Seed a campaign with a competitor domain. The agent pulls their backlinks via Ahrefs, filters for quality and relevance, discovers contacts, and drafts personalized outreach pitching your content as a parallel option.

Sibling endpoint to SERP outreach. Instead of a SERP, the seed is a competitor domain — CitationBench pulls every site linking to the competitor (via Ahrefs), filters for quality and relevance, discovers contacts, and drafts outreach pitching your content as a parallel/replacement option.

Same downstream model as SERP outreach: drafts park at WAITING_APPROVAL, you approve in bulk, sends fire via Instantly.

Conceptual overview

For each competitor backlink, the agent reasons:

Is this site a content site (where they linked to a resource) or a transactional site? (We pitch content sites.)
Does our content match the angle they're already endorsing? (Higher hit rate.)
Has anyone in our CRM already pitched this site? (Skip if recent.)
Is the site's DR high enough to be worth our time?

The drafted email cites the existing competitor link explicitly: "You mentioned [competitor]'s capacity tracking — we just published a different take that ...".

Endpoints

Method	Path	Purpose
POST	`/v1/link-building/competitor-outreach`	Start a competitor outreach campaign
GET	`/v1/link-building/competitor-outreach`	List campaigns
GET	`/v1/link-building/competitor-outreach/{id}`	Get one campaign
GET	`/v1/link-building/competitor-outreach/{id}/drafts`	List drafts
POST	`/v1/link-building/competitor-outreach/{id}/approve`	Bulk approve
POST	`/v1/link-building/competitor-outreach/{id}/reject`	Bulk reject
PATCH	`/v1/link-building/competitor-outreach/{id}`	Adjust filters / pause
DELETE	`/v1/link-building/competitor-outreach/{id}`	Cancel

POST /v1/link-building/competitor-outreach

{
  "competitorId": "cmp_monday",
  "ourContentUrl": "https://acme.com/blog/engineering-team-capacity-tracking",
  "filters": {
    "minDomainRating": 40,
    "maxDomainRating": 85,
    "linkType": "dofollow",
    "minRelevanceScore": 0.7,
    "minAchievabilityScore": 0.5,
    "excludeAlreadyContactedWithinDays": 180,
    "limit": 25
  },
  "outreach": {
    "targetingAngle": "parallel_resource",
    "emailTemplate": "tpl_competitor-replacement",
    "personalize": true,
    "approval": { "required": true }
  },
  "tags": ["q2-2026"]
}

Field	Type	Required	Default	Notes
`competitorId`	string	yes	—	A tracked competitor (see Research · competitor)
`competitorDomain`	string	one of	—	Or raw domain (auto-creates competitor record)
`ourContentUrl`	string	yes	—	The asset you want to pitch as a parallel resource
`filters.minDomainRating` / `maxDomainRating`	number	no	40 / 85	—
`filters.linkType`	enum	no	`dofollow`	`dofollow`, `nofollow`, `all`
`filters.minRelevanceScore`	number	no	`0.7`	Topical relevance of the linking page to your content
`filters.minAchievabilityScore`	number	no	`0.5`	Heuristic for how likely you could earn the link too
`filters.excludeAlreadyContactedWithinDays`	number	no	`180`	—
`filters.limit`	number	no	`25`	Cap on accounts to pitch
`outreach.targetingAngle`	enum	no	`link_insertion`	`link_insertion`, `parallel_resource`, `replacement`, `update_outdated_link`
`outreach.emailTemplate`	string	no	workspace default	—
`outreach.approval.required`	boolean	no	workspace policy	—

Response

{
  "campaignId": "ccmp_***",
  "invocationId": "inv_***",
  "agentId": "agt_***",
  "skill": "link_building.competitor_outreach",
  "status": "RUNNING",
  "estimatedCost": { "credits": 32, "durationSeconds": 360 }
}

Final summary

{
  "campaignId": "ccmp_***",
  "invocationId": "inv_***",
  "agentId": "agt_***",
  "skill": "link_building.competitor_outreach",
  "status": "AWAITING_APPROVAL",
  "creditsUsed": 30,
  "summary": {
    "competitorBacklinks": 4108,
    "afterLinkTypeFilter": 2841,
    "afterDomainRatingFilter": 1217,
    "afterRelevanceFilter": 412,
    "afterAchievabilityFilter": 178,
    "afterAlreadyContactedFilter": 91,
    "afterContactDiscovery": 27,
    "finalDrafts": 25
  },
  "topDomains": [
    {
      "domain": "engineering-blog.com",
      "drafted": true,
      "domainRating": 62,
      "relevanceScore": 0.84,
      "achievabilityScore": 0.71
    }
  ],
  "raw": "Pulled 4,108 backlinks for monday.com. Filtered to 25 high-relevance, high-achievability content sites that don't currently link to us ...",
  "files": [
    "agent-workspace/backlinks-raw.json",
    "agent-workspace/filter-decisions.csv",
    "agent-output/drafts.md"
  ]
}

GET /v1/link-building/competitor-outreach/{id}/drafts

Same shape as SERP outreach drafts — each draft has relationshipId, accountId, contact, subject, body, status, approvalUrl.

POST /v1/link-building/competitor-outreach/{id}/approve

Same shape as SERP outreach approve.

curl -X POST .../v1/link-building/competitor-outreach/ccmp_***/approve -d '{
  "draftIds": "all",
  "scheduleAt": "2026-05-25T09:00:00-04:00"
}'

MCP

> Pull monday.com's backlinks and pitch our capacity-tracking article to the best 25 sources.

Claude calls link_building.competitor_outreach.create.

> Show the drafts; let me approve them.

Claude calls link_building.competitor_outreach.drafts + approval loop.

Errors

Status	Code	Cause
404	`competitor_not_found`	—
422	`no_backlinks_found`	Competitor has no usable backlinks (try refreshing)
422	`no_drafts_produced`	All backlinks filtered out — loosen filters
503	`ahrefs_unavailable`	—
503	`apollo_unavailable`	—

Cost

Action	Credits
Per campaign (per 25-draft cap)	~30
+ per-domain contact discovery (Apollo)	+0.4 each
+ per-draft LLM personalization	+0.5 each
+ per email sent on approval	+2 each

Use cases (string things together)

A. Steal-from-competitor weekly

for CMP in cmp_monday cmp_asana cmp_clickup; do
  curl -X POST .../v1/link-building/competitor-outreach -d "{
    \"competitorId\":  \"$CMP\",
    \"ourContentUrl\": \"https://acme.com/blog/engineering-team-capacity-tracking\"
  }"
done

B. Replacement angle when a competitor has a broken link

curl -X POST .../v1/link-building/competitor-outreach -d '{
  "competitorId":     "cmp_monday",
  "ourContentUrl":    "https://acme.com/blog/our-replacement-article",
  "outreach":         { "targetingAngle": "replacement" }
}'

The drafted email surfaces the specific broken link as the hook.

C. Run as part of the `link_hunter` skill

curl -X POST .../v1/agent/invoke -d '{
  "skill": "link_hunter",
  "input": {
    "competitorIds":  ["cmp_monday"],
    "ourContentUrls": ["https://acme.com/blog/engineering-team-capacity-tracking"],
    "cadence":        "weekly"
  }
}'

API: Link Building · serp outreach — sibling
API: Link Building · inbound — the inverse
API: Link Building · campaign management
API: Link Building · CRM
API: Research · competitor
Concept: Link Building

Competitor link outreach API — automate replacement-link campaigns from a competitor domain