Link Gap Analysis That Separates Reachable From Not

A three-competitor gap in games or sports media typically returns 700 to 1,200 domains. Between 40 and 90 of them are reachable by you inside a year. This engagement exists to identify that second number and to explain, per domain, what the competitor did to get there. Why the tool export is not the deliverable: Ahrefs Link Intersect and Majestic Clique Hunter both produce the 1,200-row list in four minutes, and every agency pitching you has run it. The list contains the competitor's parent company links, their 2014 directory residue, a conference sponsorship that no longer exists, three acquisitions' legacy profiles and a syndication network that fired once. Handing that over as a plan is handing over homework. The work is reading the pages. Method: Exports from Ahrefs and Majestic, joined and deduplicated on registrable domain via the Public Suffix List, in DuckDB so the joins are reproducible and you can rerun them later. Liveness and link attribute confirmed with a Screaming Frog crawl of the actual linking URLs rather than trusting the index. Then the classification, which is manual: every surviving domain is opened and the linking page is read, and the link gets assigned an acquisition route. Editorial mention. Product review. Event or team sponsorship. Staff byline. Tool or integration listing. Community and forum. Syndicated pickup of a single PR event. Directory. Purchased. What reachable means here: A route you can execute with the assets, budget and people you currently have, inside twelve months. A link earned by a competitor's 2019 Series B announcement is not reachable. A link from an esports organisation's partner page is reachable if you can fund a team deal at that level, and I will say what that level costs. A link from a games journalist's roundup is reachable if you have a product they would install. Each reachable domain carries the route, the named contact where one exists, an effort estimate in working days and a cash cost where the route has one. What comes back: A classified dataset as CSV and Parquet, with the DuckDB queries so your team can rerun the study against new competitors. A written memo, typically 18 to 24 pages, covering the shape of each competitor's profile and what it reveals about how they operate: which of them buys, which of them has an in-house newsroom, which one has a single dominant route you could copy this quarter. A prioritised route list. Then 90 minutes on a call, recorded, where I defend the classification and you argue with it. What this is not: Not outreach. Nobody is contacted during this engagement. Not a disavow audit, which is separate work with a different method. Not a monthly tracking subscription, because a gap moves too slowly to be worth watching monthly and reselling that as a retainer is padding. Not a rating-score forecast, because I cannot forecast a third party's proprietary metric and neither can the people who do. Who should not buy this: Anyone who intends to hand the reachable list to a vendor who bills per link. The routes here mostly cost time and relationships rather than a unit price, and a per-link vendor will quietly substitute the cheap sites they already own. Also anyone who already knows their answer and wants a document supporting it. Twice I have delivered a memo concluding the competitor's advantage was not links at all but forty per cent more indexed pages of genuine product content, and in both cases that was the unwelcome finding. After delivery: One follow-up call at 60 days, included, to review what the routes returned in practice. If the classification was wrong somewhere, I want to know which route it was.