Competitor Backlink Check: Sort Their Links Into Ones You Can Earn

To run a free competitor backlink check, put their domain into a free backlink checker, such as CrawlTide's free backlink checker or the free version of Ahrefs' Backlink Checker, and read the referring domains, not the total. Then sort every link by how the competitor earned it. Google Search Console cannot help here: its Links report only covers sites you own.

A competitor backlink check hands you a long list of rows, and most of them are links you cannot earn or should not want. The useful work is not the pull itself, it is the sorting. What follows covers which competitors to check, why the numbers never agree, which links are worth copying, which ones Google's spam policies name outright, and how to get from a raw export to a short list worth pitching.

How do I check a competitor's backlinks for free?

Use a third-party backlink index, because Google does not show other sites' links. These are the free options and what each can tell you about a competitor.

Source	What it shows for a competitor	Limits
CrawlTide free backlink checker	Backlink and referring-domain totals, the top 20 referring domains and the top 20 backlinks, strongest first	Top rows only; lookups cached for up to seven days
Ahrefs' free Backlink Checker	A free view of Ahrefs' own index	The free version is limited compared with the paid product; check the page for what it currently includes
Google Search Console Links report	Nothing about competitors	Only covers properties you have verified
Paid backlink tools	Full referring-domain lists, history, and side-by-side gaps	Each one reports from its own crawl, so totals differ

For a first pass, the free backlink checker for any domain is enough to see a competitor's strongest referring domains. If you have not yet checked your own profile, start with how to check website backlinks, because the comparison only makes sense against your own baseline.

Which competitors should you check?

Check the pages that rank above you for the queries you want, which are often not the businesses you meet in sales calls. A local accountant may lose clients to the firm across town but lose rankings to a national tax blog and a software vendor's help center.

To build the list, search three to five of your target queries and note the domains in the top results. The ones that appear for several queries are your search competitors. If you are not sure which queries to use, the queries you already get impressions for in Search Console are the best starting set, as shown in our free keyword research tool workflow. Check competitors at page level as well as domain level: a single guide that ranks for your main query can have a link profile that looks nothing like the rest of its site, and that page is the one you are actually up against.

Why do backlink tools disagree about the same competitor?

Every backlink tool reports from its own crawl of the web, and no crawl sees all of it, so totals for the same site differ from tool to tool. Pick one source for a comparison and use it for every competitor, including yourself.

Google will not fill the gap for you. The Search Console Links report only covers links to your own property, and Google's Links report help page says plainly that it "isn't a comprehensive list of every link on your site". Its on-screen tables are limited to 1,000 rows (the export goes up to 100,000), and it does not say whether a link is nofollow. It is a good view of your own profile and no view at all of a competitor's.

Treat third-party authority scores the same way. They are each vendor's model of the link graph, useful for ranking prospects against one another within one tool, and not numbers Google reads.

Which competitor links can you actually earn?

The ones the competitor earned by being useful, quoted or listed, not the ones they bought or announced. Ask one question of each referring page: what did the competitor do to get this link? The answer tells you whether you can earn the same link, and how.

Link type	How it was usually earned	Can you earn it?
Resource or "useful tools" pages	The page lists helpful material on a topic	Yes, if you have a resource that fits the list better than an entry already on it
Roundups and comparison articles	An editor picked the product or guide for a list	Often: pitch the editor with a concrete reason to add you at the next update
Podcast and interview pages	Someone at the company was a guest	Yes, if you have a person with something specific to say
Quotes in news or trade articles	A writer quoted an expert from the company	Yes, over time, by answering journalist requests in your field
Industry associations and curated directories	Membership or an application	Usually, if you qualify. Mass-submission directories are a different thing (see below)
Integration and partner pages	A real product or business relationship	Only if you build the same relationship
News coverage of funding, launches or acquisitions	A news event at the competitor	No. Note the outlets for your own next announcement and move on
Sponsorships and paid placements	Money changed hands	Only as advertising. These should carry rel="sponsored" and are not a ranking play

The top three rows are where most realistic wins sit, because the linking page exists to point at useful things and has no reason to stop at one.

Which competitor links does Google call link spam?

Google's spam policies (page last updated August 28, 2026) define link spam as "creating links to or from a site primarily for the purpose of manipulating search rankings," and several of its named examples show up constantly in competitor profiles. Copying them copies the risk.

• Directories and bookmarks: "Low-quality directory or bookmark site links" are listed by name. A trade association directory you qualify for is not the same as a site that lists anyone who fills in a form.
• Forum and comment links: "Forum comments with optimized links in the post or signature" are listed too, so a competitor's forum-signature links are a pattern to avoid, not a list to work through.
• Anchor text you asked for: the policy names "links with optimized anchor text in articles, guest posts, or press releases distributed on other sites." Ask for the link and let the editor word it.
• Swaps and partner pages: "Excessive link exchanges" and "partner pages exclusively for the sake of cross-linking" are both on the list.
• Templates and widgets: "Widely distributed links in the footers or templates of various sites" usually show up as hundreds of links from one network, which inflates a competitor's total without telling you anything you can use.

When a large share of a competitor's links falls into these rows, their total is not the bar to beat. Their remaining editorial links are.

Should you skip nofollow links?

Rank them lower for search purposes, but do not delete them by reflex. Google's spam policies say paid and sponsored links are not a violation when they are qualified with rel="nofollow" or rel="sponsored", and many well-run publications mark outbound links that way as a matter of policy. Filtering to followed links only hides those sites.

A nofollow link from a page your buyers actually read can still send visitors who convert. Keep those prospects on a separate list for referral value, and rank the followed editorial links first when the goal is search visibility.

How do you confirm a competitor's link still exists?

Open the referring page before you pitch, because backlink indexes lag the live web and some links in any export are already gone. Google's own help page warns that links it found in the past may have since been removed, and third-party data is no fresher: our own free checker caches lookups for up to seven days, so a link removed this week can still appear.

Before a prospect from a competitor backlink check goes on the outreach list, confirm three things:

1. The link to the competitor is still on the page, in the body rather than a sidebar or footer.
2. The page is still indexed and still about the topic you are pitching.
3. The rel attribute matches what the export said, because a link that became sponsored or nofollow belongs on a different list.

This takes a minute per page and removes the most embarrassing kind of pitch: asking an editor to add you next to a link they deleted last spring.

How do you turn a competitor backlink check into a prospect list?

Keep the sites that link to two or more of your competitors but not to you, because they have already shown they link to sites like yours. Run the same check for each competitor in one tool, put the referring domains side by side, and keep the overlaps.

Here is a hypothetical example. A small bookkeeping firm checks three competitors and finds a regional business association, two "best resources for new founders" pages and a small-business podcast that link to at least two of them. That is four prospects, each with an obvious pitch: join the association, offer a better resource than one already listed, and offer a guest with a specific topic. A list like that beats a spreadsheet of hundreds of untriaged rows.

Keep the list small enough to personalize every message, record which link type each prospect is, and re-run the competitor backlink check each quarter. Competitors earn new links, and the new ones tell you what is working for them now.

Doing the overlap by hand works for two or three competitors. If you want it kept up to date, CrawlTide's competitor analysis syncs competitor backlinks on the Standard plan and up, and the link gap view (domains that link to your competitors but not to you) is on Pro and up. The Free plan does not include backlinks.

What a competitor backlink check cannot tell you

It cannot tell you which links are moving a competitor's rankings. Google does not publish how much any single link counts, and a strong profile can sit behind a page that ranks for other reasons, such as better content or a closer match to intent. It also cannot show links the tool's crawler has not found, or tell you whether an editor will say yes. Use the check to find prospects and patterns, not to explain a ranking.

For the rest of the free stack by task, see free SEO tools that stay free. To start the sort today, put a competitor's domain into the free CrawlTide backlink checker, which returns its top 20 referring domains and top 20 backlinks, strongest first.