# Sites that link to competitors but not you: a gap-analysis checklist

The cheapest link prospects you will ever find are the sites that already link to your competitors. They publish in your niche, they link commercially rather than editorially by accident, and someone has already proven they say yes. The work is sorting them.

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# The comparison, step by step

List 3-5 real competitors. Not the giants — the sites you actually lose deals to. If a competitor’s entire link profile is press coverage you can’t get, it pollutes the gap.
Pull referring domains for each and merge them into one set, noting how many competitors each domain links to. A site linking to three of your competitors and not you is a stronger signal than one linking to a single competitor.
Subtract your own referring domains. What remains is the gap: sites that demonstrated willingness, to someone else.
Score the gap, not the domain. A low-authority site that links to every tool in your category is a better prospect than a high-authority site that linked once, two years ago, in a news story.

# What disqualifies a gap domain quickly

The links are all in comment threads or user profiles — decayed before you start.
The site exists to sell links and says so in its footer. That is a purchase, not a gap.
The “competitor link” is a syndicated press release. It won’t repeat for you.
The domain links to you already under a different URL variant you forgot you had.

# From gap to pitch

For each surviving domain, find the exact page that carries the competitor link. Your pitch is to that page, not to the homepage: “your comparison of link monitors lists three tools, here is what is missing”. Useful additions get accepted; “please also link to me” does not.

Tools like AgentLinkOps automate the subtraction — its competitor backlinks view lists the sites linking to named competitors but not to you, with spam screening on each source. The filtering logic is the same by hand; the tool just keeps the merge honest when the lists get past a few hundred domains.

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