Alert rules
Competitor backlink alerts that do not cry wolf
A channel that pings on every new rival link gets muted in a week. These rules keep the signal and drop the rest.
Rule zero
Alert on decisions, not on data
A message should end with a question someone can answer: reach out, ignore, or investigate. If no action follows, it belongs in the weekly report, not in the channel.
- Page a human for a handful of events per month at most.
- Everything else goes into one Monday digest.
- Review the rules every quarter and delete the noisy ones.
Severity table for rival links
| Event | Severity | Route | Why |
|---|---|---|---|
| Rival gains a link from a domain you already own a link on | Info | Digest | You already have the relationship |
| Rival gains a link from a niche site with DR above 60 | Warn | Channel message | Possible outreach target |
| Same domain links to two or more rivals but not you | Warn | Channel message | Overlap is the warmest list you can get |
| Rival gains 25 or more new referring domains in one snapshot | Page | Direct message to owner | Campaign, launch or purchased batch |
| Rival loses a major donor | Info | Digest | Possible opening for you |
How to wire the rules
- 1
Pick three to five rivals
More than that and the digest gets long enough that nobody reads it. Choose the sites that rank for your money queries, not the ones that merely sound like competitors.
- 2
Snapshot each one weekly
Use
action=refdomains&q=rival.com&per=1000. Two credits per rival per week is $0.0002, so five rivals for a year cost about five cents. - 3
Add intersect for the overlap rule
action=intersecttakes 2 to 10 domains and returns the sites linking to several of them. It costs 2 credits per call. Run it with your rivals and remove your own domain from the output. - 4
Score the new domains
Send the new domain names to
bulk_dr, which takes up to 2,000 at once for one credit. Compare the scores against the thresholds in the table. - 5
Post the result
A Slack incoming webhook takes a JSON body with a text field. Send one message per Warn event, and everything else in a single Monday digest.
What we deliberately do not alert on
Anchor text changes. They are interesting in a quarterly review and meaningless in a daily one.
Raw backlink counts are another trap, because one scraper can add 40,000 links in a night and mean nothing. Count referring domains instead, then read the donors before you react.
Our index refreshes about once a month, so a rival link built yesterday will not trigger anything for weeks. Pair this with Google Alerts for rival brand mentions and a look at their newest posts. Be patient. Recipe in code: the weekly diff page.
Imagine a fictional rival jumping from 520 to 560 referring domains in one pull. Forty new domains looks like a campaign. Open ten at random: if nine are scraper directories, log it and move on. If nine are trade publications, someone ran a launch, and you should look at what they published.
Typical questions about watching rivals
How do I see competitors backlinks for free?
The domain, overview and stats actions need no key and show totals and Domain Rating. For the actual list of referring domains you need a key, but a pull is 2 credits, and new accounts start with $100 free, enough for hundreds of thousands of pulls.
Can this replace Ahrefs or Semrush alerts?
Not entirely. Those tools crawl more often and add keywords, rank tracking and content alerts. This API is about link data at a low per-call price, so it suits teams that already script their reporting and want link diffs in the same place.
Are all competitors worth watching?
No. Watch the three to five that win your key queries. A giant brand with ten thousand referring domains will gain links daily and tell you nothing about what to do next week.
What about rivals that buy links?
You cannot prove it from a diff. A sudden batch of similar-looking domains is a hint, nothing more. Read the pages before accusing anyone, and do not copy a tactic you have not understood. See spam link triage for what to look at.