Link Gap Analysis That Names the Mechanism Behind Every Link

The deliverable here is not a list of domains. A Link Intersect export takes eleven minutes and tells you nothing about whether you could ever get the link. What you get is a ranked set of opportunities with the mechanism named for each one: how the competitor came to have that link, whether the mechanism repeats, and what it would take on your side to earn the equivalent. Typically forty to ninety domains survive that classification out of several thousand raw rows, and the size of the survivor set is itself one of the findings. Choosing the comparators: Four to six sites, and at least one you do not consider a competitor. The pages outranking you for your commercial terms frequently belong to a consultancy, a review platform or a well-funded content operation in an adjacent category, and excluding them because they are not on your battlecard is how these analyses end up describing a market that does not exist. We will propose the list and argue for the odd one. What gets stripped out: Syndication tails, scrapers, and the same press release counted forty times. Directory and aggregator noise. Domains that sell links, which we remove entirely rather than presenting as an opportunity, because listing purchasable inventory as a gap is how this analysis gets used to justify buying. Links pointing at a competitor's careers page, status page or login screen, which tell you nothing about how they win rankings. How each survivor is classified: By acquisition mechanism. Journalist citation traced back to a data study or a reactive comment. Integration or partner directory entry, which depends on the integration existing. Community list or awesome-list inclusion, which in developer tools is a large and under-worked category. Conference speaker or sponsor page. Customer case study published by the customer. Open-source dependency listing. Review platform profile. Each is then marked as reproducible now, reproducible after a product or programme change, or not reproducible, and the third category is the one that earns the fee. The honest part: Some of your competitor's best links exist because of a fact about their business you do not have. They shipped an integration with a platform you have not integrated with. They funded a study across a customer base larger than yours. They were founded in 2014 and got written about when the category was new. We name those explicitly instead of burying them in a list you will spend six months failing to work through. What this is not: Not an outreach campaign, and we do not pursue the opportunities under this engagement. Not a content plan, though the analysis usually implies one. Not a monthly monitoring subscription, because competitor link profiles do not change fast enough to justify one and we would be selling you a refreshed export. Who this is not for: Teams who want the list to hand to an outreach vendor for volume emailing, which will burn the reproducible opportunities and produce nothing from the rest. Companies in a category where the top three competitors are all buying links, where the finding will be that the gap is purchased and the recommendation will be to ignore it, and you can have that answer on the first call for free. What arrives: One working session where we walk your team through the ranking, then the annotated sheet with the mechanism, the evidence URL and the reproducibility judgement for every surviving domain. The ranking is by what you could plausibly earn in two quarters, not by domain authority.