In the age of AI and large language models, automated on-page optimization and content saturation, backlinks still hold their ground as an important factor deciding SERP position.

And the top SERP places are rarely won by blind chance; they are earned with hard and systematic work, implying carefully calculated link placements.  

That’s why, instead of guessing which links might work, smart SEO teams study what already works. Every know-how and every trick that gives a competitive edge is justified, including spying on one’s competitors.

This guide will teach you how to spy competitors backlinks with a structured approach. Read on to learn how to break down their backlink strategies and turn those into repeatable winning moves you can apply to your own site.

Identify the Right SERP Competitors to Analyze

Your attention is a valuable and limited resource, and you cannot focus on every brand name you see in SERPs. Knowing who is worth your attention and who isn’t is the key prerequisite to success.

Distinguish True SERP Competitors from Business Competitors

When you ask a random company representative about their competitors, they will most likely mention other businesses in the same niche. That’s normal business thinking, but it doesn’t work well for SEO. Search results don’t care who your sales team competes with.

Google doesn’t compare you with other businesses in the same niche; it only compares pages. Look at the pages immediately above and below your page, even if they belong to other industries, organizations, individuals, blogs, or other stuff unrelated to what you do.

That’s the key difference that matters for your backlink strategy. Because they require you to study the right targets.

True SERP competitors change depending on the query. For instance, a keyword about “best bicycles” will attract different pages than a keyword about the best food for pets. The same logic applies in local SEO, where the fiercest competition exists between geographic neighbors, not brand names or company sizes.

That’s why your competitor list should be focused on the relevant keywords, not the brand names that you normally compete with offline.

So, even before you start to check competitor backlinks, filter your targets properly:

  • Pages appearing on page one of your specific query.
  • Other websites that share similar content goals.
  • URLs matching search intent, not brand category.
  • Pages earning links for similar topics.

Once you sort these things, you’ll start to track competitors links with much higher efficiency.  

Segment Competitors by Intent, Content Type, and Authority

Even when you understand that your real competitors are the ones that Google puts next to each other, don’t assume they are all the same.

Subtle differences that only matter for SEO are important at this stage:

  • Some pages rank because they explain stuff. 
  • Others rank because they know how to sell effectively. 
  • A few rank just because they have a good history and a strong reputation; therefore, people trust them.

Intent is the first factor to consider when categorizing your SERP competitors. You can usually feel it right away. Is the page trying to help (informational intent) or to convert (transactional intent)?

Then look at what kind of content that page contains. Is it a long-read article? Is it a tool? Or a landing page? Maybe the page ranks because it contains high-performing user-generated content (e.g., reviews or comments), which amplifies perceived authority?

Those attract links in very different ways. Comparing them directly never really works.

Authority is the annoying part. Big sites can rank with links that wouldn’t help you at all. That’s not theory; that’s just how it goes.

So before digging into competitors backlinks, separate pages by things like:

  • What the page is actually doing.
  • What format it uses.
  • How strong the site feels.

After making that distinction, you’re no longer comparing apples to… whatever else Google throws in.

Spying on competitors’ backlinks takes discipline and patience. It’s not a one-time action, nor a free-riding exercise, but a repeatable research process that gets only better results with time and effort. 

Step 1: Select Priority Keywords and Ranking URLs

Before looking at the first backlink in SERPs, take a step back to understand what it is that you’re looking for. Analyzing competitors backlinks without keywords is like tracking an animal by looking at footprints, but without prior understanding of what animal you want to hunt.

A good way to start is to focus on the keywords that actually matter for your website. Those keywords would bring real value, like visibility and conversions.

The next step is to look at the first page with SERPs. Ignore the domain at this point. You should be interested in URLs. Google ranks pages, not brands or domains, and backlink profiles are built at that fundamental level.

Shortlist a small number of URLs that consistently show up in top positions. At this initial step, the goal is simple:

  • Correct keywords that matter to your site.
  • Which URLs (not brands or domains!).
  • Who consistently wins. 

Everything else will depend on you taking this step correctly (with proper priorities and targets in mind).

Within the shortlisted URLs, you’ll find plenty of backlinks to analyze. But not all of them are worth your attention. It’s like finding habitable planets (within the so-called Goldilocks zone) in the vastness of the universe: there are billions of planets out there, but only a handful of them might support life.

The first thing to analyze when you want to find backlink opportunities is placement. A backlink in the footer or header doesn’t carry the same weight (and probably doesn't matter that much for the site) as a link placed inside a post’s body.

Then turn your eyes towards relevance. This works in two dimensions:

  • the page/article/post where the link lives;
  • and how naturally the link fits inside that page.

Context matters more than the anchor text, and these things are continuously analyzed by humans and search engine bots alike.

As a sidenote, filtering links by relevance highlights how to select suitable placement, a task that is often handled more efficiently through an experienced backlink service rather than manual trial and error.

But in your manual filtering process, you should ignore links that only work because of brand size or partnerships you can’t replicate. Focus on links that look earned, not negotiated. 

Don’t try to process too much at first. Your goal is to spot patterns you can replicate and to narrow down the initial URL list to a few that really matter for your website (business, brand, etc.).

The essence of spying on competitors’ backlinks is understanding how their best-performing links came to be. Knowing that, you should be able to replicate their link acquisition methods, scale what worked, and even modify and improve them to be not just one, but two steps ahead.

Look attentively at each link and try to clarify the following nuances:

  • What is the context that the link appears in?
  • Is a competitor cited as a source?
  • Is a competitor mentioned as an example?
  • Is it mentioned as an alternative?

In each specific situation, your competitor must have used a slightly different acquisition method. Some you might replicate easily. Others might take a significant effort. While some may not even be worth replicating.

This step exists to underscore the importance of gauging the ease of replication. 

It’s a good time to remind you of the famous Pareto principle: 80% of the results can be achieved by applying just 20% of the effort. Why overkill yourself with doing more if it won’t bring an expected outcome?

The same principle applies when you spy competitors backlinks: the highest replication difficulty might be wise to skip, while channeling all your energy into those 20% of easy (quick wins) actions that will bring you 80% of success.

But you won’t know the answer in advance unless you run the sorting exercise to arrange backlink acquisition methods by replication difficulty. And looking at the overall picture, you should be able to prioritize and plan your actions.

High-performing SEO teams summarize their link-building work in a structured document that highlights quality, relevance, and strategic intent. All these things are critically important when you want to protect your time and avoid low-return outreach. 

Step 5: Build a Replication and Outreach Plan

A realistic plan of action is what you need at the end of each spying session. Once you have enough ideas on the competitors backlinks you can and want to replicate and improve, sketch answers to the following questions:

  • Which pages will you promote, and what content do you need for that?
  • Who do you need to contact and why?
  • What value can you offer to make the link valuable and worthy to them?  

The last part about incentives is very important. Your outreach pitch should deliver real value to your recipients, and the whole effort should be mutually beneficial, not just for yourself. So, think of what you’ll offer in exchange: perhaps, a link back to their site, or their brand mention? 

At this stage, documenting progress becomes critical, and tools like Surfer SEO help consolidate backlink, content, and ranking data into a clear report. This document will help you track progress and always know where you’re at every given moment of your outreach plan.

The goal is to adapt the best link acquisition practices to your realities. What worked for your competitors might not automatically work for you unless you tweak and change it to support your business goals, your organizational capabilities, processes, and even your work culture.

The Bottom Line

Spying on SERP competitors is a rather popular practice and is part of the SEO strategy. And just as with any market and business research, the initial step here is always about the analysis. 

You should learn to distinguish between your true SERP competitors and just domains and brands that you think are your business rivals. The former are the ones that compete with you for the same user queries, while the latter are the ones that share your industry but not your search intent, which makes them irrelevant for SERP analysis.

When you spy competitors backlinks, follow these steps: 

  1. First, look inwards at your best keywords that matter for your website.
  2. Then look at the top SERP positions and rank the backlinks they have by relevance and placement.
  3. Analyze how those backlinks were acquired and sort by acquisition method.
  4. Group all relevant backlinks by acquisition method to prioritize your targets (low-hanging fruits vs. others).
  5. Develop and execute a replication and outreach plan.

Adopting your competitors’ best link-building practices is a perfectly legal practice, and there is nothing immoral in it, as some mistakenly believe. But the ultimate result always depends on your ability to adapt whatever winning methods you discover to the specifics of your brand, business, and website.

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