How to Track Backlinks Over Time Without a Paid Tool

The short version: You can track backlinks over time for free by combining Google Search Console's Links report, Bing Webmaster Tools, Google Alerts, and a simple spreadsheet you update once a month. It takes about 25 minutes a week, it will never show you every link that exists, and that gap matters less than you think because most backlinks do nothing for your rankings anyway.

Why I stopped paying for backlink tracking

In 2022, when I was rebuilding my business after five years of losing clients, speaking gigs and a chunk of my income to the fallout from long Covid and a broken relationship, I cancelled my Ahrefs subscription. That was £99 a month I could not justify anymore. I remember sitting at my kitchen table thinking, right, if I cannot pay for the data, I will just build the data myself.

What surprised me is that the free version worked almost as well for the one thing I needed, which was knowing whether new links were showing up and whether old ones had vanished. I did not need a competitor gap analysis three times a week. I needed a simple log I could trust.

If you are trying to understand why backlinks matter enough to bother tracking them at all, I have written about that separately here: why backlinks are important for SEO rankings. This post assumes you already know they matter and just want a free way to watch them.

The core tool: Google Search Console's Links report

Search Console is free, it is Google's own data, and it is the closest thing you have to ground truth about what Google itself has crawled and counted as a link to your site.

• Log into Search Console and click "Links" in the left sidebar.
• Under "External links" click "Top linking sites" to see every domain linking to you, ranked by number of links.
• Click "Top linked pages" to see which of your pages are pulling in the most links.
• Export both reports as CSV, once a month, same date every time. I do mine on the first Monday.

The catch, and nobody tells you this clearly enough: Search Console only shows you a sample, not the full list, and it shows the top 1,000 linking sites at most. It also lags. A link can go live and not show up in this report for two to six weeks. If you are expecting real time tracking, you will be disappointed. If you accept it as a monthly snapshot, it works fine.

Building the spreadsheet that does the actual tracking

The report on its own does not show you change over time. That is what your spreadsheet is for. Here is the exact structure I use, in Google Sheets because it is free and syncs across devices.

Columns, left to right:

• Date first spotted
• Linking domain
• Linking URL (the specific page)
• My page being linked to
• Anchor text used
• Follow or nofollow (check this manually with your browser's view source, search for "nofollow")
• Status (live, removed, redirected)
• Last checked date
• Notes

Every month when you export the Search Console CSV, paste the new list into a fresh tab called with that month's name. Then, in your master tracking tab, use a simple formula to flag anything new:

=IF(COUNTIF('Last Month'!A:A, A2)=0, "NEW", "seen before")

That one formula is doing 90% of the work paid tools charge you for. It tells you what showed up since last time. Anything flagged NEW gets a row added to your master tracker with all the details above filled in by hand.

Anything that was in last month's list but is missing this month gets marked "removed" in your master tab, with the date you noticed. This is the bit most free guides skip entirely, and it is the most useful column in the whole sheet. Links disappear more often than people admit, either because a site got redesigned, a blog post got deleted, or someone quietly took your link out during an update. I found a guest post link I'd earned for a client go missing after three months, and the only reason I caught it was the spreadsheet flagged it as "removed" during a routine check. We asked the site, politely, and it turned out it had been dropped during a template migration by accident. It was put back within a week. Without the tracking, that link would have just quietly stopped counting and nobody would have noticed for a year, if ever.

Bing Webmaster Tools: the free source most people forget

Bing Webmaster Tools is free, takes ten minutes to verify your site, and gives you an "Inbound Links" report that is separate data from Google's, because Bing crawls the web with its own index. I have found links in Bing's report two to three weeks before they showed up in Search Console, particularly from smaller or newer sites that Google is slower to crawl.

Add a second export to your monthly routine from Bing, paste it into the same spreadsheet system, and tag each row with which source found it, "GSC" or "Bing." Over a year you will start to notice patterns, some sites Google finds fast, others only Bing seems to catch at all.

Google Alerts for links you have not earned yet

Set up a Google Alert for your brand name written without "https" or "www," so it catches text mentions of your business name even before anyone turns it into a hyperlink. Set a second alert for your exact domain, like "yourbusiness.com" in quotes.

This will not tell you if a link exists yet, but it tells you when someone is talking about you, which is often the stage right before a link appears. I use this to follow up with a friendly email: "Saw you mentioned us, would you mind adding a link to the specific page?" That single follow up email has turned unlinked mentions into real backlinks for me at least a dozen times over the past two years, at zero cost.

The manual site search trick

Once a quarter, run this search in Google: site:yourdomain.com -site:yourdomain.com. It sounds contradictory but it works because Google interprets it as "show me pages that mention my domain as text but are not on my domain." It is rough, it surfaces a lot of noise, but it occasionally catches forum mentions, directory listings, and small blog links that never made it into Search Console at all.

Using the free tiers of paid tools without paying

You do not have to avoid paid tools entirely to avoid paying for them. Several offer usable free tiers:

• Ahrefs' free Backlink Checker shows your top 100 backlinks and top linking domains, no account needed, refreshed periodically.
• Moz Link Explorer gives you 10 free queries a month on a free account, which is enough for a monthly spot check if you use it deliberately rather than wasting queries on curiosity searches.
• Ubersuggest's free tier allows a limited number of daily lookups and includes a basic backlink overview.

None of these give you full historical tracking on their own. The move is to run one of them once a month, screenshot or export the top domains list, and paste that into the same spreadsheet you are already keeping. You are essentially building your own historical archive on top of tools that refuse to keep history for free accounts.

If you also want to see what your competitors are building, and you should, because it tells you which of your own links are rare and valuable versus common as muck, I've laid out the exact Google search operators for that in how to find and analyse competitor backlinks using Google search.

What this takes, week to week

Here is the honest time cost, because I tracked it: about 25 minutes a week if you are consistent, closer to two hours if you let it pile up for a month and have to catch up. Weekly, it is:

• Monday: check Google Alerts inbox, follow up on any unlinked mentions worth chasing, 10 minutes.
• First Monday of the month: export Search Console and Bing reports, run the COUNTIF check, update the spreadsheet, 30 to 45 minutes.
• First Monday of each quarter: run the free tool check and the manual site search, 20 minutes extra.

Averaged out, that is under half an hour a week for tracking that is arguably more honest than a paid dashboard, because you built it and you understand exactly what it is and is not counting.

The uncomfortable bit nobody wants to say out loud

Here is where I will annoy some SEO people. Most of the backlinks you will spend hours tracking will do nothing measurable to your rankings. A link from a low authority directory, a syndicated press release picked up by forty near identical sites, a comment section link with a nofollow tag, none of these move the needle, and no amount of tracking changes that. The value is almost entirely concentrated in a small number of links from sites that already have real traffic and real authority in your topic area.

So the point of tracking is not to grow a big number. It is to notice, quickly, when one of the ten or twenty links that matter disappears, changes anchor text, gets deindexed, or gets buried under a site redesign. If you are spending your free tracking time celebrating that you went from 340 to 360 backlinks, you are measuring the wrong thing. Track quality signals per link, not the count. This is the same discipline I talk about when clients ask me to measure ROI from AI search visibility, the temptation is always to chase a bigger number instead of asking whether the number that matters moved.

The other thing people avoid saying is that free tracking will always show you less than the truth. Google itself has said publicly it does not disclose every link it counts. You are working with a sample, always. That is fine. Directionally accurate and consistently checked beats perfectly complete and abandoned after two months, every time.

Where this fits with building links

Tracking is only useful once you have something worth tracking. If your link count is thin because your outreach process is thin, no spreadsheet fixes that. I go through the actual process for earning links, not just measuring them, in how to build backlinks for your business site without wasting six months on nothing, which pairs well with this tracking system once you have a steady flow of new links coming in worth watching. And if you want the wider strategic case for why some links matter enormously and others barely register, that is covered in why backlinks matter for your SEO strategy.

The quickest way to test any of this on a real site is the backlink checker on this site, which is free and needs no account.

If you write on this topic, see Sites That Accept Guest Posts: Real Lists, Real Pay, and What Gets You Published.

Frequently asked questions

Can I really track backlinks without paying for Ahrefs or Semrush?

Yes, using Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools together with a monthly spreadsheet export, you can track new and lost backlinks reliably, though you will see fewer total links than a paid tool reports because both platforms cap and delay what they show.

How often should I check for new backlinks?

Once a month is enough for most small businesses, since backlink data in Search Console and Bing refreshes slowly anyway, checking daily wastes time without giving you new information.

Why does Google Search Console show fewer backlinks than a paid tool?

Search Console only displays a sample of your top linking sites, capped at roughly the top 1,000 domains, and it lags by weeks after a link goes live, whereas paid tools crawl the web independently and often catch more, though not always the same links.

What is the single most useful column in a free backlink tracking spreadsheet?

The "status" column that flags a link as removed the moment it disappears from a monthly export, because catching a lost link from an important site early is worth far more than knowing your total count went up or down by a handful.