The short version: Google Search Console has a free Links report that shows you which sites link to you, which pages get the most links, and what anchor text is used, and you find it under Links in the left menu, no sign-up beyond your existing Google account needed. It is not the whole picture of your backlink profile, but it is the only backlink data that comes straight from Google itself, which makes it worth checking every month whether you love SEO or not.
If you want to go deeper on this: What Does Backlinks Mean In SEO? Explained Simply (With A Real Example.
If you want to go deeper on this: Do You Need Backlinks To Rank In SEO In 2026?.
Why start with Search Console rather than a paid tool
I get asked this a lot by small business owners who have heard the words Ahrefs or Semrush and assume they need to spend £99 a month before they can even look at their own backlinks. You don’t. If your site is verified in Google Search Console, the backlink data is already sitting there, free, updated every few days, and pulled directly from Google’s own crawl rather than a third-party bot that crawls the web on its own schedule.
That last bit matters more than people think. A paid tool like Ahrefs has its own crawler, called AhrefsBot, and it finds links based on where its own bot has been. Search Console shows you links Google itself has found and counted when ranking you. If you only ever check one source, this is the one that reflects what Google sees, which is the thing that affects your rankings.
Step by step: pulling your backlink report
Here is exactly what to click, in order, assuming you already have Search Console set up for your domain:
- Log into search.google.com/search-console and select the right property (use the domain property if you have both www and non-www versions verified, it combines the data).
- In the left-hand menu, click Links. It sits near the bottom, under Legacy tools and reports on some accounts.
- You will see two main tables: External links and Internal links. For backlinks, you want External links.
- Under External links, click Top linked pages to see which of your pages get the most backlinks. Click Top linking sites to see which domains link to you most. Click Top linking text to see the anchor text people are using.
- Click through any of the three “More” links to expand each table to up to 1,000 rows, which is the cap Search Console gives you on the free version.
- Export the data by clicking the download icon, top right of each table, choosing CSV or Google Sheets, so you have a static copy to compare against next month.
That’s the whole process. No plugin, no browser extension, nothing to install. Five minutes and you have a spreadsheet of every domain Google has recorded as linking to you.
What the report is telling you
Top linking sites shows you domains, not individual pages, and it is sorted by the number of links from that domain, not by the quality of that domain. This trips people up constantly. A directory listing site with a Domain Rating of 8 can show up higher on your list than a genuine mention from a trade publication with a Domain Rating of 60, simply because the directory links to you from three pages and the publication only linked once.
Top linked pages tells you which of your own pages are the most linked-to, which is often not the page you’d expect. On one client site, a five-year-old blog post about employee onboarding templates had more backlinks than the homepage, because it had been picked up and referenced by two HR blogs and a university careers page. Nobody on the team knew that until we pulled the report.
Top linking text shows anchor text, meaning the actual clickable words used in the links pointing at you. This is useful for spotting a problem early: if you suddenly see forty new links all using the exact phrase “best payday alternative” or some other keyword-stuffed anchor you never wrote, that is a sign of a negative SEO attempt or a scraped content network, and it is worth investigating before it drags your rankings down.
A real example from an audit I ran
A client came to me convinced her backlink profile was strong because a previous freelancer had told her she had “over 300 backlinks.” When we pulled the Search Console Links report, she did have 340 referring domains listed. But once we exported the list and looked at it row by row, only 12 of those domains were what I’d call useful: real sites, real traffic, topically related to her industry.
The rest were link farms, abandoned directory sites from 2014, and a batch of Eastern European forum profiles that had clearly been bought in a job lot for £40 on a freelance marketplace years earlier. None of those 328 links were actively hurting her, because Google had mostly already discounted them, but they weren’t helping either. The number “340 backlinks” sounded impressive on a report. It meant almost nothing in practice. That gap between the headline number and the real value is the single most common misunderstanding I see when business owners look at their own link reports for the first time.
What this free tool won’t tell you
This is the part most guides skip past because it makes the free tool look less useful, but it matters. Search Console will not show you:
- Domain Rating, Domain Authority, or any equivalent trust score, because Google doesn’t publish one and never will.
- Links you have lost. If a site removed a link to you last month, it simply disappears from the report with no history or notification.
- Links Google has crawled but chosen not to count for ranking purposes, which is a real and common thing, particularly for links from low-quality or spammy pages.
- Competitor data of any kind. You only ever see your own property’s links, never anyone else’s.
Those gaps are exactly why paid tools exist, and why plenty of agencies will tell you the free version is “not enough.” They’re not wrong that it’s limited. But most small businesses don’t need to track link loss in real time or compare Domain Rating scores across ten competitors every week. They need to know roughly who is linking to them and whether anything looks off, and Search Console covers that perfectly well. I’ve written a longer piece on how to interpret backlink data in Google Search Console and what it won’t tell you if you want the fuller breakdown of where the blind spots are.
Sorting the useful links from the noise
Once you have your exported list, don’t try to action all 300 or 1,000 rows. Instead:
- Sort by domain and scan for anything you recognise as spam, adult content, gambling, or a language you don’t operate in. Flag these for a disavow file only if you’re seeing an actual ranking drop, not as routine housekeeping.
- Highlight any domain that looks like a genuine publication, industry blog, or.edu/.gov site. These are the ones worth thanking, sharing, or building a relationship with for future coverage.
- Check the top linked pages against your current content plan. If an old, unoptimised page is quietly earning links, that’s a page worth updating rather than leaving to rot, and it feeds directly into a core content strategy rather than a one-off blog schedule.
When it’s worth going further
Checking your own backlinks is only half the job. If you want to understand where your competitors are getting their links from, Search Console can’t help you there at all, since it only ever shows your own property. For that you need to look at tools built for researching what competitors are doing online, and if you’re planning content around gaps you’ve spotted, pairing that with proper competitor keyword research for your niche tends to be more productive than chasing backlinks in isolation.
And if you’re at the point of paying someone to manage link building for you, run them through a proper checklist first. I’ve seen far too many small businesses hand over £500 a month to an agency that turns out to be buying the same low-quality directory links my client had. Before you sign anything, use a checklist for evaluating SEO companies so you’re judging them on actual results rather than a big-sounding backlink count.
Related reading: dead check itch io download.
Frequently asked questions
Is Google Search Console really free to check backlinks?
Yes, completely free, with no upgrade tier or hidden paywall. You need a verified Google Search Console property for your site, which is also free to set up, and the Links report is included automatically.
How often does the Search Console backlink report update?
Google refreshes the Links data roughly every few days to a week, though it’s not on a fixed published schedule. It’s not real time, so a link you gained yesterday might not show up for several days.
Why do some of my backlinks not show up in Search Console at all?
Search Console caps each table at 1,000 rows and only shows links Google has crawled and decided to record. Very new links, low-priority pages Google crawls rarely, and links Google has already discounted for quality reasons can all be missing from the report even though they technically exist.
Should I disavow bad backlinks I find in this report?
Not automatically. Google’s own guidance is that most low-quality links are ignored anyway and don’t need action. Only consider a disavow file if you can see clear evidence of a manual action, a sudden unnatural spike in spammy links, or an actual unexplained ranking drop tied to those links.
