Best free ways to find a competitor's backlinks, compared on what each tool withholds

There is a clean rule behind every free tier in this category, and once you know it the whole question answers itself. A vendor can hand you your own link data for nothing, because verifying that you own a domain costs it almost nothing. A rival's link profile is the finished product of crawling the entire web, which is the expensive asset, so that is the part with a price on it.

So this page is ordered on one criterion, applied to everybody including us: what does each vendor publish about what its free tier withholds? A vendor that writes the restriction down is doing you a favour, because the alternative is finding out after you have built a workflow on it.

How far each free tier gets you on somebody else's domain

What a free route can honestly produce

Three outputs are reachable without paying anything, and they are worth having.

A size comparison. One free Semrush lookup per rival gives you referring domain counts, which tells you whether you are three times behind or thirty. That changes the plan; a prospect list does not.

A mention list. Searching a rival's exact brand name, and then the founder's name, surfaces the publications that cover companies in your category. Many of those mentions carry no link, which makes them the cheapest outreach list in existence, because the page already named a competitor and the editor already decided the subject is relevant.

A roundup list. Searching the category phrase with words like best, top and alternatives finds the comparison pages your rivals sit on. Those pages are the highest value link targets in most categories and they cost nothing to find.

The point at which free stops, and what to do instead

Free stops the moment you need the full set of domains linking to three rivals and not to you. That report exists in exactly one place, behind a paid crawl, and assembling an approximation of it from free lookups takes longer than the month of access costs. The honest advice is to buy one month of one tool, pull the gap export, cancel, and work the list for a quarter.

Avoid the other route, which is the free tool that asks for an email and returns a number it will not explain. If a tool does not name the index behind it, you are the product rather than the user.

Where the paid tools beat us, said plainly

We sell no backlink checker, free or paid, hold no link index and run no crawler. On the subject of this page every vendor above is ahead of us, and a reader who wanted a rival's link profile should use the one month route and ignore us entirely.

Our rendered pricing page also shows no SSO, no white label, no SOC 2 and no ISO line, and covers one business per plan outside the agency tier, which covers ten. The suites are better equipped on procurement as well as on links.

The competitor data that is free on our side, and what it measures

There is one competitor comparison you can run for nothing today, and it has nothing to do with links. Ask ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude or Google AI Overviews the question your buyer would ask, worded as a buyer would word it and naming nobody, and read which businesses the answer names. If a rival is in every answer and you are in none, you have found a channel that no link report measures.

AI Knows Us runs that comparison at scale and keeps the record. Our rendered pricing page states that every plan starts with the same free scan, that it needs no account and that the free plan stays free, and llms.txt states the rule that makes the result mean something: the buyer questions never name the business being measured. The paid arithmetic is published on the same page, which is unusual in this category: one credit is one buyer question asked on one AI app once, most checks use one credit, a Claude check uses 3, and a failed check refunds its credits. The US floor is $149 a month for SEO Start, which llms.txt states watches 0 buyer questions on 0 engines, so Growth at $299 is the cheapest plan reading all five surfaces.

Ahrefs does this job as well and beats us in two published ways: its Brand Radar page states each prompt is checked daily on every selected platform where ours is weekly on priority questions, and it lists AI Mode and Copilot, which we do not read at all. Rankscale lists nine engines on its pricing page against our five and publishes a REST API and branding removal on shared dashboards, which we do not. The one criterion on which our published number is the most precise is the cost of the expensive engine, where Ahrefs publishes 8 checks per update for Claude, Rankscale publishes a flat typical 0.25 credits per engine per prompt with no per engine weight, and we publish the exact credit weight.

Reading a competitor's own published files is the other free research route worth knowing, and its limits are specific. They are set out in our piece on what a competitor's robots.txt tells you, and the four things it cannot. We measured durable inbound links ourselves on 21 October 2026, reading 2,169 stored bodies (1,797 drafts plus 372 fetched) against all 2,082 pages tracked on this site: 932 of them, 44.8% of 2,082, carry no inbound link written into another page's body. No other page on this site links to that one.

Questions buyers ask about checking a competitor's links for free

Is there any genuinely free competitor backlink checker?

There is a free lookup, not a free report. Semrush publishes that its checker needs no account, and Majestic offers a demo search on one site every few days. Both give a headline figure. Neither gives the export you would work from.

Why does Ahrefs Webmaster Tools not show competitor links?

Because its own page says so: free access covers websites you verify, and unverified competitor analysis needs a paid subscription. The restriction is published rather than hidden, which is the useful part.

Does the Google link: operator still work?

Google has withdrawn it and publishes no replacement. Searching an exact brand name in quotes finds mentions instead, which is a different and still useful list.

What is the cheapest way to get a real gap report?

One month of one paid tool. Pull the gap export across three rivals, keep the domains linking to two or more of them, then cancel. The list takes a quarter to work through and does not go stale in thirty days.

Is there competitor research that is free and that nobody else is doing?

Asking the five assistants your buyer's question and reading which businesses get named. It costs nothing, it takes ten minutes, and almost nobody in a link building workflow has looked at it.