Link Gap Analysis: Which Competitor Links Are Winnable

A link gap export is not a plan. Of the domains linking to your three closest competitors and not to you, most are unreachable in any honest way: dead, sold, reciprocal, syndicated duplicates of a single original, or won by an asset you do not have and would not build. This audit returns the subset that is reproducible, with the mechanism by which each link was actually acquired written next to it, and it names the competitor links you should stop trying to copy. The dataset: Backlink data from Ahrefs, Majestic and Semrush merged rather than trusted individually, because in health and food these three disagree widely on smaller trade, clinical and academic sites. Deduplicated to root domain. Domains with no organic traffic of their own are dropped. So are pages carrying more than a dozen outbound commercial links, syndication mirrors, and anything Wayback shows changed ownership recently. Classification by acquisition mechanism: Every surviving domain is labelled with how the link was obtained, because that is the only thing that tells you what reproducing it would cost. In this sector the categories that matter are: citation of original data; professional body and register listings, including AfN, BDA, BANT and their international equivalents; NHS trust, university and course reading-list pages; supplier, distributor and stockist relationships; practitioner and clinician review panels; conference, sponsorship and CPD activity; journal, preprint and guideline citations; and paid placements, labelled as such so you can see what share of a competitor's profile you are being asked to admire. Scoring: Each target carries a winnable rating with its reason in a sentence: the named person or department to approach, the asset or credential you would need first, and an honest estimate of effort or cost. Where the answer is that you cannot get it, it says so and explains why. Domain Rating appears in the sheet because you will look for it, and it is not what the ranking is built on. What comes back: A working spreadsheet, a written note of ten to fifteen pages, and ninety minutes with whoever owns the channel. The note covers the three or four mechanisms that account for most of the gap, what your own profile holds that the competitors' do not, the links worth abandoning, and a sequenced first two quarters. It is written to be handed to an in-house team or to a supplier, and it names what a supplier should not be paid to do. Not included: No outreach. No placements. This is an audit and I do not use it as a pitch for delivery work. If you engage me afterwards it will be because you decided to, and the audit fee is not credited against it — a credit is an incentive to write a longer target list. Wrong buyer: Brands with fewer than roughly two hundred referring domains, where the answer is nearly always the same and does not need a paid audit to reach. Anyone who wants competitors selected by traffic rather than by who actually competes for the queries that convert. Teams looking for a document to justify a budget already decided. And anyone expecting a raw export: I do not hand over four thousand rows, and refusing to is most of what you are paying for. Before we start: I need the three to five competitors you consider real, not the ones a tool picked, plus read access to Search Console and whatever your team knows about how your existing links arrived. If nobody at your company knows how they arrived, say so — it is a normal answer and it changes where I begin.