Recipe
Check competitors backlinks with a cron job, not a CSV
The usual routine is open a dashboard, export, paste into a sheet. A scheduled job does the same comparison every Monday and only speaks up when something moved.
Three jobs, three actions
Most competitor questions reduce to three. Who links to them but not to me? Who gained links this month? Who is stronger overall? Each has one action. Gap lists come from intersect, growth from a dated refdomains snapshot per rival, and relative strength from compare or bulk_dr.
Keep the watch list small. Five to ten rivals that rank for your money terms beat fifty names nobody reads. Cost is no object here, since the whole list runs for pennies, but attention is. A weekly message with three lines gets read; a weekly spreadsheet of 4,000 rows does not.
To see the exact costs of each action, open the parameter reference. The gap list is the output people act on first, because it names real prospects. Do not skip it.
Monday job
Score the whole watch list in one 1-credit call, then snapshot each rival's referring domains.
KEY=sk_live_...
LIST="rival-a.com,rival-b.com,rival-c.com,yourdomain.com"
# one call, 1 credit, up to 2,000 domains
curl -s "https://seouptr.com/api.php?action=bulk_dr&domains=$LIST&key=$KEY" \
| jq -S . > scores-$(date +%F).json
for d in rival-a.com rival-b.com rival-c.com; do
curl -s "https://seouptr.com/api.php?action=refdomains&q=$d&per=1000&key=$KEY" \
| jq -S . > "rd-$d-$(date +%F).json"
doneDashboard export or scheduled job
| Point | Manual checker (Ahrefs, Semrush, Moz) | Scheduled API job |
|---|---|---|
| Trigger | You remember to open it | Cron, every week |
| Output | Screen or CSV to clean up | JSON, ready to diff |
| Cost model | Seat or plan, from $129/month for Ahrefs API units | Credits, $0.0001 each |
| Keyword and rank data | Yes, the fuller products | No, link data only |
| Freshness | Daily crawl on larger suites | Index refreshed about monthly |
Our take
Use the suite for research, the API for the habit
If you need keyword gaps, SERP features or rank tracking, keep Ahrefs or Semrush; they do that better. If the job is 'tell me when a rival's link profile moves', a cron job costs about a cent a month and nobody forgets it.
- Moz backlinks checker and Semrush backlinks checker views are fine for one-off looks.
- Scripted calls win when the same question repeats every week.
- Our DR is not their DA or DR; compare within one tool.
Worked example (hypothetical)
Take an example. A shop watching four rivals. Each rival is snapshotted weekly: 4 calls at 2 credits is 8 credits, plus 1 credit for the bulk_dr call. That is 9 credits a week, 36 a month, or $0.0036. Add one intersect call a week at 2 credits and the month still sits under half a cent.
Say rival B goes from 410 to 470 referring domains between two snapshots. That is 15% growth in a month, against your own 2%. Not a page-level fire. Still, it is worth asking where those 60 domains came from. If a dozen share one anchor, read the spam triage before copying any of it.
Remember the refresh. Because our index moves about monthly, a rival may look flat for three weeks and then jump. Do not read the jump as a sprint. It is a catch-up in the data, and the real links may be older. Quiet weeks are normal.
What to do with the output
Rank the gap
Run intersect on your domain and two rivals (it accepts 2 to 10 domains, 2 credits). Domains linking to both rivals but not you are the strongest prospects.
Spot the new arrivals
Diff this week's rival snapshot with last week's. A new referring domain with a visible reason, say a podcast or a press list, is an outreach lead.
Ignore the noise
Dozens of new domains in a day on a rival usually means a scraper network. Do not copy it; read the spam triage first.
Log what you did
Write the date and the action beside the snapshot. In three months it tells you which of your moves matched which of theirs.
