Competitor link gap analysis, ranked by what is winnable

Roughly one link in five that a competitor holds is realistically winnable. The rest belong to a partnership, an acquisition, a decade-old redirect, or a journalist who owed somebody a favour. This engagement finds that fifth and puts it in the order you should attack it, so your team does not spend a quarter chasing links that were never available to it. On day fourteen you receive: A sheet of every referring domain held by the competitors you name and not by you, with four columns that decide anything: how the link was acquired, whether that route is repeatable by you specifically, an estimate of what it is worth to the page it would point at, and the effort in hours to get it. Under that, a written note of around two thousand words on the shape of the gap, not the rows themselves. Then a working session where we take your team through the top twenty entries and answer the awkward questions live. How the list is built: Ahrefs and Majestic for the raw referring-domain sets, deduplicated by root domain and stripped of anything with no organic traffic of its own. Then the part no tool does: one of us opens the referring page and reads it. Each row is classified by acquisition route, editorial mention, contributed article, directory, sponsorship, tool listing, integration partner, customer story, or dead-link reclamation, because the route decides whether you can copy it and the route is in nobody's export. That classification is not handed to an analyst. It is done by the partner who will be defending the recommendation on the call. Where these usually land: More often than not the conclusion is uncomfortable. The commonest version: the competitor's advantage is not a link gap, it is that they have been publishing since 2017 and you started last year. We have delivered that four times and told the client to move the money to content. The second commonest: the gap is real but concentrated in one route you cannot use, typically an integrations directory that requires shipping something you have not built. That goes on the first page of the note rather than the appendix, with the cost of the workaround next to it. If we are three days in and can see the analysis will not change a decision you have not already taken, we stop and refund the balance. That has happened twice. Limits of the method: Third-party link indexes are incomplete and they disagree with each other. Expect ten to twenty percent of what we list to be stale by the time you act on it. Confidence is flagged per row instead of resolved into one clean number. There is no gap score in this deliverable, because a single figure invites a target and the target then quietly becomes the strategy. We do not run outreach here. We do not audit your existing profile for toxicity, we do not produce disavow files, and we will not estimate how long closing the gap takes, because that depends on the capacity of people we have not met. Not for: Anyone who wants ammunition for a board slide with a taller competitor bar on it. Anyone whose competitor set is everyone ranking in the top ten rather than a named list. Sites under six months old, where the gap against an established rival is age and nothing else. Teams who have already decided and want the analysis to agree with them. What moves the price: The number of competitors, whether the market is one country or several, and whether a second language is involved. Multi-country work costs more because the same domain plays a different role in each market, so the classification is redone rather than translated. What buyers do with it: Most take the top twenty rows straight to whoever runs their outreach. Sometimes that is us, under a separate engagement; more often it is their own team or an agency already on retainer. The order is the product. It is built so the first five entries are things one person can start on Monday morning without waiting for a content brief, a legal review or a product release, and so the entries that need six weeks of internal work sit lower down with that dependency written next to them. The commercial reason to know this: Outreach capacity is the constraint in almost every in-house team, and it gets spent on whatever list is nearest. A wrong list costs a quarter of that capacity and shows up as flat rankings under a busy activity report. If your team is committing its next two quarters, this order decides what they return.