Semrush competitor backlinks vs pay per run

Semrush competitor backlinks reports are the default answer when someone asks how to see who links to a rival. But for a small site that checks its link gap a few times a year, a monthly suite can be more than the job needs. Here is a short head-to-head between Semrush's Backlink Gap and seogeoaeo.ai's Backlink Finder, a pay-per-run lookup, with a verdict at the end.

The job

You want the websites that link to two or more of your competitors and not to you. Those sites already write about your category and already link to companies like yours, so they are the best people to ask.

Side by side

	seogeoaeo.ai Backlink Finder	Semrush Backlink Gap
Price	70 credits a run; plans from $29/mo for 2,000 credits	Paid plans; the SEO plan is $139/mo, or $117.33/mo yearly
Sites per run	One domain per run	Up to five websites in one report
Linking sites shown	The 100 strongest	Row limits vary by plan
Gap built in	No, compare lists yourself	Yes, with a Matches count and a Prospects filter
Agent access	REST and MCP, same price as the browser	Semrush lists an API and MCP

Where seogeoaeo.ai wins

Cost for occasional use. Three rivals and your own site take four runs, 280 credits. That fits inside the smallest plan seven times.

Fast triage. Each linking site comes with a link rank from 0 to 1,000, a spam score, the first-seen date, the number of links and how many are followed. Sorting out the spammy rows takes seconds.

Clear limits. It says what it does not do: no single-page lookups, no contact details, no claim about which links Google counts. Figures are estimates from a link data provider.

Where Semrush wins

The comparison is done for you. Enter up to five domains and Backlink Gap shows how many of them each referring domain links to, with a filter for sites linking to rivals but not you.

Volume. If you handle many sites, a flat monthly plan makes sense. For an agency running gaps every week, Semrush is the better choice.

A three-minute version of the gap

Using Backlink Finder:

Run it on each rival, then on your own domain.
Paste the lists into four spreadsheet columns.
Strip "www." and count how many rival columns each site appears in.
Keep sites with a count of two or more that are not in your column.

Pull every column from the same tool, your own included. Link indexes crawl different parts of the web, so mixing Semrush data for one rival with another source for the next creates gaps that are only differences between tools.

Cost over a year

Say you check three rivals once a quarter. With Backlink Finder that is four runs each time, 16 runs a year, or 1,120 credits, which fits inside a single month of the $29 Indie plan. With Semrush you pay the SEO plan for every month you keep it, $139 a month or $117.33 a month billed annually. Monthly seogeoaeo.ai credits do not roll over, so the cheapest pattern is one plan month when you run the check. Top-ups, from $19 for 1,000 credits, only work while a plan is active.

The sums flip once you check many domains every week. At that volume, a flat suite with the comparison built in saves time as well as money.

Which rivals to compare

Whichever tool you choose, pick rivals by search results rather than by sales calls. The site that outranks you for your main terms may be a review site or an industry blog, not the company you lose deals to. Two to four domains is plenty for either tool.

What to do with the leads

Roundups, resource pages and edited directories are worth an email. So are pages that name your brand without a link. News stories and partner pages are not. Skip anything that looks bought. Google treats paid links that pass ranking credit as spam unless marked rel="sponsored" or rel="nofollow".

Verdict

If you check competitor backlinks now and then, seogeoaeo.ai is the cheaper and quicker route to a short list of sites to contact. If link gaps are a weekly task across many domains, Semrush's built-in report justifies its monthly price.