the 35 domains that link to every major project management tool - CrawlGraphtry free
a backlink gap analysis sounds abstract until you run it on real data. so we did. we pulled the highest-authority referring domains for the eight biggest project management tools straight from the common crawl webgraph, then looked at the overlap. the result is a near-perfect illustration of why link building works the way it does, and where the actual opportunities hide.<br>how we pulled this<br>we took eight tools: notion, trello, airtable, asana, monday, clickup, basecamp, and linear. for each one we pulled its top 2,000 referring domains ranked by cg_authority from the common crawl webgraph (about 120 million domains, 4.4 billion links), then intersected the eight lists to see how many tools each linking domain points to. no proprietary index, no scraping, just open data anyone can query.<br>first, the headline numbers for each tool. note the spread: trello and notion have roughly 50,000+ referring domains, while linear, the newcomer, has under 2,400.<br>referring domainscg authoritytrello.com58,69766notion.so52,33071airtable.com40,59462asana.com36,94863monday.com31,25559clickup.com23,41058basecamp.com11,34159linear.app2,35251backlink overlap is a pyramid<br>across the eight samples there were 9,347 unique linking domains. here is how many of the eight tools each one links to:<br>linking domainsnon-platformlink to all 83935link to 7136124link to 6179175link to 5255254link to 4350349link to 3647645link to 21,2751,274link to just 16,4666,461about 69 percent of the linking domains link to only one of the eight tools. those are noise for outreach: a site that mentioned trello once in a listicle is not going to link to your new tool because you asked. the value is in the thin top of the pyramid. only 39 domains link to all eight, and only 0.4 percent of the whole set links to five or more.
this is what a gap analysis computes the overlap is the entire point. a domain that links to six or seven of these tools but not yours is a domain that links to your category as a habit, has simply not found you yet, and converts on outreach far better than a cold list. the more competitors a domain links to, the warmer it is.
the 35 domains that link to all eight<br>here is the thin top of the pyramid, the domains that link to every one of the eight tools, sorted by authority. if you launched a project management tool tomorrow, this is the outreach list you would start with, before you wrote a single blog post.<br>textcopy<br>domains linking to ALL 8 tools, by cg authority (top of the list):
github.com 81 substack.com 75<br>hubspot.com 70 gitlab.com 70<br>zendesk.com 69 atlassian.com 68<br>zapier.com 67 entrepreneur.com 66<br>habr.com 65 buzzsprout.com 62<br>dev.to 62 ycombinator.com 61<br>userpilot.com 61 libsyn.com 59<br>kit.com 58 beehiiv.com 58<br>n8n.io 57 luma.com 57<br>smallbiztrends.com 57 zenn.dev 57<br>hatenablog.com 56 logrocket.com 56<br>canny.io 55 ghost.io 53<br>coda.io 53 stackshare.io 53<br>taskade.com 52 lovable.dev 51
35 domains link to all eight. these are the highest-authority ones.<br>the most striking part is how clean it is. among the 959 domains that link to four or more of the tools, only 2 percent are platform or cdn noise (the googles, wikipedias, and amazonaws of the world). ninety-eight percent are real, editorial, on-topic domains. the overlap method does the noise filtering for you, almost for free.<br>what the category linkers tell you<br>read the all-eight list closely and the niche's actual link-building playbook falls out of it. the universal linkers cluster into five buckets:<br>integration and automation hubs (zapier, atlassian, n8n, stackshare). every serious tool gets listed where integrations live. these links are earned by building the integration, not by pitching. developer and product communities (github, gitlab, dev.to, ycombinator, zenn.dev, habr). tools that ship in public get linked by the communities their users live in. publishing and creator platforms (substack, beehiiv, ghost, kit, buzzsprout, libsyn). newsletters and podcasts about productivity cite the tools they run on. support and feedback infrastructure (zendesk, canny, userpilot, featurebase). and adjacent and comparison tools (coda, taskade, lovable, uxpin, logrocket) that cross-reference each other.<br>that is a real strategy, not a guess. if those five buckets are where the category's links come from, that is where a newcomer should spend its first hundred hours, in that rough order of effort-to-reward.<br>the newcomer proof: linear<br>linear has 2,352 referring domains. notion has 52,330, more than twenty times as many. and yet linear still shows up linked-to by the category linkers, sitting on the same all-eight list as notion. that is the encouraging part for anyone small: you do not need fifty thousand backlinks to compete, you need the few hundred that your whole category already links to. the gap between you and the incumbents is a short, specific list, not an ocean.
livetry it on your own site<br>run this...