How to find the affiliates promoting your competitors
The full workflow, the filters that separate real affiliates from ordinary backlinks, and the four places the manual version stops working.
To find your competitors' affiliates, export the referring domains of five to ten rival brands, keep pages with commercial intent (reviews, best of lists, bonus pages), and confirm each link carries an affiliate tracking parameter or redirect. Publishers that promote three or more competitors but not you are your best recruitment targets.
Start from the principle
Affiliate directories list publishers who want to be found. Your competitors' referring domains list publishers who are already being paid to send traffic in your category. The second group is smaller, harder to assemble, and worth considerably more, because monetisation is already proven.
1. Pick five to ten competitors, not two
Include the obvious rivals, but also two brands slightly above your weight class. Their affiliate roster is where you find publishers who are already comfortable with your category and simply have not been approached by you.
For each brand, note the markets they actually operate in. An affiliate driving traffic to a competitor's Ontario storefront is useless to you if you are not live in Ontario.
2. Pull every referring domain for each competitor
Any backlink tool will do this. Export the full referring-domain list per competitor, with the linking page URL, first-seen date, and the domain's traffic estimate. You want page-level data, not just the domain, because the page is what tells you whether the relationship is commercial.
Expect a few thousand rows per competitor. Most of it is noise. The filtering in the next two steps is where the work is.
3. Filter to pages that look commercial
A backlink is not an affiliate relationship. A news mention, a forum post and a sponsorship listing all produce a link and none of them produce a partner. Keep pages whose URL or title contains commercial-intent patterns: review, best, top, versus, alternatives, comparison, bonus, promo, promo code, coupon, deal, offer, sign up, welcome offer, rated, ranked.
Drop directories, job boards, press-release syndicators and anything that links to every brand in the market indiscriminately.
4. Confirm the link is actually monetised
This is the step most people skip, and it is what separates a prospect list from a guess. Look at the outbound link itself, not the page. Affiliate links almost always carry a tracking parameter or pass through a redirect. The patterns worth grepping for:
- Query parameters: ref, aff, affiliate, btag, clickid, subid
- Redirect paths: /go/, /out/, /visit/, /goto/
- utm_medium set to affiliate
- rel="sponsored" on the anchor
A page that reviews your competitor with a plain link may be editorial. A page that reviews your competitor through a redirect carrying a tracking ID is a partner with a contract. Only the second is a recruitment target.
5. Find the gap, which is the actual prize
Intersect the lists. The publishers linking to three or more of your competitors and none to you are the highest-value rows in the entire exercise. They have demonstrated they will promote a brand like yours, they are already monetising the category, and they have no relationship with you to unwind.
A publisher linking to only one competitor may have an exclusive. A publisher linking to five is running a comparison model and has a slot open by definition.
6. Sort by recency before you sort by size
Filter each competitor's referring domains to links first seen in the last 30 to 90 days. A publisher who added your competitor six weeks ago is dramatically easier to recruit than one who has had a five-year relationship with them, and nobody else is looking at that list.
This is also the only part of the workflow with a genuine time cost to being late. A new affiliate has a window where they are still deciding who to feature.
7. Score what is left, and resist the big names
The instinct is to chase the largest publisher on the list. Usually wrong. A niche site sending 20,000 highly relevant visits a month converts better than a general site sending 500,000 that barely overlap your audience.
| Signal | What you are checking | Weight |
|---|---|---|
| Monetisation evidence | Tracked outbound links, disclosure text, multiple competitor offers | Highest |
| Audience overlap | Do their readers match the market and product you actually sell | Highest |
| Geo match | Which market the page targets, not where the domain is registered | Highest |
| Buying intent of the page | A comparison page beats a news article beats a homepage link | High |
| Recency | How recently they started promoting a competitor | High |
| Reachability | A named contact, not a generic form | Medium |
| Raw traffic | Useful only after everything above passes | Low |
8. Open with the page, not the programme
You already know exactly what they publish and who they currently promote. Use it. The generic version, "would you like to join our affiliate programme", gets ignored. The version that works names the specific page and the specific gap: you have this competitor at number two in this roundup, we are not on that page yet, here is one concrete reason a reader would prefer us, happy to set you up and see how it performs.
Every prospect on this list was found because of a page they wrote. Referencing it is the whole advantage of doing the work this way.
Where the manual method stops working
The workflow above is sound and you should run it. It has four failure modes, and all four are structural rather than a matter of trying harder.
- It is a snapshot, and the channel moves weekly. You export on the first of the month. On the eighth, a publisher adds your competitor to a roundup that ranks well. You find out at the start of the next month, or not at all, because by then the link is no longer "new". The recruitment window in step 6 is precisely the thing a periodic export cannot see.
- Backlinks are not the whole channel. A backlink index sees pages that link. It does not see a YouTube review, a Telegram channel, an Instagram story, or a comparison table rendered client-side. In several markets those are where the volume actually sits.
- Pages serve different content by geography. The same affiliate URL can show a different operator list, a different offer and a different set of links depending on where the reader is. Crawling from one location tells you what one location sees.
- Sub-affiliates are invisible. Where a publisher runs their own network, the traffic reaching your competitor is generated by sites that never link to your competitor at all. The parent shows up in the export. Everyone actually doing the promotion does not.
Frequently asked questions
- Which competitors is an affiliate already promoting?
- Open the affiliate's page and list every operator link that carries a tracking parameter (btag, aff, ref) or goes through a /go/ or /out/ redirect. Each one is a paid relationship.
- How do I find my competitors' affiliate publishers for free?
- Use a backlink tool's free tier on each rival, filter to review and comparison pages, then check the outbound links by hand. It works for one market and a few brands.
- How often should I check?
- Monthly at least. New affiliates are easiest to recruit in their first weeks with a competitor, so weekly is better.
Where Kaspero fits
Steps 1 to 3 are a pleasant afternoon. Steps 4 through 6, repeated across ten competitors every week, across every market you operate in, and extended to social and video, is not a task a person should be doing by hand. The parts that reward automation are the ones with a recurring deadline:
- Continuous discovery rather than a monthly export, so a new competitor placement surfaces in days rather than weeks
- Link-level verification that distinguishes a tracked affiliate link from an editorial mention, at volume
- Geo-accurate rendering, so you see the page the way a reader in the target market sees it
- Coverage beyond the web, since the publishers who matter increasingly are not publishing on a website first
That is what Kaspero was built for. You describe the brands and the markets you care about, and an agent goes and finds who is promoting them, where, and how, then keeps checking. The same visibility that surfaces a new partner also surfaces a partner promoting an offer you retired three months ago, which is the other half of the job. We wrote about why those are one job, not two, in one channel, two tools.