How to Check Backlinks: See How Many Your Site Really Has

The short answer: where to see your backlinks

You can see how many backlinks your site has for free in Google Search Console: open Links, then read Top linking sites under External links. It lists the sites Google knows link to you. For a second view, and for any site you do not own, use Bing Webmaster Tools or the free tiers of Ahrefs, Semrush and Moz. Each tool reports a different total, so pick one, track referring domains (linking sites) every month and watch the trend rather than the headline number.

Which tool answers which question:

• How many sites link to my site? Search Console's Links report, plus Ahrefs Webmaster Tools as a second index once you verify the site there.
• Who links to a competitor? Bing Webmaster Tools, the free Ahrefs Backlink Checker, Moz Link Explorer or Semrush. Search Console only covers sites you have verified.
• Is one specific link followed? Open the page and read its rel value, or paste the URL into our free nofollow link checker.
• How many links do I need? Count the referring domains of the pages that rank for your keyword and compare them in the backlink gap calculator.

If your site launched in the last few weeks, expect very little. Search Console only shows links Google has crawled, which takes time on a new domain, and the first links most new domains collect are automated spam pages (more on those below).

Google Search Console's Links report: what it shows and what it does not

Search Console is the only free report built on Google's own link data, so start there. Verify your site (a Domain property covers every subdomain and both http and https), then:

1. Open Links in the left menu.
2. Under External links, read Top linked pages (your pages with the most links from other sites), Top linking sites (the domains linking to you) and Top linking text (the most common anchor text).
3. Click More under Top linking sites to see the full table, then click a site to see which of your pages it links to.
4. Use the Export button and choose Latest links to download recent links sorted by the date Google found them.

What it does well: it shows links Google has actually found, grouped by root domain, and it also shows your internal links, which helps you spot important pages that get too few links from your own site.

What it does not do, according to Google's own help page for the report:

• It is a sample. Google describes the report as a sample of your links, not a complete list. Tables stop at 1,000 rows, and exports reach up to 100,000 rows.
• No nofollow status. The report does not say whether a link is nofollow, so a followed link and a nofollow link look the same.
• Stale links. A link can stay in the report after the linking page removed it or went offline.
• Merged data. Subdomains are grouped under their root domain, and your pages are grouped by canonical URL.
• No competitor data. You can only see properties you have verified.

So Search Console answers "which sites link to me, according to Google" well, and "exactly how many links" poorly. Use the number of rows in Top linking sites as a rough referring-domain count, and the Latest links export as your monthly list of new links to review.

Bing Webmaster Tools: free link data for any site

Bing Webmaster Tools has a Backlinks tool that Bing says lists backlinks for any site, not only yours, including sites similar to yours. That makes it one of the most useful free ways to look at a competitor's links.

How to use it:

1. Sign in to Bing Webmaster Tools and import your site from Google Search Console, which verifies it in a few clicks.
2. Open Backlinks to see the domains Bing has found linking to you, with their anchor text.
3. Add a competitor's domain to view its backlinks, then look for sites that link to them and not to you. Those sites are your outreach list.

Keep in mind that Bing's index is not Google's, so its totals will differ from Search Console. That is fine: you are looking for linking sites you did not know about, not a precise count.

Setting up Bing Webmaster Tools pays off twice. Since February 2026 it also has an AI Performance report (in public preview) that counts how often your pages are cited in Microsoft Copilot and Bing's AI summaries. Our guide to AI visibility explains how to read it.

Ahrefs, Semrush and Moz: what the free versions show

The big SEO tools each crawl the web with their own bots and sell access to the result. Their free tiers are enough for a founder checking one site a month. The limits below were checked on each vendor's own pages in October 2026, and they change often.

• Ahrefs Backlink Checker (free version): enter any domain or URL to see its Domain Rating, its number of backlinks and referring domains, and a short list of its top backlinks. Good for a quick look at a competitor.
• Ahrefs Webmaster Tools (now called Ahrefs Free): for sites you verify, with no limit on the number of verified sites. It shows up to 1,000 of your backlinks at once with sorting and filters, plus a site audit with 5,000 crawl credits per project each month. It is the most detailed free view of your own links.
• Semrush: without a paid SEO Toolkit plan, its Backlinks report allows 10 requests a day and shows 10 results per report. Enough to check a total, not to work through a list.
• Moz Link Explorer: a free Moz Community account gets 10 queries a month, with Domain Authority, Page Authority, Spam Score, linking domains, anchor text and counts of followed versus nofollow links.

Remember that Domain Rating (Ahrefs) and Domain Authority (Moz) are each company's own score, built from its own crawl. Google does not use either. Our guide to DA vs DR explains how they are calculated and why they disagree, and the Domain Rating entry defines the metric.

Why every tool shows a different number

Put the same domain into four tools and you will get four totals. That is normal, and it has a few causes:

• Different crawlers. Each company finds links with its own bot. A link on a page one bot never visited does not exist for that tool.
• Different freshness. Tools recrawl pages on their own schedules, so a removed link can linger for weeks in one tool and vanish from another.
• Different counting rules. Some tools count every page that carries a link, so one sitewide footer link on a 3,000-page blog becomes 3,000 backlinks from a single site. Others group by domain, skip redirects or merge subdomains.
• Different spam filters. Tools hide some spam pages and keep others.
• Google shows a sample. Search Console is not a full count either.

So which number is right? None of them is a full picture of what Google sees and uses. The practical answer: choose one third-party tool, record its referring-domain count on the same day each month, and check the trend against Search Console's list of linking sites. A rising count of relevant sites is the signal you want. A jump of thousands of backlinks from one domain is not.

Referring domains vs backlinks: the count that matters

A backlink is a single link from a page on another site to yours. A referring domain is a site that links to you at least once. If one blog links to you from ten articles, that is ten backlinks and one referring domain.

Referring domains is the better headline number because it counts independent sites. Ten links from one site are mostly one vote; ten links from ten relevant sites are ten. That is why "total backlinks" alone tells you little, and why most SEO tools show both.

When you review the linking sites themselves, four questions matter more than either count:

1. Is the site relevant to your topic and your customers?
2. Does it have real visitors? A link on a page people read can send you customers. A high score with no traffic is a weak sign.
3. Is the link in the main content? A contextual backlink inside an article is widely treated as worth more than a footer or sidebar link, and Google's spam policies name links spread across the footers or templates of many sites as link spam.
4. Is it followed? A dofollow link can pass ranking signals. Google treats nofollow, sponsored and ugc as hints and says it generally does not use such links for ranking.

To turn your count into a target, look up the referring domains of the pages ranking for your keyword. Our guide to how many backlinks you need to rank walks through it, and the backlink gap calculator turns the numbers into a monthly pace.

How to verify one promised link

Whether you earned a link, wrote a guest post for one or paid for a placement, check it yourself instead of trusting a screenshot. It takes five minutes:

1. Open the page in a private window and search it for your domain (Ctrl+F or Cmd+F). If you cannot find the link, a search engine may not either.
2. Read the rel attribute. Right-click the link, choose Inspect and look for rel. No nofollow, sponsored or ugc value means a followed link. Our free nofollow link checker lists every link on a page with its rel value, so you can do this in one step.
3. Confirm it is a real link. Google says it can generally only crawl links that are <a> elements with an href attribute. A "link" that only works through a script click handler may not count.
4. Check the placement. Note whether it sits in the article body or in a footer, sidebar or author box.
5. Check that the page can be indexed. A noindex robots tag, a robots.txt block or a canonical tag pointing to another URL can each keep the page, and so the link, out of Google's index. The meta tag checker shows the robots and canonical tags of any page.
6. Look for the page in Google. Search for its exact URL. Google notes that site: searches are not a complete list, so a missing result is a prompt to check again later, not proof of a problem.
7. Log it and recheck. Record the URL, date, anchor text and rel value, then recheck after 30 and 90 days. Links get edited, pages get deleted, and "permanent" placements sometimes are not.

One rule for paid links: Google asks that paid links carry rel="sponsored" (or nofollow). A seller promising followed paid links is offering what Google's link spam policy describes. Read buying backlinks: risks and safe alternatives before you pay anyone.

Spam links: the ones every new site gets

Check a brand-new domain and you will often find a handful of backlinks you never asked for. When we checked lightspeedbolt.com about two weeks after launch, the free Ahrefs checker showed 4 backlinks from 4 sites, and all 4 were auto-generated spam pages with keyword-stuffed titles about authority backlinks. Pages like these are generated in bulk and point at large numbers of new domains.

How to recognise them:

• Page titles stuffed with SEO phrases, or text that reads as machine-generated.
• Pages that list hundreds or thousands of unrelated domains.
• Copies of your own content on domains you have never heard of.
• Sites with no real navigation, no author and no sign of visitors.

What to do: usually nothing. Google says most sites will not need its disavow tool, because it can usually work out which links to trust on its own. It recommends disavowing only when you have a considerable number of spammy, artificial or low-quality links and they have caused, or are likely to cause, a manual action. In Search Console, open Manual actions under Security and manual actions. If it reports no issues, leave the spam alone.

The exception is links you built or paid for in the past that break Google's policies. Try to get those removed at the source first, and use the disavow tool only for the ones you cannot remove.

A 15-minute monthly backlink routine

Set a reminder for the first Monday of each month and run the same steps every time:

1. Export Latest links from Search Console and scan it for new linking sites.
2. Record your referring-domain count from the same third-party tool you used last month.
3. Open each new link worth having and check its rel value and placement with the nofollow link checker.
4. Recheck every link you were promised or paid for, and ask for a fix if one has gone.
5. Glance at Manual actions. No issues means no action needed on spam.
6. Compare your count with the pages that outrank you, and decide how many new linking sites you need next month.

Write the numbers down. After three months you will know your real link velocity, which is the number to plan around.

For free ways to earn more links, start with our guide to free backlinks. If you need more relevant links than you can earn alone, our backlinks service places them in editorial content and lists every live URL, anchor and status in your dashboard, so you can verify each one with the steps above.