Competitor link gap, filtered down to what you can get

The filter is the deliverable: A raw intersect of four competitors typically returns three to four hundred referring domains. On the last six of these we ran, between 18 and 34 survived our reachability test. The rest were unreachable in principle: paid placements with a rate card, links inherited from a parent company, coverage of a funding round you have not had, directories that stopped accepting entries in 2019, or domains that have not linked to anyone outside their own advertiser list in two years. Handing over the full three hundred would be easier and would waste a quarter of your team's time. Why the standard export fails: The usual link-intersect report answers a question nobody asked, which is who links to your competitors. The question a growth lead actually has is narrower: what do we have to publish, be, or say in order to be linked to by the sort of site that already links to three of our rivals. So we build the set twice. Once from referring-domain intersects in Ahrefs and Majestic, and once from the SERP itself: for a defined query set, we take the top ten per query and count the domains linking to three or more of them. The second set is smaller, less flattering and far more useful, because it is drawn from the pages Google already treats as the reference set for those queries. What the filter tests: Is there a named editor or author with a live address. Has the domain linked to anyone in the last eighteen months who is not visibly a customer or an advertiser. Does it publish a media kit with rates, in which case this is media buying, and we say so and price it as such rather than pretending it is earned. Is it in your language and market. And would your compliance function sign the surrounding context — in fintech that question kills placements regularly, because a comparison page's own copy makes claims you are not allowed to appear beside. What the pattern usually shows: We count what the earned links actually point at, not just where they come from. In one recent set, 61 percent of the links the competitors had earned in eighteen months pointed at four artefacts: a price index, a salary survey, a free calculator and an annual report. That is a content brief with evidence behind it, and it is worth more than the domain list. In beauty the answer is usually less comfortable: coverage follows product launches with samples in editors' hands, on the publication's own calendar, which makes it a sampling and PR-timing problem rather than an SEO one. We will say that rather than sell you a substitute. We do not do: Outreach, pitching, placement buying, or anything that ends with money moving to a publisher. We also do not use domain-rating thresholds as a filter. A rating is one vendor's model of Google's model, and using it to sort targets discards the local trade press that actually moves a Dutch market while keeping expired-domain blogs with inflated scores. Wrong fit: Teams with nobody to own the follow-through. This produces a target set and an argument for each target; if there is no PR lead, content lead or founder who will do the asking, you are buying a document. Also wrong: anyone who wants the deliverable measured by row count, and anyone hoping the answer is a list of sites that will link to a product page. They will not, and the honest version of this work spends its time on what you would have to make instead. What arrives: The filtered set with a reason per domain and the specific person or desk to approach. The rejected set, with the rejection reason, so nobody rebuilds it next quarter. The artefact analysis: what earns links in your category now, ranked by how often it has done so. And a briefing session with whoever will carry it.