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How to Use Ahrefs' Backlinks Checker to find Your Competitor's Customers

Ahrefs' Backlinks Checker tool is a pretty powerful tool. And one very interesting thing it can be used for is to compile a list of your competitor's customers. This trick is a great example of how a growth person can work with a sales team to compile a list of leads.

First, an important caveat

This whole post is constrained by a very big caveat: this trick only works if your competitor's customers link to your competitor's web site. To make this more explicit: Competitor A's customers link to Competitor A's site. Still confused about this caveat? It will become more concrete if you read through the rest of the post.

Simply put, backlinks are links from one web site to a page on another web site. This link is a backlink to Microsoft's Investor Relations page. This link is a link to a page which defines the term "backlinks". In fact, one of the original insights that Sergey Brin and Larry Page had when they first founded Google was that, for any given web site, the number of backlinks to it was a proxy for that site's quality. Their first search engine algorithm was called, appropriately, Backrub.

Ahrefs' Backlinks Checker allows you to figure out which sites link to which other sites. It provides a free version of the tool here. For the purposes of this post, I will be using the free version; the paid version has more extensive data available. You can read more about the size of Ahrefs' links db here.

To get an idea of what you see when you enter a URL, here's the data returned for some sites which link to Mighty Networks.

Consider the first site returned, that of The World Future Society. Why is this site returned as a backlink to Mighty Networks? Well, if you scroll all the way to the bottom of The World Future Society's web site, you will see this footer:

And this is the tell--The World Future Society uses Mighty Networks' software to host its community! Mighty Networks exposes its customer list via backlinks.

In fact if you click on the Privacy Policy in this footer, you are taken to Mighty Networks' web site! What this means: if you compete with Mighty Networks, you can use Ahrefs' Backlinks Checker to quickly compile a list of their customers to poach.

So you can generalize this: if a company's customers link to the company's web site on their own sites, you can use Ahrefs' Backlinks Checker to infer a list of customers for that company.

Amazing! What can I do with all of this data?

One possibility is that you download all of the links, extract the host name from those links, and then run those TLDs through Rocketreach to find executives' names and contact information. ("Host name" means, for example, https://www.microsoft.com/ as opposed to https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/investor .)

Then you can run a drip campaign via Klaviyo to market your company's product.

Other possibilities

You don't necessarily need to look for your competitor's customers. Maybe your product complements another piece of software out there. If you can compile a list of users of that software using this trick, then you have a set of leads. You can pitch these companies by saying "Hey, we noticed you use [software] and [our software] complements it by doing [X]. You should take a look at us!"

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