Link Building With Claude: Find the Links Your Rivals Have

Say you sell a small tool for tracking houseplant watering, and your site sits at position 9 for “plant watering schedule app”. Eight sites rank above you. Google Search Console’s free Links report says 41 sites link to you. It says nothing about who links to the sites beating you, or which of those would ever link to you.

That is the whole job of link building, getting other sites to link to yours, because Google still reads a link as a vote. The hard part was never the email. It is the list. Who links to your rivals, which of them would plausibly add you, and what page would the link sit on.

Claude is very good at that list once it can see the link data, and useless before. This guide is the workflow we use with the tool we build, ContextBolt SEO. It goes from a handful of rivals to a short, vetted list of pitches in one conversation. It also draws a hard line at outreach. The research is the agent’s job. The email is yours.

What Claude can and cannot do for link building

Ask Claude for link building ideas with nothing connected and you get the familiar list. Guest posts, broken links, resource pages, digital PR. None of it is wrong and none of it is about your site, because the model has no idea who links to you or to anyone else. The link graph changes every day, and a model’s training data is a frozen snapshot of the web.

Connect it to live link data and the job changes shape. Claude can pull the domains linking to your rivals, strip the ones that already link to you, sort what is left, check each prospect, and read the page a rival’s link sits on. That is the work of several tabs and a spreadsheet, done in one conversation.

The connection is MCP, the open standard Anthropic introduced in late 2024 for plugging agents into live data and tools. Reading your own link profile and your rivals’ is covered in backlink research with Claude. This post starts where that one stops, at winning new links.

Here is where I draw the line, and it is the opinion this post is built on. Automate the research. Never automate the ask. The people worth pitching already get templated link requests. An agent that sends fifty more for you has not saved you time. It has spent your name.

Google draws a separate line nearby, and it is worth knowing where it sits. Its spam policies list “using automated programs or services to create links to your site” as link spam, beside buying links and excessive link swaps. That is about tools that plant links themselves, like comment bots. Emailing a person who then decides to link is not what it describes. Bad automated outreach is a reputation problem, and on a small site that is worse.

Step 1: pick the rivals Google already ranks

The gap is only as good as the rivals you feed it. Most people type in the brands they think of as competitors. Those are the sites they lose customers to, which is not the same list as the sites they lose rankings to.

Read the live top ten for the query you want to move on instead. The sites above you there are the ones whose links your page is up against.

Copy this prompt

Show me the live top ten for "plant watering schedule app".
Which result is mine, and which two to four sites above me are
real product or guide pages rather than app stores, Reddit or
news sites? Those are the rivals for a backlink gap.

In ContextBolt SEO that is serp_overview, one credit. Skip the marketplaces and forums in the results. An app store listing and a Reddit thread earn their rank differently, and their links tell you nothing about what your page is missing. If you want the fuller comparison of what those rivals rank for, SEO competitor analysis with Claude walks it through.

Step 2: run the backlink gap

A backlink gap is the list of sites that link to your competitors but not to you. It is the best starting list link building has, because every site on it has already chosen to link to a page like yours.

Copy this prompt

Run a backlink gap for myplantapp.example against greenleaf.example and
wateringcan.example. Show the 50 strongest prospects. For each one,
tell me how many of my rivals it links to and flag anything with
a high spam score.

That is backlink_gap, three credits. It takes your domain and one to four rivals, and it returns up to 100 domains that link to them and not to you. Your own site and the rivals themselves are removed from the list, since a comparison page on a rival’s site would otherwise show up as a prospect. Each row carries three things.

• Link strength: How much ranking value that site passes to the rival it links to, on a 0 to 1000 scale. It is a property of the link, not the site. A huge publisher linking once from a buried page scores low.
• Rivals linked: When a prospect links to more than one of your rivals, the row says so, for example “links to 2/2”.
• Spam score: Anything at 30 out of 100 or above comes back marked to vet before pitching.

Here is the shape of what comes back. The format is the tool’s own; the sites and numbers are made up for the example.

1. homegardenhub.example: link strength 241/1000
2. urbanjungle.example: link strength 188/1000 · links to 2/2
3. plantcareapps.example: link strength 154/1000 · links to 2/2
4. freeappsdaily.example: link strength 97/1000 · spam 41/100,
   vet before pitching

The numbers are estimates from a large third-party link index, not Google’s own count. No outside tool sees Google’s full link graph, which is why two tools disagree about the same site. For picking who to pitch, estimates are plenty.

Step 3: sort by likely yes, not by strength

This is where most link building goes wrong, and it is where the agent earns its keep.

The gap comes back sorted strongest first, so the top rows are the most tempting. They are also, usually, the worst place to start. A high-strength link to a rival is often a news story, a big publisher’s feature, or a partner page. Those links came from a relationship or a moment you cannot recreate by email.

The rows that win are the ones that link to two or more of your rivals. A site that links to three watering apps is not reviewing one product. It is often keeping a list, a roundup, a resource page, a comparison. Lists get updated. Adding one more entry is a small edit for the owner, and you are handing them a better page.

Copy this prompt

Re-sort that gap for likelihood of a yes, not raw strength.
Top group: sites linking to two or more of my rivals with a
spam score under 30. Middle group: one rival, mid strength.
Park the rest. Give me the top group as a table.

On our example that turns 50 prospects into perhaps nine worth an hour each. That is the list. Everything after this step is about making those nine pitches good.

Step 4: vet each prospect before you pitch

Two checks per prospect, and both are quick.

Is the site itself worth a link? Link strength told you what the site passes to your rival. It did not tell you how strong the site is. For that, run backlink_overview on the prospect, three credits. It returns the site’s own domain rank on a 0 to 1000 scale, its referring domains and its spam score. A roundup on a site nobody links to is a link that does very little.

What page is the link on? The gap works at the domain level, so it tells you that a site links to your rival, not where. Find the page. If your agent can search the web, ask it to. If not, search Google yourself for the prospect’s domain and the rival’s name together, for example site:plantblog.example greenleaf. Then read the page.

Copy this prompt

For the top five prospects, run a backlink overview on each and
tell me its domain rank and spam score. Then find the page on
each site that links to greenleaf.example or wateringcan.example, and tell
me what kind of page it is and when it was last updated.

What you are looking for decides the pitch.

• A roundup or “best of” list: The easiest ask. Say what your product does that the listed ones do not.
• A resource or tools page: Also easy. Show the exact section you fit in.
• A comparison or review of one rival: Harder. Offer a fact the author can use, not a request to be added.
• A news story or a guest post: Usually a dead end for this list. Park it.
• A page last touched in 2021: The owner may be gone. Low priority, whatever the strength says.

Google’s rules also matter here. Paid links break its spam policies unless they are marked rel="sponsored" or rel="nofollow", which its guide to qualifying outbound links explains. So if a prospect asks for money, the link would have to be marked sponsored, which tells Google it was paid for rather than given as a vote. Decide on that basis, not on the price.

Step 5: draft the pitch from the page, then send it yourself

Now Claude is doing the thing it is best at, writing a short, specific note from a page it has read.

Copy this prompt

Draft a pitch to the owner of the first prospect. Name the page
and the section my app fits in. Say in one sentence what it does
that the apps already listed do not. Under 90 words. No flattery,
no "I hope this finds you well", and no ask for anything but a
look. I will edit and send it myself.

Read what comes back as if you were the person receiving it. A good pitch names the page, proves you read it, gives one reason your addition helps their readers, and ends. If you cannot say in one sentence why their readers need your page, the page is not ready and no email will fix that.

Then send it yourself, from your own inbox, one at a time. That is slower than a sequence tool. It is also how a pitch gets read as a note from a person rather than filtered as one more template.

Step 6: keep the list and come back to it

Link building is slow. A reply can take three weeks, and a list you cannot find again is a list you rebuild from scratch.

Every lookup in ContextBolt SEO saves automatically to your SEO Dashboard. The gap, each vetting check and the top ten you started from are all there next week without re-running anything, and you can bookmark the results worth coming back to. Ask Claude to keep a simple tracker beside it, one row per prospect, pitched or not, and the date.

Re-run the gap after a month. New rows are rivals’ fresh links. A prospect that has dropped off the list may now link to you, and the Links report in Search Console will confirm it. That second run is how you tell whether the work is paying.

What a first list costs, in credits

ContextBolt SEO runs on credits. Research calls like the live top ten cost one, backlink calls cost three. Here is the whole first pass from this guide.

• The live top ten, to pick rivals: 1 credit.
• The backlink gap against two rivals: 3 credits.
• A backlink overview on five prospects: 15 credits.

That is 19 credits for a sorted, vetted list of pitches. The 7-day free trial includes 100, so the first list and a second pass on a different page are covered before you pay anything. After the trial the plan is $35 a month for 1,000 credits.

Your own link profile is free to read. Search Console’s Links report shows your top linking sites straight from Google, and it is the fastest way to check whether a prospect already links to you before you write to them. The gap already filters those out, but a second look costs nothing.

Where this stops

The agent does not know your niche the way you do. It can sort a list by rules. It cannot tell that one plant blog is run by the person every other plant blog listens to. Read the top group yourself before you send anything.

A gap is only what your rivals earned. If none of your rivals has a link from the site you most want, the gap will not surface it. Original data, a free tool, or a page someone would cite still wins links no gap can find. Content gap analysis with Claude is the place to start on the page side.

It does not send, schedule or follow up. That is deliberate. The research is where an agent saves you days. The ask is where it would cost you the thing link building actually runs on, which is people deciding you are worth a link.

What you end up with is a short list of sites that already link to pages like yours, a check on each one, the page each link would sit on, and a pitch you have read and meant. ContextBolt SEO starts with a 7-day free trial, and a first list fits inside it.