How to find link-building opportunities from competitor backlinks

Executive overview

Most competitor backlink profiles are too large to review manually. Three filtering strategies in Ahrefs reduce thousands of raw backlinks to a short, actionable outreach list.

Filtering competitor backlinks with Link Intersect turns a haystack of 11,000 links into dozens of high-probability targets.

Finding superfans

• Pull the competitor's Best By Links report; set HTTP 200 filter to remove dead pages.
• Take the top 5–10 linked pages and paste them into Link Intersect using prefix mode.
• Sites that link to all 5 pages are superfans — high-probability targets because they already value similar content.
• Exclude your own domain to strip sites that already link to you.
• Switch ALL to ANY to expand results to sites linking to any 2+ articles; this lifts the list from ~66 to ~300 quality targets.
• 300 results is scannable in under an hour.

Finding power linkers

• Instead of one competitor's articles, enter 5 competing blogs as the Link Intersect inputs.
• Sites that link to all 5 competitors but never to you are high-value cold outreach targets.
• A personal email introducing your content converts well because these sites already engage with the niche.
• Repeat with another set of 5 competitors once the first list is exhausted.

Mining latest backlinks

• Use the New Backlinks report to see who linked to a competitor in the last few days.
• Recently active sites are better targets — older linking sites may have gone dormant.
• Skim domain names for relevance; verify the site hasn't already linked to you via the Referring Domains report.
• Set up Ahrefs Alerts for individual competitor articles (not whole domains) to receive manageable weekly emails of new links pointing at pages that outrank yours.