Link building starts with analysis, not outreach.

Google has no documentation on analysing competitors' links, so we will not attribute a method to it. Its Links report in Search Console covers links to your own property: top linked pages, top linking sites and the most common link text. Data about other sites' links has to come from elsewhere.

Google's documentation does tell you what to be careful about when reading any list of links. Links marked sponsored, ugc or nofollow will, according to its guidance on qualifying outbound links, generally not be followed. And the Links report help says that for known spam sites Google typically ignores the links. So a raw count of a competitor's links is not a count of links that do anything. That is our inference from those two statements, not a Google claim about any competitor.

What the analysis looks for is a matter of judgement: where the links come from, why those sites linked, and whether the reason is something you could credibly match.

Even your own data is summarised. The Links report groups sites by root domain, leaves out subdomains, and combines duplicate link text. Any comparison with another source should allow for differences in how links are counted and grouped. The useful output of this stage is a set of reasons, not a list of domains.

A link gap is the difference between the sites that point to competitors and the sites that point to you. Google has no page on it. It does give a way to read your side of the comparison. The Links report help page suggests checking whether sites important to you point to your site, with a restaurant mentioned in food blogs and review sites as its example, and checking that the link text other sites use describes you accurately.

The gap on its own is a list, and a list invites volume. The useful question is why a site linked to a competitor and not to you: a resource you lack, a story you haven't told, a relationship you haven't built. Some gaps are not worth closing. A site that exists to sell links, or a directory that takes anyone, offers the kinds of links the spam policies describe.

Anything found in the gap should survive the same test as any other link: would it exist if search engines did not?

The report's top linking sites table is sorted by count of links, and count is not quality. The help page suggests confirming that you recognise the sites listed. If unknown and possibly spammy sites appear, it says you might need to ask to be removed or, if all else fails, disavow them. The gap analysis and the clean-up are separate pieces of work.

Google's SEO Starter Guide says other sites linking to you happens naturally over time, and that you can encourage people to discover your content by promoting your site. That is as close as Google gets to a plan, and it is deliberately general.

A plan built from the gap sets out which links are worth pursuing, in what order, and how to tell whether they worked. For some sites it also means looking back. If past link building needs reviewing, Google's disavow help page is clear about the order of things. It calls the tool advanced, says most sites will not need it, and says to use it only where there are a considerable number of spammy, artificial or low-quality links and they have caused, or are likely to cause, a manual action. It recommends removing as many bad links from the web as possible first.

Measurement uses the same Links report, bearing in mind that it shows links found over time and does not flag nofollow. We report on relevance and outcomes, not domain metrics.

Clean-up is slow. Google says disavowed links continue to be shown in the Links report, that a list applies only to the property it was uploaded to, and that it can take a few weeks for a list to be incorporated. A plan should allow for that lag. We don't promise rankings or traffic numbers. We set out the opportunity and the evidence, and measure against it.