How to read a competitor's backlinks before copying them
By the Auditmatic team · Updated 3 November 2026 · 6 min read
Start with the overview
Check the number of referring domains, the trend over the last year, and how many links are new and lost each month. A steady climb is natural. A sudden jump may be a campaign, or a pile of low-quality links.
Find the pages that earn links
Sort their pages by referring domains. A tool, a data study or a guide often earns most of the links. That page shows what their audience links to.
Read where the links come from
- Sample 20 linking domains and note the type: news, blogs, directories, forums, partners.
- Discard obvious spam and sitewide footer links.
- Mark the sites that are relevant to you and could link to you for a similar reason.
Look for broken links
If a competitor's page that earned many links now returns an error, the sites that linked to it may happily link to your equivalent page instead.
Run it with your AI agent
Connect your agent to Auditmatic, then paste this prompt. Replace the parts in angle brackets. It reads real data and asks before it spends anything.
Use my Auditmatic project for <your-domain>. Run get_backlinks_overview and get_backlinks_profile for <competitor.com>. Report referring domains over the last 12 months, the 10 pages that earn the most referring domains, and a sample of 20 linking domains by type. Flag likely spam. Then list 15 relevant domains that link to them and not to me.
Without a tool
You can do this by hand with free tools:
- Open a free backlink checker for the competitor and note referring domains.
- Sort their pages by links to find the top few.
- Visit a sample of linking sites to judge quality.
Questions
Is a competitor with many links always stronger?
Not necessarily. A few relevant links can outweigh many weak ones.
Should I copy their links?
Copy the ideas: the content that earns links and the kinds of sites that link. You cannot copy the exact links.
Keep going
Start with a free audit
See what your site needs first. No signup, and it takes about a minute.