How to find backlink opportunities without paying for a tool
Most link prospecting advice assumes you already pay for Ahrefs. Here is what you can actually do without a subscription, what each method quietly misses, and the honest point at which free stops being enough.
Published August 16, 2026
Link prospecting has one job: produce a list of sites that would plausibly link to you, ranked by whether the link would be worth having. Everything else — the outreach, the content, the negotiation — comes after. Get the list wrong and the rest is wasted effort at scale.
The expensive tools are good at this. They are not the only way to do it, and for a site with a few hundred referring domains, they are often overkill for the first pass.
Method 1: read your competitors' footers and resource pages
The least fashionable method is still one of the best. Pick five competitors, open the pages they use to link out — resource pages, partner pages, 'as featured in' strips, blogroll footers — and write down every domain you find. No tool required.
What it gets you: sites that already link out in your category, with the exact page that does the linking. That page is your outreach target, which is more than most tools hand you.
What it misses: everything earned rather than published — editorial mentions, guest posts, digital PR pickups. On most competitors that is the majority of the profile.
Method 2: search operators against your niche
Search for the shape of the page you want to appear on rather than the topic. A few that still work:
"your topic" + "write for us"
"your topic" + inurl:resources
"your topic" + "recommended tools"
intitle:"best {your category}" -site:yourdomain.comWhat it gets you: pages that are actively soliciting contributions or already curating lists in your category. High intent, low volume.
What it misses: quality control. A page that says 'write for us' is often a page that says yes to everyone, which is exactly the neighbourhood you want to avoid. Every result needs checking by hand.
Method 3: the free tier of a backlink index
Ahrefs, Moz and Majestic all expose a limited amount of data without a paid plan, and Google Search Console shows you your own links for free. Between them you can usually see who links to you and get a partial view of a competitor.
What it gets you: real data rather than inference. Search Console in particular is authoritative about your own profile in a way third-party crawlers are not.
What it misses: the competitor side, which is the part that matters for prospecting. Free tiers are deliberately shallow there.
Method 4: intersection — who links to several competitors but not you
This is the highest-yield method and the hardest to do by hand. A site that already links to three of your competitors has demonstrated it links to companies like yours; the fact it hasn't linked to you is an omission rather than a rejection.
Doing it manually means building three or more competitor backlink lists and intersecting them, which is where the free methods run out of road. Doing it automatically is what a link-gap or intersection tool is for.
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Where free stops being enough
Free methods break down at three specific points, and it is worth knowing which one you have hit before you pay for anything.
| You need | Free can do it? | Why |
|---|---|---|
| A list of 20 targets | Yes | Manual competitor reading gets you there in an afternoon. |
| Sites linking to 3+ competitors | Barely | Requires full competitor profiles, which free tiers cap. |
| Knowing the price before you ask | No | Nothing free publishes what a placement costs. |
| Ranking 200 targets by fit | No | Needs scoring against keywords and topical relevance at volume. |
| Checking your links stay live | No | Requires repeated crawling on a schedule. |
The pricing row is the one people underestimate. You can build a perfect prospect list for free and still have no idea whether the $600 quote you get back is a fair price or three times the going rate — and that is where most link budgets are actually lost.
A workable free-first process
- Export your own links from Search Console. This is your exclusion list — never pitch a site you already have.
- Read five competitors' outbound pages by hand. Twenty to forty domains, with the linking page recorded.
- Run three or four search operators for your category. Add the plausible ones; discard the obvious link farms.
- Check every survivor for real traffic and a real audience. A domain rating with no traffic behind it is a rented number.
- Only then ask about price — and check the quote against the market before you accept it.
That process costs nothing but time, and for a first campaign it is genuinely sufficient. The moment you are running it monthly, across more than one site, the time cost passes the tool cost and the maths flips.
Check a price
Before you accept a quote, see what that domain costs on the open market.