Competitor link analysis, starting from your ad auctions
You already know who beats you for the clicks you pay for. The same rivals tell you where links are being won.
Auction insights hands you a ranked list of real competitors for your money terms. SEO people usually guess that list. You get it from the account you already manage.
A seven-step runbook
Export the rivals
In Google Ads open auction insights for your best campaign and note the five domains with the highest impression share above yours.
Pull their referring domains
Use Ahrefs, Semrush, Majestic or Moz. Each shows a competitor's backlink profile; export the referring domains with Domain Rating and traffic.
Find the overlap
Link gap tools (Ahrefs calls it Link Intersect, Semrush calls it Backlink Gap) list sites that link to two or more rivals but not to you.
Cut the noise
Remove directories, scraped lists, forums that allow anyone to post and anything in a language you do not sell in.
Match against inventory
Open the marketplace and filter by niche, language, Domain Rating and traffic. Compare the same domains with your shortlist.
Score by price and relevance
A mid-range site that covers your topic usually beats a famous site that does not. Note price next to each candidate.
Order a small first batch
Put five to ten domains in the basket, review the total and pay. Log the date so you can read results later.
What the analysis can and cannot tell you
A competitive link analysis shows where rivals are mentioned. It does not show why Google ranks them. A rival may rank because of content, brand searches or age, with links playing only a minor part.
Stay sceptical.
Treat it as a map of publishers who cover your topic and accept outside material. That is all. Overlap is a hint rather than a recipe.
Also expect gaps in the data. Every tool crawls its own slice of the web and refreshes on its own schedule, so two exports of the same rival will disagree. Our own crawler and our own index have the same limits, which is why we show Domain Rating, traffic and referring domains on every row and let you judge.
A word on privacy of method: all of this runs on exports you control. You do not need to hand your ad account to anyone to build the list, and you should not.
Repeat the exercise every quarter. Rivals come and go in auction insights, and the sites that cite them change with them.
A tiny hypothetical run
Say auction insights lists five rivals. This is an invented example. After exporting, one of them has 800 referring domains and the others between 150 and 400. Together they share 60 sites that link to at least two of them but not to you.
Strip out directories, forums and foreign-language sites and 22 remain. You check each in the marketplace and find 9 listed, with prices from $40 to $180. Buying five of the nine as a first batch costs roughly $500.
Is that a good result? You cannot know yet. Seen this way, the exercise is cheap research that ends in a bounded purchase, which is what a PPC manager would want.
Filters that save an afternoon
- Organic traffic above a floor you set, e.g. 1,000 visits a month.
- Language matches your ad targeting.
- Niche matches the landing page, not just the brand.
- Referring domains count looks proportionate to Domain Rating.
- No obvious outbound link farm on the page you would sit on.