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.
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.
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.
