How to find every 'best X' and roundup post in your niche

To find the “best X” posts your buyers read, list the searches they make, then collect every list-style article that ranks for those searches. That means your category, your category for each audience, “alternatives to” each competitor, and head-to-head comparisons, run in Google with a few operators to filter out marketplaces and forums.

This guide is part of our listicle link building hub, which explains why these posts matter and how to pitch them. Here we focus only on the finding: the searches, the operators, a worked example, and a simple sheet that turns raw results into a prospect list.

Key takeaways

• Start from buyer searches, not from high-authority domains. Posts that rank for those searches are the ones that send buyers.
• Four query families cover most of the ground: category, category plus audience, competitor alternatives, and comparisons.
• Operators (quotes, intitle:, -site:, after:) narrow results to editorial lists and recent updates.
• Log every post with its URL, last updated date and the competitors it names, then score fit and freshness.
• Re-run the same searches monthly and only add new URLs.

How do you find the ‘best X’ posts your buyers read?

You run the searches your buyers run and keep the list articles that come back. A buyer doesn’t search for “SaaS listicles”; they search “best invoicing software for freelancers” or “FreshBooks alternatives”. The posts that rank for those searches are your prospect list, because they’re the posts that shape buyers’ shortlists.

Write your seed searches in four families:

Aim for 10 to 20 seeds to start: one or two category searches, one per audience you genuinely serve, one alternatives search per close competitor, and a few comparisons between the leaders. If you aren’t sure who your close competitors are, look at which products appear together on the first lists you find. That’s how editors group the market, and it’s the grouping that matters for outreach. A competitor backlink analysis is a second source: lists that link to your rivals rarely show up in your own searches.

Which Google search operators help you find listicles?

Quotes, intitle:, the minus sign with site:, and the date filters do most of the work. Google documents quotes, site:, the minus sign, before: and after: on its Refine Google searches help page. intitle: isn’t listed there but still restricts results to pages with the word in their title.

A strong starting query combines them:

intitle:best "invoicing software" freelancers -site:capterra.com -site:g2.com -site:reddit.com

Our free search string builder writes a full set like this for your category, audiences and competitors, ready to paste into Google.

How do you find ‘alternatives to’ articles?

Search each competitor with “alternatives”, and exclude the competitor’s own domain. Use three variants because writers title these posts differently: "[competitor] alternatives", "alternatives to [competitor]" and intitle:"[competitor] vs". Excluding -site:[competitor].com removes their own comparison pages, which won’t list you.

Expect a mix. When we ran "invoicing software" alternatives to FreshBooks on 18 October 2026, the results were dominated by AlternativeTo pages and vendor blogs such as InvoiceOwl and Moon Invoice that list their own product among the alternatives. AlternativeTo is a user-driven directory you can add yourself to; a rival vendor’s alternatives post rarely adds a direct competitor. The editorial lists worth pitching are often a few results further down. We cover how to pitch them in how to get into competitor alternatives articles.

How do you find roundup posts and ‘tools for X’ lists?

Search the job your product does, not just its category name. Roundups are often titled around a task or audience: “tools for remote teams”, “apps every freelancer needs”, “our marketing stack”. Try intitle:tools "[audience]", "tools we use" [topic] and intitle:"tool stack" OR intitle:toolkit [topic]. These turn up posts on adjacent product blogs and personal sites that the category searches miss. The niche tool roundup template shows how to pitch them.

What does a real search turn up? A worked example

Here’s what one category looked like on 18 October 2026, using a web search tool and reading each result. The point isn’t the exact list, which will change, but the shape of what comes back.

Search 1: best invoicing software for freelancers 2026. The results included NerdWallet, an affiliate publisher that discloses partner compensation; Bloom, Agiled, Tofu and Frihet, all software companies with their own lists; and two independent comparison sites. Agiled’s list, updated 14 April 2026, ranks Agiled first among 13 tools.

Search 2: intitle:best "invoicing software" freelancers -site:capterra.com -site:g2.com. Excluding the marketplaces surfaced a different group: posts on the blogs of Ruul, Aspire, Assembly, Webflow and Inkbot Design. Several of these companies offer invoicing only as one part of a wider product (payments, banking, client portals), and Webflow doesn’t sell it at all. They write for freelancers, so a tool that helps those readers is welcome. The publishers with no invoicing product of their own are often the easiest yes.

Search 3: "invoicing software" alternatives to FreshBooks. Mostly directory pages and vendor alternatives posts, as described above.

What the three searches told us:

• Different queries find different publishers. The plain search favoured big lists; the operator search found adjacent blogs. You need both.
• Vendor lists are common. In this category several software companies publish lists that rank themselves first. Note them, but put them at the bottom of your pitch list.
• Some results are junk. Watch for thin list pages hosted on an unrelated organisation’s site or subdomain, the kind of third-party content Google’s site reputation abuse policy targets. Skip pages like that; they rarely last and nobody maintains them.

How many listicles exist in your category?

More than you’ll pitch in a month, fewer than you fear. In a mature software category, the four query families often surface dozens of distinct list posts across the first two pages, with heavy overlap between searches. A narrow or brand-new category may return only a handful.

To estimate your own number, run your seed searches, open the top 20 results for each, and count unique list URLs after removing duplicates and marketplaces. Track the count over time. If you’re finding fewer than ten genuine prospects, widen to adjacent audiences and use cases, or look at broader methods in our hub on how to get backlinks.

How do you log and score what you find?

Use one row per post, with the columns you’ll need to decide and to pitch. This is the core of link prospecting: a list you can act on, not a pile of URLs. A spreadsheet is plenty. The columns that earn their place:

Then score each row quickly:

If a post already mentions you without a link, move it to its own list; asking for that link is a separate, faster process, and our unlinked mention template covers it. For more detail on vetting the site itself, see how to choose sites to pitch.

How do you keep the list current?

Re-run the same seed searches each month and add only URLs you haven’t seen. Two things change: new posts get published, and old posts get refreshed and climb back onto page one. The after: operator helps here. Adding after:2026/09/01 to a seed search shows pages Google considers updated since that date, which is a quick way to spot refreshes worth a fresh pitch. Do the same for lists you’re already on: re-checking the posts that link to you catches entries dropped in a refresh.

Keep the “Found via” column honest. After a few months it shows which searches produce prospects and which return marketplaces, so you can prune the seed list and spend your time on the families that work.

Should you do this by hand or have it done?

The manual method above finds most of what matters in a category, and it’s free. The cost is time: re-running searches, opening every result, spotting the vendor lists and junk pages, and keeping the sheet tidy.

If you’d rather not, BacklinkGenie runs the same buyer searches for you, skips forums, marketplaces and sites that sell links, keeps only posts where your product fits, and finds the person who edits each one. The free prospect report shows what it finds for your site, with each post’s Domain Rating (from Ahrefs), a fit reason and a verified contact, before you pay anything. How it works explains each step.

Once you have a list, the next steps are covered in the listicle link building guide: qualifying each post, finding the editor and writing a pitch that gets read. The step-by-step checklist version is in our guide to getting listed in ‘best X’ articles. When a post makes the cut, find the person who edits it before you write a word. If you sell software, link building for SaaS explains why these lists matter more than most link types.