People also ask
In practice
Every serious link plan starts here, because the fastest way to find relevant publishers is to look at who already links to products like yours. The analysis runs in layers. First the domain-level export: referring domains for three to five direct competitors, deduplicated, with your own subtracted — the remainder is the raw prospect universe. Then the page-level read, which is where the money is: which of the competitor’s pages hold the links (alternatives pages, pricing, a data study, a free tool), because that tells you both what earns links in this category and which of your pages are trying to compete unarmoured.
Then the qualitative pass: for the most promising publishers, open the linking pages — is the competitor there as a product listing, a quoted expert, a sponsor, a comparison row? Each context implies a different pitch. The anchor and pattern read rounds it out: heavy brand anchors suggest organic coverage worth replicating; repeated keyword anchors suggest paid campaigns whose publishers may sell to you too — with the risk profile that implies. The output is three lists: prospects (publishers to pursue), asset lessons (content types that earn links here), and warning flags (publishers that link to everyone, links that vanished, patterns that read as bought).
Re-run quarterly — competitor campaigns land and decay, and the map needs updating. The same data feeds the gap analysis and, on the AI side, the list of pages citing competitors’ comparisons, which is the brand-mentions target list.
See also: Link prospecting, Competitive gap: pages and links, Target page selection.
Related service: Link building strategy.
