How to Do a Full Competitor Analysis with Ahrefs in 2026

You find a competitor's keyword, replicate their content strategy, and watch your organic traffic climb 40% in three months. That's not a fantasy. That's what happens when you run a proper competitor analysis with Ahrefs and actually act on what you find.

This guide walks you through every step I use personally, in the exact order that makes sense.

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What You Need Before Starting

Before you touch Ahrefs, get these ready:

Ahrefs account. You need at least the Lite plan to run meaningful competitor research. The free Webmaster Tools version won't cut it here because it limits you to your own site data.

A list of 3 to 5 real competitors. Not aspirational ones. Think about who actually shows up when your target customers search for what you sell. Google your main keywords and write down the domains that consistently appear in positions 1 through 5.

A spreadsheet. Google Sheets or Excel. You will be pulling a lot of data and you need somewhere to organize it fast.

Optional but genuinely useful: Surfer SEO for content optimization once you know which gaps to target, and Semrush as a cross-reference tool when Ahrefs data feels incomplete on a specific niche.

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How to Do Competitor Analysis with Ahrefs: Step-by-Step

Step 1: Run Each Competitor Through Site Explorer

Open Ahrefs, go to Site Explorer, and paste your first competitor's domain. Hit search.

You'll land on the Overview dashboard. Screenshot the key numbers: Domain Rating (DR), total backlinks, referring domains, organic keywords, and estimated monthly organic traffic. Paste these into your spreadsheet. Do this for every competitor before going deeper.

This gives you a baseline. You now know who is actually strong versus who just looks strong.

Step 2: Analyze Their Top Organic Pages

In Site Explorer, click Top Pages in the left sidebar under Organic Search.

Sort by organic traffic. You're looking for the pages sending the most visitors from Google. Export the top 20 to 30 results. These are your competitor's traffic pillars, and understanding them tells you exactly where their content strategy is focused.

Pay attention to the keyword each page ranks for, the traffic value column, and how old the page is. A three-year-old page with 5,000 monthly visitors means this topic has staying power.

Step 3: Find Keywords They Rank For That You Don't

Go to the Content Gap tool under Competitive Analysis in the sidebar.

Enter your domain in the "This target doesn't rank for" field, then add your competitors' domains below. Click Show keywords.

This is where the real gold is. You get a list of keywords your competitors rank for and you don't. Filter by keyword difficulty under 30 to start. These are your fastest-win opportunities. Export the list and flag your top 15 to 20 targets.

Step 4: Investigate Their Backlink Profile

Click Backlinks in the left sidebar within Site Explorer for your strongest competitor.

Filter by "DoFollow" links and sort by DR of the referring domain. You want to see who is linking to them from high-authority sites. Look for patterns: Are they getting links from industry blogs? Resource pages? Podcasts? News sites?

Export the top 50 referring domains. This becomes your link building outreach list.

Step 5: Check Their Anchor Text Distribution

Still inside their backlink report, click Anchors in the sidebar.

This shows you what text people use when linking to them. If a competitor has a clean, natural anchor profile, they've built links the right way. If it's over-optimized with exact match anchors, that's a vulnerability you can note.

More practically, this tells you how the market talks about topics in your niche, which helps when you're writing content briefs.

Step 6: Use the Keyword Explorer to Validate Opportunities

Take your top keyword targets from Step 3 and run them through Ahrefs Keyword Explorer one by one.

Check the Keyword Difficulty (KD) score, monthly search volume, and the SERP overview at the bottom. Look at who currently ranks. If the top 5 results are all DR 80-plus domains, this keyword is hard to win even if the KD score looks low.

I cross-reference promising keywords using Semrush to get a second opinion on difficulty and search intent. Two data sources beat one.

Step 7: Map Out Their Content Cadence

Go to their blog or content hub and sort by newest first. Check how often they publish, what formats they use (listicles, how-tos, case studies, comparisons), and which categories they prioritize.

You're not copying them. You're identifying what they're ignoring. If they publish three product roundups a week but zero comparison articles, that's a gap you can own.

Step 8: Build Your Priority Action List

You now have enough data to act. Open your spreadsheet and create three columns: Quick Wins (KD under 20, you have some authority), Medium-Term Plays (KD 20 to 40, needs solid content), and Long-Term Targets (KD 40 plus, needs links and time).

For content creation on these targets, I use Jasper for drafting long-form articles fast, and Copy.ai when I need to crank out multiple variations of meta descriptions and headlines quickly. Writesonic is another solid option if you're producing high content volume across a team.

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Quick Reference Table

Step	Action	Time Needed
1	Run competitors through Site Explorer, record overview metrics	20 minutes
2	Export Top Pages for each competitor	15 minutes
3	Run Content Gap analysis, filter by KD under 30	20 minutes
4	Export top 50 backlinks per competitor	15 minutes
5	Review anchor text distribution	10 minutes
6	Validate keywords in Keyword Explorer	25 minutes
7	Audit competitor content cadence manually	20 minutes
8	Build priority action list in spreadsheet	15 minutes

Total time: roughly 2.5 hours for three competitors done properly.

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Common Mistakes to Avoid

Targeting keywords based on volume alone. A keyword with 10,000 monthly searches means nothing if all ten SERP results have DR 85-plus and thousands of backlinks. Look at the actual SERP, not just the number.

Ignoring smaller competitors. The DR 45 site ranking for your target keyword is beatable. The DR 85 authority site is not, at least not this quarter. Focus your energy where you can actually win.

Downloading data and doing nothing. This is the most common failure mode. Competitor analysis creates a to-do list. If you don't assign ownership and deadlines to each action item, the spreadsheet dies in a folder.

Running the analysis once. Your competitors are publishing content right now. Run this process every quarter. Set a calendar reminder.

Skipping the SERP overview in Keyword Explorer. The KD score is a starting point, not a verdict. Always look at who actually ranks and what kind of content they published.

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Pro Tips

Use Ahrefs Alerts for ongoing monitoring. Set up alerts for when competitors gain new backlinks. You'll know immediately when a major publication covers them, which often signals a PR push or product launch you should know about.

Filter backlinks by "New" in the last 30 days. This shows you who your competitors are actively building relationships with right now, not two years ago. Fresh link opportunities are more likely to still be reachable.

Check the Traffic Value column seriously. Organic traffic estimates can be off. Traffic Value (what that traffic would cost in Google Ads) is often a better signal of which pages are actually valuable to your competitor's business.

Combine Content Gap results with Surfer SEO. Once you identify a keyword gap, run the top-ranking pages through Surfer SEO to understand exactly what word count, heading structure, and semantic coverage you need to compete. This cuts the guesswork out of content briefs.

Look for competitor pages with declining traffic. In Site Explorer, check the Pages report and filter for pages that have lost traffic in the last six months. These are ranking positions that are up for grabs. Write a better version and build a few links to it.

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Bottom Line

Knowing how to do competitor analysis with Ahrefs is one of the highest-leverage skills in SEO. Most people open the tool, poke around, and close it without a clear output. The process above gives you a concrete deliverable every time: a prioritized keyword list, a link prospecting list, and a content gap report you can act on this week.

Run it properly, document everything, and revisit it every quarter. That's what separates sites that grow consistently from sites that publish content and hope for the best.