The problem this solves
A competitor's backlink profile is a public ledger of every authority bet that paid off for them: the content that earned coverage, the partnerships that produced links, the digital PR that actually landed. Reading that ledger properly means sorting thousands of referring domains by real authority, separating earned links from directory noise, and tracing which specific pages attract links on their own. Done by hand it is a week of analyst time, so it gets done rarely and shallowly.
Meanwhile link building at most companies runs on generic tactics - guest posts, resource pages, cold outreach - with generic results. The far better starting point is sitting in the rival's profile: a proven map of who links to companies like yours and which content formats they link to. An autopsy converts that map into a strategy you can execute, with targets and formats that are already validated by your own market.
How the mission runs
- Pull the full profile. Backlinks retrieves the competitor's referring domains, anchor text distribution, and link history. The agent baselines the profile's shape - total domains, authority spread, velocity over time - so the strategy that follows is grounded in what actually built their authority.
- Rank what matters. Referring domains are sorted by authority and relevance, with directory noise, expired domains, and boilerplate links filtered out. What remains is the list worth studying: the publications, communities, and partner sites whose links plausibly move rankings in your shared category.
- Trace the linkable assets. The agent identifies which competitor pages earn links organically - the studies, tools, templates, and definitive guides that referring domains chose to cite. Each asset is profiled: what it is, who linked to it, and why it worked, since these formats are your proven blueprints.
- Read the velocity story. Link acquisition over time reveals campaigns: spikes around launches, steady editorial programs, or a purchased-looking burst. The agent annotates the timeline with what the competitor shipped in each period, separating repeatable strategy from one-off events that would be wasted effort to copy.
- Write the replicable strategy. Everything lands in a Google Doc as an actionable plan: the target-domain list worth pursuing, the content formats with demonstrated pull, and a sequenced set of plays with the evidence behind each. It reads as a strategy document you could hand a content lead today.
The prompt
This is the exact objective the agent receives. Swap the obvious placeholders for your own domain, segment or channel and run it as-is from the console, Slack, or the API.
What comes back
A Google Doc containing the full autopsy: the competitor's strongest referring domains ranked by authority and relevance, the link-velocity timeline annotated with campaign inferences, a breakdown of their most-linked assets and why each earned coverage, and a replicable strategy section - target list, content formats, and sequenced plays - built from what demonstrably worked in your market. Raw link data stays attached to the mission run for verification.
Make it yours
- Run the autopsy on two or three rivals and ask for the intersection: domains that link to multiple competitors are your warmest link targets.
- Point it at the category leader even if you never compete with them directly, since their profile shows what the strongest version of the strategy looks like.
- Ask for a gap section listing the authoritative domains that link to your competitors and have never linked to you, prioritized as an outreach queue.
Frequently asked questions
How current is the backlink data?
Backlinks reflects the most recent index of the competitor's profile when the mission runs. Link indexes update continuously but discover new links on a lag of days to weeks, so the Doc stamps its retrieval date, and quarterly re-runs keep the velocity read honest.
Can the agent tell earned links from paid ones?
It infers from pattern: anchor text distribution, domain quality, and acquisition bursts that fail to line up with any shipped content are flagged as likely paid or programmatic. The Doc labels these inferences clearly so you never build a strategy on a competitor's purchased spike.
Does this mission do outreach?
This playbook produces the strategy document and stops there, which keeps the run fast and review-friendly. The target list is formatted so a follow-up mission or your own team can execute outreach against it, and any mission that sends email on your behalf goes through your approval queue.