Link Gap Analysis That Names What You Can Actually Get

The export from any gap tool comes back with three or four hundred domains. On the health and food teardowns I have run, between 20 and 35 of them turned out to be both reachable and worth the effort. What you are buying is the shorter list, the reason each name is on it, and the reason the other three hundred are not. Method: Union of Ahrefs Link Intersect, Semrush Backlink Gap and Majestic Clique Hunter, deduplicated to root domain, because each index misses different things and the disagreement between them is informative on its own. Then the part no tool does: I open them. Every domain that survives the first cut gets a live check. Is the link still there today, is the linking page indexed, is it in the body or a footer template, does the linking page receive any traffic at all, and does the site have a rate card if the question is asked the right way. The classification: Open, meaning directories, trade associations, supplier and stockist listings, university spin-out registers, anything you qualify for and can simply claim. Earnable, meaning a journalist, a dataset, a research collaboration, a conference programme. Purchasable, with the price and my view on whether that price is defensible. Unrepeatable, meaning an acquisition, a founder's former employer, a personal friendship. Artefact, meaning expired domains, scraped copies, hacked footers and network sites, counted separately so nobody sets a target based on them. And exposure, meaning the links your competitor holds that would not survive a manual review, which is a different kind of finding and occasionally the most useful one in the file. What comes back: A working spreadsheet with classification, contact route and effort estimate per domain. A short written read on what the pattern says about how this category actually earns links, which in health is usually a small number of associations and a smaller number of correspondents. And a working session with your team to argue about sequencing, because your people know which relationships already exist and that knowledge reorders the list in a way no external analysis can. What I check that the tools do not: Whether the competitor's strongest links point at pages you have no equivalent of, which is a content finding rather than a link finding and is frequently the real answer. Whether their anchor distribution has a shape a reviewer would notice. Whether the domains cluster around one agency's client roster, which tells you both the vendor and the price. Whether a stretch of the profile predates a domain migration and is now redirect equity rather than a live link. Not included: No outreach. No link building. No monthly re-run. No content production. This stays audit-only, including when you like the list and ask me to go and get it. I will introduce you to people who do that work and I will review their proposals for you, but I do not sell the analysis and the execution to the same buyer in the same quarter, because the analysis stops being honest the moment it is a sales document for my own next engagement. Who this is not for: Teams who need the analysis to justify a budget already approved for a named vendor. Anyone with fewer than three genuine competitors in the organic results, where the exercise returns a list of coincidences. Sites under a manual action, which need a different piece of work first and should not be spending on acquisition until it is lifted.