Free Backlink Checker: See the Backlinks of Any Website in Seconds (Plus the Google Method)

The quick answer: You can check your website's backlinks for free using Google Search Console (the most accurate free source), plus the free tiers of Ahrefs, Ubersuggest and Bing Webmaster Tools to fill in the gaps. No single free tool shows you everything, and that's the bit nobody tells you upfront.

I check backlinks for a living now, mine and clients'. And the first thing I want you to know before you open a single tool is this: there is no complete list of your backlinks anywhere. Not in Google Search Console, not in Ahrefs, not in Semrush, not even inside Google's own index. Every tool crawls the web differently and finds different links at different times. So the goal isn't to find "all" your backlinks. It's to find enough of them, from a couple of angles, to spot patterns.

Free backlink checker: check any website in seconds

Type a domain and press Check backlinks. You get the live backlink count, referring domains, the dofollow and nofollow split, spam score, broken links, the countries and top level domains the links come from, and the first date the site was seen linking. Results for a domain are kept for 30 days so repeat checks are instant.

The checker uses a commercial link index (the same class of data the paid tools resell) and shows the summary numbers free, with no account. For the link by link list, use the Google Search Console method below, which is free and is Google's own data.

Start with Google Search Console (it's free and it's Google's own data)

If you own a website and haven't set up Google Search Console, do that first, before you look at anything else. It's free, it takes about ten minutes to verify, and it's the only tool on this list that's showing you Google's actual view of your site rather than a third-party crawler's guess.

Here's the exact path:

• Log into Search Console at search.google.com/search-console
• Select your property (the website you've verified)
• In the left menu, click "Links"
• Under "External links" you'll see "Top linking sites" and "Top linking text"
• Click "More" under either one to expand the full list

This will show you the domains linking to you, roughly how many links from each, and the anchor text they're using. It's ranked by link volume, so your biggest referring domains sit at the top.

The catch: Search Console samples the data rather than showing every single link, and it can lag by weeks. I've had links show up in Search Console two months after Ahrefs found them, and the reverse is also true. It's accurate for what it shows you, it's just not complete.

The free version of Ahrefs' Backlink Checker

Ahrefs has a free backlink checker on its site (no login needed for a quick look, though a free account gives you a bit more). Type your domain in and it will show you your top referring domains, total backlinks, and your domain rating, capped at a small number of results, usually the top 100 links by authority.

This is the one I use for a fast gut check on a competitor's site as well as my own, because you don't need an account to run it. The number it shows for "total backlinks" will almost always be lower than what a paid Ahrefs account shows for the same domain, sometimes by a factor of ten or more, so don't panic if the free tool says 400 and you were expecting thousands. It's a sample, not a census.

If you're still fuzzy on what counts as a backlink versus an internal link or a mention with no link at all, it's worth reading what a backlink means in SEO terms before you start hunting, because half the confusion in this process is people counting things that don't count.

Ubersuggest, for a second opinion

Neil Patel's Ubersuggest has a free backlink report built in. Put in your domain, click "Backlinks" in the sidebar, and you'll get a list of linking domains, the estimated domain score of each one, and whether the link is follow or nofollow. The free version is limited to a handful of lookups a day per browser, so it's a supplement, not your main tool.

What I like it for specifically is the follow/nofollow split, because that's where a lot of people get their expectations wrong. I've had clients get excited about a "backlink" from a huge publication, only to check and find it was tagged rel="nofollow", meaning it passes trust to a reader but no direct ranking signal to Google in the traditional sense. Still worth having for traffic and brand credibility, just not the SEO silver bullet they assumed.

Bing Webmaster Tools (the one everyone skips)

Nearly nobody sets this up, which is exactly why I'm mentioning it. Bing Webmaster Tools is free, it takes minutes to verify (you can often import your Search Console property directly), and its "Backlinks" report under "Reports & Data" shows you a different crawl of your link profile than Google's.

I picked up a spammy backlink this way once that hadn't shown up in either Search Console or Ahrefs' free checker: a scraped copy of one of my old blog posts sitting on a low quality directory site based in Indonesia, linking back with my full URL as anchor text. Harmless on its own, but it's exactly the kind of thing that adds up if it happens fifty times, and Bing found it a full month before the others did.

What to look for once you've got the data

Pulling the list is the easy part. Reading it is where most people stop too early. Here's what I check, in order:

• Referring domains, not total link count. One hundred links from three domains is worth far less than fifty links from fifty different domains. Domain diversity matters more than volume.
• Anchor text patterns. If forty percent of your anchor text is your exact keyword phrase and none of it is your brand name or a natural phrase like "click here" or "this guide", that's a red flag for over-optimisation, and it's the kind of pattern Google's algorithm has specifically targeted since the Penguin update.
• Where the link sits on the page. A link buried in a footer or sidebar of a low quality directory carries far less weight than one placed naturally inside a paragraph of a real editorial article. If you want to see what strong versus weak placement looks like side by side, this breakdown of real backlink examples is worth ten minutes.
• Topical relevance. A link from a marketing blog to your marketing agency site is worth more than a link from an unrelated site about car insurance, even if the car insurance site has a higher authority score.
• New links versus lost links. Both Search Console and Ahrefs let you sort by date. If you've lost a batch of links recently, that's usually worth ten minutes chasing down, because it often means a site redesign somewhere removed you, and a polite email can get the link put back.

The uncomfortable bit about "Domain Authority" and "Domain Rating"

Here's something most backlink guides gloss over: Domain Authority (Moz's metric) and Domain Rating (Ahrefs' metric) are not Google metrics. Google has never confirmed either exists inside its own ranking system, because they don't, they're proprietary scores each company invented to help you compare sites relative to each other within their own tool. A DR 40 in Ahrefs is not directly comparable to a DA 40 in Moz, and neither number appears anywhere in Google's actual algorithm documentation.

I say this because I've sat in meetings where a client has rejected a useful backlink opportunity because the "DA was too low", while ignoring a spammy PBN link with an artificially inflated score sitting on their own profile already. The number is a rough proxy for authority, useful for comparison, not a Google ranking factor you should be chasing for its own sake. Traffic, relevance and real human readers behind the link matter more than the score next to it.

A quick word on what these free tools won't show you

Free tools show you a slice, and the slice they show tends to be biased toward the biggest, most authoritative sites in their existing index, because that's what their crawlers hit most often. Smaller, newer or more obscure sites linking to you often don't show up at all in a free lookup, even though Google has indexed the link. That's the trade-off. Free costs you completeness, and paid costs you actual money, usually somewhere between 99 and 399 US dollars a month for a proper Ahrefs, Semrush or Moz Pro subscription depending on the tier.

If your site is small (under, say, 500 backlinks total), the free tools I've listed will get you close to the full picture. If you're running an established site with tens of thousands of links, you'll hit the ceiling of the free tools within about five minutes and start missing real gaps in your data. That's a decision to make with your budget, not a reason to panic.

Once you know what you've got

Checking your backlinks isn't the end goal, it's the diagnostic. Once you've pulled the list and know roughly how many referring domains you have and what shape they're in, the next question is whether you need more, and what kind. Not every site needs the same mix. A local plumber's site and a SaaS company need entirely different link profiles, and it's worth reading up on how many types of backlinks you should be aiming for before you go chasing volume for its own sake.

And if part of what you found looks off, an agency offering to sell you links, an odd pattern of exact-match anchor text, a batch of new links from sites that look freshly built, it's worth reading what really happens when you pay for backlinks before you assume the fix is throwing more money at the problem. Sometimes the answer isn't buying more links, it's cleaning up what's already there and building a handful of good ones, which is covered in more depth in how to get quality backlinks with real numbers behind the advice.

Looking for places to earn new links? The free write for us finder lists guest post sites in any niche.

See also Free Guest Posting Sites List: Where to Get Published in 2026.

For the full guide on this topic, see find backlinks using google search.

Links are half the picture. To see how much Google traffic the same domain earns, run it through my free website traffic checker.

For a single comparable number, run the same domain through my free domain authority checker.

All my free tools are listed on the free marketing tools page.

How to find the backlinks of any website (not only your own)

Search Console only shows links to sites you own. To find backlinks of a website you do not control, use the checker at the top of this page: type the domain, and it returns the referring domains, the total backlink count and the strongest linking pages, the same data a paid tool shows on its free tier but without the sign-up. Run it on your top three competitors and export the linking domains that link to two of them but not to you; that list is the start of every link building plan I have run.

Google backlink checker: what Google itself gives you

There is no standalone Google backlink checker any more; the link operator was retired years ago. What Google gives you is the Links report in Search Console (top linked pages, top linking sites, top linking text, and an export of the sample), which is the most accurate view of your own links because it comes from Google's crawl. Its two limits are that it is sample-based above a few thousand links and that it never shows another site's backlinks. The checker on this page covers the second gap; Bing Webmaster Tools covers the first with its own crawl.

How to check backlink quality in two minutes

For any linking page ask four questions. Is the page indexed (search its URL in Google)? Does it have traffic of its own (the traffic checker linked below estimates it)? Is the link inside the content rather than in a footer, sidebar or comment? Is the linking site about a related topic? Two yeses is a link worth keeping; four is a link worth getting more of. A domain score on its own tells you almost nothing, which is why the checker here shows the linking pages and not only a number.

Also in: Türkçe, Bahasa Indonesia, العربية, עברית.

Shopping for guest post sites? This free list of blogs that accept guest posts is searchable by niche.

Backlinks are one signal out of many. If you want someone to read the whole picture for you, I work as an SEO consultant for UK businesses.

Frequently asked questions

Can I check my backlinks for free without any tool at all?

Sort of. You can search Google using the "link:" operator followed by your domain, but Google deprecated this feature years ago and it now returns an unreliable, incomplete sample rather than an actual list. Google Search Console is a far more accurate free option and takes about the same effort to set up.

Why do Ahrefs, Search Console and Ubersuggest all show different numbers?

Because each one crawls the web with its own bot on its own schedule and none of them index the entire internet. Ahrefs' free checker caps results, Search Console samples rather than lists everything, and Ubersuggest limits free daily lookups. Treat every number as directional, not exact.

How often should I check my website's backlinks?

Once a month is enough for most small business sites. If you're actively running a link building campaign or you've had a recent traffic drop and suspect a link problem, check weekly for a couple of months until things settle.

Is a nofollow backlink worth checking at all?

Yes. Nofollow links don't pass the same direct ranking signal, but they still send real readers to your site, build brand recognition, and Google has said it may still use nofollow links as a signal in aggregate. Don't dismiss them just because a tool flags them as nofollow.

Why three tools will give you three different answers

I get asked this question most weeks by clients who are convinced they've done something wrong. They check Google Search Console, see 400 linking sites, then run the same domain through Ahrefs and see 1,800. Neither number is broken. They're measuring different things, crawled by different bots, on different days, with different rules about what counts.

Google Search Console only shows links it has crawled and decided to surface to you, and it caps and samples that data rather than listing every single link that exists. Ahrefs and Semrush run their own independent web crawlers that touch a huge chunk of the internet, but still nowhere near all of it. So when you ask "how many backlinks does my site have," the honest answer nobody likes to give is: there isn't one true number. There's only an estimate, from a specific crawler, on a specific day. Even Google doesn't know the exhaustive total of every link pointing at your site, and that's worth sitting with before you get precious about a specific figure.

How often you should be checking

Monthly is enough for most small business sites. Weekly checks make sense only if you're actively running a link building campaign or watching for negative SEO attacks, where a sudden spike of thousands of spammy links from unrelated domains needs catching quickly so you can disavow them. Outside of that, checking daily just gives you noise, because crawlers refresh their indexes on their own schedules, not yours, so day-to-day changes rarely reflect anything real happening on your site.

Set up ongoing monitoring so you're not doing this from scratch every time

Doing a one-off audit is fine, but backlinks aren't static, sites go down, links get removed, spam accumulates. Set this up once and you stop having to repeat the whole process:

• Turn on email alerts in Ahrefs or Semrush for new and lost backlinks, sent weekly, not daily, or you'll drown in noise.
• Check Search Console's Links report monthly, same day every month, so you spot patterns rather than one-off blips.
• Keep one running spreadsheet you update quarterly rather than starting fresh every time, so you can track growth over time instead of just staring at a snapshot.

If you're new to this whole area and just want the plain, no jargon version of how to get your first real number to work from, I put together how to find out how many backlinks your website has as the starting point before any of this quarterly monitoring stuff matters.

Buying guest posts to build links? Here's how sponsored posts on this site work.

How to check who's linking to a specific page, not just the domain

Most people only ever check the whole domain. But if you're publishing content regularly, check individual pages too:

• In Ahrefs or Semrush, paste the exact URL, not the root domain, into the search box.
• Switch the mode from "domain" to "exact URL" or "this URL only."
• Compare which of your posts attract natural links versus which ones sit at zero.

This is one of the most useful five-minute audits you can run, because it tells you what kind of content people want to reference. For me it's always been original data, opinionated takes, and free templates. Never the generic "top 10 tips" post.

Does backlink count matter at all, then?

It matters as a rough signal of authority and as a way to track your own progress over time, and it matters if you're benchmarking against a competitor before pitching for the same keywords they rank for. What it does not do is guarantee anything on its own. I have seen sites with fewer than 200 total backlinks outrank sites with 10,000, because the smaller site had links from three or four authoritative, topically relevant domains, a strong internal linking structure, and content that answered the query better. Google's own public guidance, including comments from its search advocates over the years, has consistently pushed back on the idea that link quantity is a target to hit. The company has said more than once that it evaluates link quality and relevance, not volume, and that manipulative link schemes built purely to inflate a count can trigger a manual action rather than a ranking boost. You can read Google's own search essentials documentation on this, which is one of the more useful primary sources on the subject, on Google's Search Essentials page.

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.

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.

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