Similar Sites Finder - Competitors from the Link Graph

Independent tool, not affiliated with Common Crawl, Similarweb, Semrush or Ahrefs. It reads the public Common Crawl web graph and never visits the domains you check.

Sites like any domain, found from who links to them. When the same websites link to two sites, the two are usually in the same niche: reviews, "best tools" lists, directories and articles cite competitors together. Paste one domain or a list and get the most similar sites for each, most similar first, with their Open Authority 0-100. Built on the Common Crawl web graph: 133 million domains and 2.1 billion links.

Real results (September 2026 graph)

The first eight results, in order:

Domain	Most similar sites
apify.com	brightdata.com, zyte.com, scrapingbee.com, scraperapi.com, octoparse.com, firecrawl.dev, parsehub.com, serpapi.com
ahrefs.com	semrush.com, g2.com, backlinko.com, web.dev, moz.com, screamingfrog.co.uk, seroundtable.com, searchenginejournal.com
scrapy.org	crummy.com, toscrape.com, parsehub.com, scrapinghub.com, selenium.dev, python-requests.org, octoparse.com, zyte.com
booking.com	avisworld.com, dragonpass.com, loungekey.com, expediapartnercentral.com, rentalcars.com, priceless.com, agoda.com, sixt.com
zalando.de	oo34.net, flaconi.de, tracdelight.com, douglas.de, aboutyou.de, fashionid.de, otto.de, tracdelight.io

Why this one

• Competitors the way the web sees them. Similarity comes from real links between sites, not from keywords or categories, so it finds alternatives, direct competitors and close neighbours in any language or country.
• Big general sites don't crowd the list. Search engines, social networks and link directories link to everything; they are weighted down or left out, so the list stays about your niche.
• Fast and in bulk. About a tenth of a second per domain: the graph is indexed on our side, nothing is scraped.
• Nothing to block. An open dataset: no captchas, no failed runs.
• See it live. Market maps around apify.com, ahrefs.com, duolingo.com and glossier.com: crawlplant.com/similar-sites-finder.

What can you use it for?

• Competitor research: find the players in a market you don't know yet, then compare them with the other Actors below.
• Link building: feed the similar sites into Link Gap Finder to see who links to them and not to you.
• Lead generation and market maps: expand a seed list of companies into their whole niche.
• AI agents: "what are the alternatives to X?" answered from link data.

Quick start

1. Click Try for free with the default input (sites similar to apify.com).
2. Replace Domains with your own list.
3. Download the table as CSV, Excel or JSON.

Copy to your AI assistant

Paste this into ChatGPT, Claude or any agent so it knows how to use the Actor:

crawlplant/similar-sites-finder on Apify: the sites most similar to each domain in a list (competitors, alternatives),
found from the websites that link to both, in the Common Crawl web graph (133M domains, 2.1B links).
Input: domains (domains or URLs), maxReferrersPerDomain (default 50: similar sites per domain, up to 1,000),
minAuthority (0-100), maxItems (default 500).
Row: domain, input, similarDomain, similarity (higher = more alike), sharedReferrers, referrersCompared,
similarDomainAuthority (Open Authority 0-100), similarDomainRank, position (1 = most similar), ccRelease.
Price: $5.00 per 1,000 rows on the Free plan; the default run (50 rows) about $0.25.

Ready-to-use examples

1. The 50 sites most similar to a domain

{ "domains": ["apify.com"] }

2. Competitor lists for several companies at once

{ "domains": ["ahrefs.com", "booking.com", "zalando.de"], "maxReferrersPerDomain": 20 }

3. Only established similar sites (Open Authority 50 or more)

{ "domains": ["scrapy.org"], "minAuthority": 50 }

4. A long list for a market map

{ "domains": ["https://www.zalando.de/"], "maxReferrersPerDomain": 500, "maxItems": 500 }

5. Alternatives to a SaaS tool, top 10

{ "domains": ["ahrefs.com"], "maxReferrersPerDomain": 10 }

6. Expand a seed list of companies into their niche

{ "domains": ["booking.com", "expedia.com", "airbnb.com"], "maxReferrersPerDomain": 30, "minAuthority": 40 }

How to…

Find competitors of a website

Put the site in domains (example 1). The top rows are the sites most often linked from the same pages: usually direct competitors and close alternatives.

Find alternatives to a tool or service

Run the tool's domain (example 5): review sites and "best tools" lists link to the alternatives together, so they come out on top.

Build a market map from a few seed companies

Paste several companies of one market (example 6). Each gets its own list; merge them and count how often a site appears.

Turn competitors into link-building prospects

Paste the similar sites into Link Gap Finder as competitors to get the sites that link to them and not to you.

Input options

Option	Default	Description
domains	apify.com	Domains, URLs or e-mail addresses; reduced to the registrable domain
maxReferrersPerDomain	50	Similar sites per domain, most similar first (up to 1,000)
minAuthority	0	Keep only similar sites with at least this Open Authority (0-100)
maxItems	500	Maximum rows in total

Example output

A real row from September 2026:

{
  "type": "similar",
  "domain": "apify.com",
  "input": "apify.com",
  "similarDomain": "brightdata.com",
  "similarDomainAuthority": 71,
  "similarDomainRank": 22413,
  "position": 1,
  "sharedReferrers": 61,
  "referrersCompared": 300,
  "similarity": 1.313,
  "ccRelease": "cc-main-2026-jul-aug-sep",
  "ccReleaseDate": "2026-09-21",
  "scrapedAt": "2026-09-29T20:51:31.478Z",
  "source": "live"
}

Output fields

Field	Description
domain, input	The domain looked up and what you typed
similarDomain	A site similar to it
similarity	Similarity score: higher = more of its links come from the same sites (comparable within one domain's list)
sharedReferrers, referrersCompared	How many of the compared sites linking to domain also link to the similar site
similarDomainAuthority, similarDomainRank	Its Open Authority (0-100) and harmonic-centrality rank among all 133M domains
position	Its place in the list, 1 = most similar
ccRelease, ccReleaseDate	The Common Crawl web graph release and its approximate date
scrapedAt, source	When the run read the data; always live

How does it work?

The Actor takes up to 300 of the strongest sites linking to your domain that link to at most 300 domains each (so directories and portals that link to everything don't count), collects the sites they link to, and ranks those by how often they are cited together with yours relative to how many sites link to them in total (a cosine similarity over links). A domain needs a few dozen linking sites for a good list; for very small sites the list can be short or empty.

Pricing

Pay per result: platform usage is included. One price per row, and you pay only for the rows you get.

Event	No discount (Free plan)	Bronze (Starter)	Silver (Scale)	Gold (Business)
Similar site (per 1,000)	$5.00	$4.50	$4.00	$3.50
Actor start (per run)	$0.00005	$0.00005	$0.00005	$0.00005

Example on the Free plan	Rows	Cost
Default run: 50 similar sites of one domain	50	~$0.25
Top 10 alternatives of a tool	10	~$0.05
30 similar sites for each of 100 companies	3,000	~$15

Set a maximum cost per run in the run options to stop a large run at your budget.

Reliability

• There's nothing to block: the data comes from our index of the Common Crawl web graph, rebuilt when a new release comes out (about monthly). No captchas, no logins, no browser, no requests to the sites you check.
• A domain that isn't in the graph gets a warning in the run log and no rows, and you don't pay for it.
• Set a maximum cost per run in the run options to stop a large run at your budget.

Run it through the API

JavaScript:

import { ApifyClient } from 'apify-client';
const client = new ApifyClient({ token: 'YOUR_TOKEN' });
const run = await client.actor('crawlplant/similar-sites-finder').call({ domains: ['apify.com'], maxReferrersPerDomain: 20 });
const { items } = await client.dataset(run.defaultDatasetId).listItems();
console.log(items.map((r) => `${r.similarDomain} (${r.similarity})`));

Python:

from apify_client import ApifyClient
client = ApifyClient("YOUR_TOKEN")
run = client.actor("crawlplant/similar-sites-finder").call(run_input={"domains": ["apify.com"], "maxReferrersPerDomain": 20})
for r in client.dataset(run["defaultDatasetId"]).iterate_items():
    print(r["similarDomain"], r["similarity"], r["sharedReferrers"])

Use with AI agents

Works as a tool in the Apify MCP server:

https://mcp.apify.com?tools=crawlplant/similar-sites-finder

Try "what are the main competitors of example.com?".

More from the same data

• Link Gap Finder: sites that link to your competitors but not to you.
• Referring Domains Checker: every domain that links to a site.
• Bulk Domain Authority Checker: authority, referring-domain counts and rank history for any list of domains.

FAQ

How fresh is the data?

The newest Common Crawl web graph release (about monthly). ccRelease says which one.

What about the biggest platforms?

For sites that almost everyone links to (facebook.com, google.com, youtube.com), sharing linking sites says little, so their similar sites are generic. The Actor works best for companies, products, publications and niche sites.

Why is a known competitor missing?

Similarity needs sites that link to both. Two sites in the same market that nobody cites together, or a very new site with few links, won't show up. Try a larger maxReferrersPerDomain or run the competitor itself.

Is it legal?

It reads the Common Crawl web graph under the Common Crawl terms of use: link statistics between domains, no page content and no personal data.

Sources and credits

Common Crawl web graph, commoncrawl.org, used under the Common Crawl terms of use.

Privacy

Only public link statistics about domains are read; no personal data is collected. Each run sends the developer anonymous feature-usage statistics (the options used, never the domains); your Apify account id is replaced by a one-way hash.