How Can I See How Many Backlinks My Site Has Gained This Year? (Real Steps, No Guessing)

The short version: Google Search Console will show you a live list of your backlinks for free, but it won't cleanly answer "how many did I gain this year" because it doesn't let you set a date range. For that you need a paid tool like Ahrefs, Semrush, or Moz, set to a custom date range from 1 January to today, looking at both new referring domains and lost ones. Do both, because the free tool and the paid tool answer different questions.

I get asked this a lot, usually by someone who's just spent six months guest posting, doing digital PR, or begging for links, and now wants proof it worked. Fair question. The annoying answer is that "how many backlinks have I gained" is three different questions wearing one trench coat, and most people only ever check one of them.

The three numbers people confuse

Before you open a single tool, get clear on which of these you want:

• Total backlinks right now (a snapshot, includes links from years ago)
• New backlinks gained this year (the raw wins)
• Net backlinks gained this year (new links minus the ones that died, went nofollow, or got deleted when a blog shut down)

Almost every "backlink checker" tool leads with the first number because it's the biggest and looks the most impressive. It's also the least useful one for judging whether your outreach this year worked. If your site has 3,000 total backlinks, that tells you nothing about January to now. You want number three, and I'll show you where to find it in a minute.

Step by step: checking it for free in Google Search Console

Google Search Console is the best free starting point, and I've written a full walkthrough of checking backlinks using Google Search Console if you want the deeper version. Here's the fast route for this specific question:

• Log into Search Console and click "Links" in the left sidebar
• Under "External links," click "Top linking sites" and then "More"
• Click into "Top linked pages" too, this shows which of your pages are earning links, not just how many overall
• Click on the "Linking sites" or "Target pages" tables and export to CSV or Google Sheets
• Sort by any date column you can find, though be warned, Search Console doesn't consistently show the date it discovered a link

Here's the catch nobody tells you upfront: Search Console shows a rolling snapshot of links it currently knows about, not a historical timeline you can filter by date. There's no "show me links found between 1 January and today" button. If you want a true year-on-year count from the free tool, you have to export your full link list on 1 January (or as close to it as you remember), export it again today, and manually compare the two spreadsheets in Excel or Google Sheets using a formula like COUNTIF or a simple VLOOKUP to find which domains are new. It's clunky, but it's free and it's accurate to what Google itself has indexed.

I do this every January for my own site now, purely because I forgot to one year and had no baseline to compare against by December. Lesson learned the annoying way.

The faster route: a paid backlink tool with a date filter

If you don't want to run spreadsheet comparisons twice a year, this is where Ahrefs, Semrush, or Moz earn their monthly fee. All three let you open your site's backlink profile and set a custom date range.

In Ahrefs, for example, you go to Site Explorer, enter your domain, click "Backlinks" in the left menu, then use the date picker at the top to set your range from 1 January 2026 to today. It shows you:

• New backlinks gained in that window
• Lost backlinks in that same window
• New versus lost referring domains, which is the number that matters

Semrush's Backlink Analytics tool does the same job under "Backlinks," with a "New" and "Lost" tab you can filter by date. Moz's Link Explorer is a bit more limited on date filtering but still shows discovery dates per link if you export the full list.

None of these tools agree with each other exactly, because each one crawls the web with its own bot and none of them crawl everything. Ahrefs might show 340 new referring domains this year while Semrush shows 275 for the same site. That's not an error, it's just a different slice of the internet being sampled. Pick one tool and stick with it for consistency rather than chasing the "true" number, because there isn't one single true number, even Google's own internal count differs from what shows in Search Console.

A real example, because the theory only gets you so far

When I sat down to rebuild parts of my own site's authority after a stretch where I'd stepped back from blogging (I talk about that period, and the general mess of rebuilding a business publicly, in this Monday Motivation Spotlight conversation), the backlink numbers were sobering. Pulling an Ahrefs date range from 1 January to the end of that year showed 214 new backlinks gained. Great, right? Except the same report showed 40 links lost from 12 referring domains, mostly old guest posts on sites that had either shut down, redesigned and dropped their resource pages, or gone through an ownership change and wiped years of content in the process.

Net gain: roughly 174 new links, from about 63 new referring domains once I stripped out duplicates and links from the same forum thread being counted multiple times. That's the number I reported to myself as progress, not the 214. If I'd only looked at "new backlinks" and stopped there, I'd have been quietly overstating the win by more than 20%.

The uncomfortable bit almost nobody says out loud

Here's the part that gets left out of most "how to check your backlinks" articles: the raw count going up is not proof that your SEO is working, and treating it as your headline metric can actively mislead you. A single low-quality directory submission can add 15 backlinks from 15 subdomains of the same spam network in one afternoon. Your tool will happily report "you gained 15 backlinks this month." Your rankings won't move an inch, and in the worst case, Google may eventually discount or even penalise the domain those links came from, dragging your profile down with it.

What correlates with ranking improvements is new referring domains from sites with real traffic and real editorial standards, not raw link count. One link from a site like the BBC or a well-known trade publication in your niche is worth more than fifty links from expired-domain PBNs or comment sections. If you're going to celebrate a number this year, celebrate quality referring domains gained, not total links. I've watched clients get excited about a "200 new backlinks" report that turned out to be 190 of them from the same low-value web directory network, and it did precisely nothing for their traffic.

Building the habit so this isn't a once-a-year scramble

The reason most people can't answer "how many backlinks did I gain this year" cleanly is that they only check backlinks when they remember to, usually in a panic before a client call. Fix that with a simple monthly routine:

• First Monday of every month, export your backlink list from whichever tool you use
• Save it as a dated file, backlinks-jan-2026.csv, backlinks-feb-2026.csv, and so on
• Note just two numbers each time: new referring domains and lost referring domains
• Keep a running total in a simple spreadsheet, it takes about ten minutes a month

Doing it monthly rather than annually also means you catch link losses while they're fixable. If a site drops your link because they redesigned their blog, a polite email asking them to re-add it often works, especially if it's within a few weeks of the change. Wait a year and that contact has usually moved jobs or the site's changed hands twice.

If you're building new links rather than just measuring old ones, it's worth knowing where the free opportunities are before you spend money on outreach tools. I keep an updated list in where you can get backlinks for free, and pairing that with proper on-page work matters too, because backlinks pointing at a poorly optimised page are wasted effort. Worth a read if you haven't sorted the basics, in why you should SEO optimize your website.

What "good" looks like by the numbers

People always want a benchmark, so here's a rough one from working with small and mid-sized business sites over the years. A small local business site doing modest, consistent outreach (a few guest posts, some digital PR, listing on relevant directories) tends to gain somewhere between 20 and 60 new referring domains a year. A content-heavy site publishing link-worthy research or data each month can hit 150 to 300 new referring domains a year. Anything jumping by thousands in a single month, unless you've had a genuine viral moment or major press hit, is worth investigating rather than celebrating, because that pattern usually means either a spam attack (people building bad links to your site to try to harm it) or a technical issue duplicating your link data.

Related: my guest posting sites usa page.

If you want the full count rather than this year's gains, here's how to check how many backlinks your site has in total.

If you're asking how many backlinks do I have in total rather than this year, start with my quick check and what the number means.

Related: link building (this site).

Frequently asked questions

Can I see backlinks gained this year for free without any paid tool?

Yes, using Google Search Console. Export your full external links list now, save it, and compare it against an export from the start of the year using a spreadsheet formula. It takes manual work but costs nothing and uses Google's own data.

Why do Ahrefs, Semrush, and Moz all show different backlink numbers for the same site?

Each tool crawls the web with its own bot and its own schedule, so none of them index the exact same set of pages. The differences are normal, not errors. Pick one tool and track changes over time within that tool rather than comparing raw totals between tools.

Does Google Search Console let me filter backlinks by date range?

No, not directly. Search Console shows a current snapshot of the links it knows about, not a searchable timeline. To get a true date-range comparison for free you need to export the data periodically yourself and compare exports manually.

Is a rising backlink count always a good sign?

No. A big jump can come from spam networks, expired directories, or duplicate crawls rather than real editorial links, and it can sit alongside no improvement in rankings at all. Focus on new referring domains from relevant, trafficked sites rather than the total number of links.