Google Search Console (formerly Google Webmaster Tools) is a free service offered by Google for website owners to maintain and manage their websites.
You cannot use it to research the competitors, but it is a great tool to check the health and technical aspects of your website(s).
The platform provides reports about incoming links, keywords in serps, too short meta tags, mobile usability,crawl errors, site's response time, security issues, malware, blocked pages and other similar aspects. It should be connected with Google Analytics.
The platform provides reports about number of clicks, evolution of clicks, search queries, ranking pages, countries and more. You can filter the results.
It displays external and internal links, but doesn't show detailed reports with percent of anchor texts, referring domains or IPs.
They have an active forum for webmasters where you can find resources or ask questions.
It is a must use tool to keep an eye on your website's issues.