorer to spot why people link to it
• Identify the footprint — a common mark within the pattern (e.g. a % sign in anchor text for a stats page)
• Use Batch Analysis with an anchor/surrounding text filter to count and export matching pages
• Repeat across multiple top-ranking competitors to compound the prospect list

Searching for lookalike prospects by topic pattern

• When seeds share a topical pattern (e.g. "top SEO ebooks"), search for that pattern in page titles
• Use Google with intitle: operators or Ahrefs Content Explorer in title-search mode
• Broaden the search by swapping a narrow term (e.g. "SEO") for a wider category (e.g. "marketing") to multiply results
• Content Explorer also works for phrase-match searches — useful when prospects use a specific phrase on-page (e.g. "use LSI keywords")

Scraping URLs for batch analysis

• When a seed is a set of URLs (e.g. all videos in a YouTube course), use the Scraper Chrome extension to collect them
• Right-click the target element, choose "Scrape Similar", and adjust the XPath as needed
• Run the full URL list through Ahrefs Batch Analysis sorted by referring domains
• This surfaces warm prospects — people who already linked to or embedded related content