How to find the backlinks your competitors have and you can actually buy

The set of domains that link to one or more of your competitors’ pages for a keyword and do not link to yours. It is a list of places where the sites that rank have earned or bought a vote and you have not. On its own it is a research artefact; it becomes a plan when each domain is tagged with whether it can be bought, for how much, and whether its authority passes verification.

Because you cannot buy it. A typical gap for a competitive keyword runs to hundreds of domains; across our catalogue only a fraction of any site’s referrers are carried by a marketplace at all. The rest were earned, and the way to get them is to be worth linking to. Spending the afternoon on those is spending it on a list you cannot act on.

The second cut is quality. A competitor with a hollow link profile is not a target to copy. Of the domains we measure, 24.7% read suspect (high link authority, no organic footprint); a gap map that does not filter them would send you to buy exactly the links a Google update discounts.

Give a target URL and up to five competitors, or let the top-ranking pages for your keyword stand in. We pull each competitor’s referring domains from an independent backlink index, subtract yours, and intersect the remainder with the catalogue. Every match is priced at the cheapest seller of that placement type, carries its verification, its survival record where we have one, and its Placement Score. The result is held at price for four hours so the plan you read is the plan you can buy.

POST /v1/targets/gap
{ "url": "https://yoursite.com/page", "competitors": ["rival-one.com", "rival-two.com"] }

→ { gap_total, carried, lines: [{ domain, price_credits, verification, placement_score, why[] }] }

• Domains linking to more than one competitor. A site that links to three of the pages that rank is a topical citation, not a coincidence.
• Verified, not merely rated. A claimed DR 60 that the index cannot see anyone visiting is a number, not a vote.
• In topic. The gap map says which of a topic’s top-ranking sites each domain already links to; a domain that links to none of them is a farm with a category label.
• Priced within its band. An ask far under comparable placements is the signature of bought authority, not a bargain; see plausibility.

It depends on the band. The median guest post across the catalogue is $170 at the buyer price; a DR 60–69 root domain runs $458. Gap links skew toward the upper bands because competitors who rank tend to have earned the good ones. Budget by the count you can afford in the band that matters, not by the size of the gap; the live distribution is on the pricing pages.