Backlinks
Backlink Checker
See who links to a page or a domain
Enter a domain or a URL and get the referring domains and linking pages we hold, each with its anchor text, whether the link is followed, the page it points at, and when we last saw the link live.
Get early accessWhat it returns
- The referring domains in our index for the domain or URL you entered, with how many pages on each one link to you.
- The linking pages themselves, each with the anchor text used, the target page it points at, and whether the link is followed or marked otherwise.
- The distribution of your anchor text, so a profile built on your brand name reads differently from one built on the exact phrase you want to rank for.
- When each link was last seen live, and the date of the index behind the whole report, because a link list without dates is a list of claims.
When this matters
A competitor has outranked you on a commercial term for two quarters with a thinner page, and nothing on the page explains it. Their link profile usually does. Reading who links to that specific URL, with the anchor text, separates the three cases that look identical from the outside: a page cited by people in the field, a page sitting on a domain strong enough to carry it, and a page propped up by links you would not want. Each one calls for a different response, and guessing which it is wastes the quarter.
How to answer this today
The backlinks area watches a profile instead of describing it: it tracks your referring domains on a schedule, reports what was gained and lost between crawls, and compares your profile against the competitors in your project. Pulling the current link list for a URL you do not track, including someone else's, is the one-off question this tool handles.
BacklinksWhy this is harder than it looks
Nobody has every link
A backlink report is whatever one crawl found. Two tools run on the same domain will return different totals and both will miss links that exist, so the count is a floor on reality and never a census. Treating a total as complete is the most common mistake made with this data.
Links change without telling anyone
A page gets edited, a link gets removed, a site goes offline, and the index still holds the old row until the next crawl. Every link needs a last-seen date, because a report that presents stale links as current overstates a profile that may have shrunk.
Counting is ambiguous
Site-wide footer links, redirected URLs, canonicalised duplicates and both the www and bare versions of a host can each be counted once or many times. The totals swing wildly depending on which choice a tool made, which is why referring domains and raw backlinks are reported separately.
Index queries are paid
Serving a link list means querying a licensed index per lookup, so the tool is metered and rate limited per IP. The limit exists to stop automated extraction of the index itself, which is the thing that would end the free tier for everyone else.