Steal Your Competitors' Backlinks: 5-Step Framework

“Steal your competitors’ backlinks” sounds like something you’d whisper at a shady SEO conference, but in reality, it’s one of the most legitimate, repeatable growth link building tactics in search – and one of the most poorly taught, in my opinion.

So whether you’re publishing your first guest post or running enterprise link building campaigns for a Fortune 500, the core idea is the same: the websites already linking to your competitors have proven they’ll link to content on your topic. So your job is simply to give them a reason to link to you instead of (or in addition to) them. 

This guide is built to work for both ends of the spectrum: newer to link building, and intermediate or advanced, without watering down either. 

Let’s get into it.

Step 1: Identify the Right Competitors (Most People Skip This)

This is actually the step that will quietly determine whether your entire link building campaign works. As picking the wrong competitors and spending three weeks chasing links will end up with no realistic chance of winning. Pick the right ones and your hit rate can triple before you even send a single email. 

The two kinds of competitors (and why one is much more useful)

There are two ways to define a competitor in search, and they actually produce completely different prospect lists.

• Domain-level competitors – websites that rank for a broadly similar set of keywords to yours. So let’s say you run a project management SaaS, your domain-level competitors are Asana, Monday, ClickUp, and Trello – these are your obvious rivals. 
• Page-level competitors – specific pages outranking you for specific keywords you care about. So, for our given example earlier – for the keyword “best project management software for agencies”, your page-level competitor might be a mid-tier review blog you’ve never heard of.

Here’s the part other guides miss: page-level competitors almost always produce better prospect lists than domain-level competitors do – this happens for three reasons:

• Realistic authority match – a DR42 review blog that’s ranking for your keyword has a backlink profile you can actually replicate. Asana’s backlink profile, as an example, is full of TechCrunch features and Fortune 500 case studies you’ll never land – realistically.
• Topical precision – the websites linking to a page about project management for agencies are actually far more likely to link to your page on the same topic than sites that are linking to Asana’s homepage.
• Less competition for the same links – every in-house SEO specialist in your space is mining for the same Asana’s backlinks, but almost no one is missing the DR42 blog links.

For beginners:

If you’re new to the competitor link-building strategy, just do this:

1. Open a Google Incognito window, so your search history doesn’t skew the results.
2. Search your top 5 money keywords – the ones you’d most want to rank for.
3. For each search activity, you can write down the top 3 to 5 organic results – just skip Reddit, Wikipedia, and giant brands you can’t realistically compete with.
4. Group URLs together. You’ll usually have here 5 to 10 websites showing up repeatedly across your searches – that’s your competitor list.

Now, you have a list of pages whose backlink profiles are actually worth analyzing with Ahrefs. You can move straight to step 2. 

For intermediate and advanced SEOs:

The process above leaves a lot of the average sites on the table. So here’s the version that actually scales:

Pull your full keyword universe, not just your money keywords. You can export every keyword where you currently rank positions 4 to 20 – these are the keywords where one or two good links could realistically push you into the top 3, which is where you can see actual traffic lives. So in Ahrefs, go to Site Explorer → Organic Keywords, then filter to positions 4 to 20 with a minimum volume threshold (I’d suggest just 100 per month, but adjust for your niche).

Cluster the keywords by intent and topic. Don’t analyze all 800 SERPs individually – you’ll burn out when you reach keyword 50. Simply cluster them into 8 to 15 topical groups (e.g., “agency onboarding, “client reporting, “resource planning”). So tools like Keyword Insights or a quick clustering script will do this activity in minutes. So each cluster actually becomes a separate mini campaign. 

For each cluster, identify the 3 to 5 page-level competitors that appear most often in the top 10. These are your non-obvious competitors, like niche blogs, comparison websites, and industry publications that already dominate your topic but aren’t on your sales team’s radar – so these are usually your highest-value link targets. 

Build a competitor authority matrix. So, for each page-level competitor, you have to capture:

Domain Rating (DR)

• Total referring domains to the specific ranking page (not the entire website)
• How many of your priority clusters rank in
• Approximate content age and last-updated date.

Then apply the DR ±15 rule. Realistically, here, you can only replicate the backlink profiles of sites within roughly 15 DR points of yours. So websites that are significantly above that will have backlinks you can’t win (sites like national press, .edu, .gov citations from research partnerships). So websites significantly below aren’t worth your time. The sweet spot really is here: your DR ±15, ranking for clusters you care about.

Step 2: Pull Their Backlinks (Paid and Free Methods)

So now you have your competitor list. The next step is to choose whether you’re working from a list of 1,000 real prospects or 4,000 rows of noise. 

Free workflow (no paid tools required)

If you’re not paying for Ahrefs or SEMRush, you can still run this entire campaign – it just takes longer. Here are your options:

• Google Search Console + Bing Webmaster Tools. – Start with your own baseline so you know which backlinks you already have and don’t double pitch sites.
• Ahrefs Webmaster Tools (free) – verify your website, and you’ll get limited backlink data on competitors via their free Site Explorer tier. Though capped, it is just enough for 5 to 10 competitors. 
• Ubersuggest free tier. – three competitor lookups per day – obviously slow but workable.
• Manual SERP scraping. – for any competitor URL, search link:competitorurl.com variants, plus “competitorbrand” mentions on industry sites. – laborious but will surface enough editorial backlinks that tools sometimes miss. 

You can expect free workflow to give you maybe 30 to 40% of what paid tools can see. So that’s still, if you’d ask me, enough to win meaningful backlinks – it just means smaller, more focused batches.

Paid workflow

If you want to use tools, here’s how to do it:

• Ahrefs Site Explorer → Backlinks. – This is the most complete index. Filter to Dofollow, One link per domain, and Live before actually exporting. You can skip these filters, and your CSV will double in size with no extra value. 

• Semrush Backlink Analytics. – useful as a second source, as it can catch backlinks that Ahrefs sometimes misses (and vice versa). This is for high-priority competitors; you can pull from both and dedupe. 
• Page-level vs. domain-level pulls. You can export backlinks to specific ranking pages first, not the whole domain. Given that page-level backlinks will have a 3 to 3 times higher replicate rate. 

At the end of step 2, you should have one master spreadsheet per competitor (or one combined sheet with a competitor column), which contains at a minimum: referring URL, referring domain, DR, anchor text, link type, first seen date, and target URL. Don’t try to qualify yet – just pull clean data. 

Now we filter.

Step 3: Filter for Winnable Links (Backlink Qualification Scorecard)

Now, having a typical export of 1,200 raw backlinks is not enough – you should filter them down to roughly 60 to 100 real backlink prospects. 

Here are six qualification criteria that you can follow:

• Domain Rating (DR) – so within DR ±25 range – though higher isn’t always better, like a DR80 site that never replies is worth less than a DR35 site that links easily.
• Organic traffic to the linking page – so if the page has zero traffic, the link truly passes minimal value. Simply aim for at least 100 monthly organic visits to the specific page linking out.
• Topical relevance  – as simple as this: is the linking page actually about your subject matter? – tight topical relevance always beats high DR almost any time – great to have both, of course.
• Link type – editorial in-content backlinks = highest value
• Do/nofollow – dofollow preferred, but don’t auto-reject nofollow links from high-trusted sites

You should have a ranked prospect list, sorted by source, segmented by which steal link building strategy best fits each backlink. 

Step 4: Four Tactics, Run as One Campaign

Most of the link building guides you’ll see present these as four separate options – well, in fact, you can run them in a specific sequence so that the backlink prospects you fail to convert in one stage will become warm leads in the next. 

Tactic 1: Link Intersect (highest hit rate, run first)

Websites linking to multiple competitors but not you – this logic is pretty overwhelming – so they’ve linked to three websites on this topic and somehow missed yours. So your link building outreach pitch here is essentially, “you covered X, Y, Z; here’s a fourth resource worth including.”

Tactic 2: Broken Link Reclaim (highest conversion rate per pitch)

You need to find competitors that have 404’d, been redirected, or been removed entirely. So you can pitch your live equivalent as the link replacement. Use tools like Ahrefs’ Broken Backlinks report – here’s a deeper walkthrough on how to regain lost backlinks in Ahrefs if you want the full process.

This link reclamation tactic has one of the highest per-pitch conversion rates, given that you’re solving an actual problem for the linking website — broken backlinks can hurt their SEO and UX. 

Tactic 3: Skyscraper Replacement (slowest, but compounds)

This skyscraper SEO link building approach requires you to identify your competitor pages with the most backlinks. Then build something that’s genuinely better – original data, proprietary framework, real case study – all that’s current to 2026. 

The bar here is much higher than it was five years ago. Given that longer and prettier doesn’t work anymore. So differentiation here now means you need to have original research, exclusive interviews, or a framework that no one else has published. 

Tactic 4: Guest Post Replication (use as warm-up, not standalone)

Start finding publications that your competitors have guest-posted on. Then, pitch adjacent topics – simply find them via site:publication.com “author bio” or by searching a competitor founder names +  contributor, or by searching competitor founder names + contributor. For a more systematic approach, here’s how to lookup guest post opps on Ahrefs.

The sequencing insight here matters: so let’s say prospects who ignored your Link Intersect pitch in stage one might respond to a guest post pitch in stage four – given that you’re offering them work, not just asking for a backlink, given that you’re offering them work, not just asking for a backlink. If you’re weighing which format to lead with, this breakdown on guest posting vs niche edits is worth a read.

Step 5: Outreach That Survives a 2026 Inbox

There are three shifts that have changed cold outreach in the last 24 months:

• Link prospects assume every cold email is AI-generated.
• Reply rates on templated outreach have roughly halved.
• Personalized used to work (i.e., “I loved your article on X”) now reads as an obvious AI bait.

What actually works now is specificity that will prove you actually read the page. Either you 

Three shifts have changed cold outreach in the last 18 months:

• Prospects assume every cold email is AI-generated.
• Reply rates on templated outreach have roughly halved.
• The personalization that used to work (“I loved your article on X”) now reads as obvious AI bait.

What actually works now is the specificity that proves you actually read the page. So you can either reference a specific argument, a specific data point, or a specific commenter. 

Broken Link template 

Link Intersect template 

Skyscraper Replacement template 

Final Thoughts

Stealing competitors’ backlinks isn’t just a one-off campaign – you can do this as a monthly motion that can compound over time as you run it. 

If you’d rather skip the spreadsheets and have an actual experienced team to run this entire workflow for you, you can check out our enterprise link building services, or if you’re an agency, our white label link building services.