<b>Read your rival's Lost Links, not their live ones</b>

<b>Read your rival's Lost Links, not their live ones</b>

Everyone audits a competitor's <i>current</i> backlinks. The real intel is in the Lost tab. When a link drops, it tells you which placements were paid (they churn when payment stops) versus earned (they stick).

The play:
— Open the competitor in Ahrefs, go to Referring domains, filter to Lost over the last 12 months
— A donor that linked for exactly 6 or 12 months then vanished? Rental link, almost certainly. Annual contract that lapsed
— A burst of links lost in the same week from unrelated domains? A PBN got deindexed or a vendor got burned

Multiple SaaS profiles show 30-40% of their 'authority' was rented and is now gone. The brands that survived a core update are the ones whose Lost graph stayed flat. Watch the churn, not the count. Watch this space.