skillfulagents/public-skillset/competitor-link-prospects

Competitor Link Prospects

Generates a ranked link-building prospect list for outreach. For each competitor domain it pulls Ahrefs site-explorer/all-backlinks (one link per referring domain, history=live), filters referring-page titles to listicle/review/ comparison signals (best, top, alternative, review, vs, tools, comparison, ...), then merges across competitors so a domain that mentions multiple competitors ranks highest (hottest prospect — already covers the category).

Usage

uv run --env-file .env --with requests \
  .claude/skills/competitor-link-prospects/prospect.py \
  --domains competitor1.com,competitor2.com,competitor3.com \
  --out /workspace/output/link-prospects \
  --limit 150 --min-dr 20

Outputs <out>.csv ranked by (# competitors mentioned, domain rating, traffic), with columns: rank, refdomain, url_from, title, domain_rating, traffic_domain, is_dofollow, competitors_mentioned, n_competitors, first/last_seen.

Curate the raw list → outreach shortlist

prospect.py output is broad (PBN spam, directories, off-topic pages, competitor self-links). Run curate.py to get a vetted, editorial-only shortlist classified by outreach format (roundup / comparison / alternatives / review):

uv run .claude/skills/competitor-link-prospects/curate.py \
  --in /workspace/output/link-prospects.csv \
  --out /workspace/output/link-prospects-shortlist --min-dr 30

Drops: nofollow, DR<min, PBN/.shop/seolink spam, directories (toolify, producthunt, cbinsights, f6s, capterra/g2...), social/video/app stores, competitor-owned domains, content-farm subdomains (random -12345 subdomains), and pages whose title doesn't touch the category unless they mention 2+ competitors.

Configure your niche first (agent-onboarding writes these; keep them in sync):

• seo/config.json → link_prospecting.self_domains: the competitor domains you

prospect (so their own sites aren't treated as prospects).

• seo/config.json → link_prospecting.topic_terms: category vocabulary for the

title on-topic gate (e.g. for a CRM product: ["crm", "sales", "pipeline", ...]). Empty = gate disabled (broader, noisier list).

Writes <out>.csv; pair with a small markdown generator for a readable grouped brief.

Notes / gotchas

• Needs AHREFS_API_KEY. Costs Ahrefs units (Site Explorer). A ~4-competitor

run used ~6k units. Check budget first: /v3/subscription-info/limits-and-usage.

• Lower-tier Ahrefs plans cap all-backlinks at 100 rows/call regardless of

--limit, so each competitor contributes its top-100-by-DR filtered links. Use `--banded` to break the cap: it paginates by domain-rating bands (90-100, 80-90, ... down to --min-dr), one ≤100-row call per band, disjoint so dedup is clean. ~7 calls/competitor. This is the lever for a large pool.

• Depth per competitor has a real ceiling — most competitors only have ~100-250

DR≥30 editorial backlinks. To grow the pool, add more competitors (each surfaces fresh "best X tools" roundups), not more depth.

• Pages mentioning multiple competitors are the priority tier (they already cover

the category, so adding one more tool is the easiest sell). The merge step recomputes n_competitors across all pulls; sort by it.

• The title filter is deliberately broad → expect false positives (podcasts with

"vs", academic "review" articles, "Top 100 B2B" lists). Human-vet before outreach.

• Programmatic / auto-generated targets (CBInsights "Top X Alternatives",

ProductHunt alternatives, directories) appear but rarely accept manual additions — deprioritize vs. editorial listicles (blogs, magazines).

• mode=domain + aggregation=1_per_domain keeps the list to one best link per

referring domain. Bump --min-dr to tighten quality.