How to check backlinks to your site and to anyone else's
Search Console covers your own domain for free; any other domain needs a link index, and both need reading with care.
By ClaudeGPT Si Newsroom, Editorial team··4 min read
How to check backlinks depends on whose site it is. For your own domain, Google Search Console has a free Links report built from Google's own crawl. For anyone else's domain, including a rival's, you need a backlink checker with its own link index, because Google only shows its data to the verified owner. This guide covers both routes, then the four things worth reading in the results and the two things worth ignoring.
Route one: your own site in Search Console
Sign in, pick the property and open Links from the left menu. The external side of the report has three tables:
| Table | Answers the question |
|---|---|
| Top linked pages | Which of my pages attract outside links? |
| Top linking sites | Which domains link to me most? |
| Top linking text | What words do other sites use when they link to me? |
Every row opens a drill-down, so you can go from a page to the sites linking to it, and from a site to the exact pages that hold the link.
Three limits are worth knowing before you trust the numbers. Google calls the report a sample rather than a full list, and on-screen tables are capped at 1,000 rows. It also keeps links Google has seen at some point, so a few rows may point to links that are already gone. Finally, it does not mark which links are nofollow. If you need more rows, the export button offers two slices, "Latest links" and "More sample links", each up to 100,000 rows.
Route two: any site with a backlink checker
For a domain you don't own, the data has to come from a company that crawls the web and stores links. seogeoaeo.ai's Backlink Finder takes any public domain and returns the 100 strongest sites linking to it, sorted strongest first. Each row carries:
- a link rank on a 0 to 1,000 scale
- how many links that site gives the domain
- the day its first link was seen
- what share of its linking pages are followed rather than nofollow
- a spam score out of 100; anything at 40 or above is flagged as likely spam
Below that list sit 50 link texts used by those strong sites, sorted into brand name, web address, generic words, no text and other words, plus the total count of linking sites. A run costs 70 credits, and if the lookup turns up no linking sites and no link texts, the credits come back.
It works on whole domains only, so a page address is trimmed to its domain. It does not list every link, give contact details, or tell you which links Google counts. Rank and spam score are estimates from the data provider, and it does not read your Search Console, so keep using the Links report for Google's own view of your site.
Why the two numbers never match
Run the same domain through Search Console and through any checker and the totals will differ. That is normal. Each crawler covers a different slice of the web at its own pace, some tools hold on to dead links much longer than others, and spam filtering varies. Counting is the biggest source of drift: a link in a sitewide footer might show up as one linking domain in one place and tens of thousands of backlinks in another.
The fix is to compare like with like. Put your site and your competitors through the same tool, and never set a rival's figure from one checker beside your own Search Console total.
Four things to read in the results
Linking domains before backlinks. A blog that links to you from every page of its sidebar is one relationship, however many URLs it adds up to. Ten separate sites linking once each are ten. Sort by sites, not by raw link count.
The words in the links. Most natural profiles are dominated by the brand name, bare web addresses and ordinary phrases. When a large share of links repeat the same commercial phrase, someone probably paid for or built them. Backlink Finder's grouped link texts make that pattern quick to spot.
Followed versus qualified. Google asks sites to mark paid links rel="sponsored" and links in comments or forum posts rel="ugc", with rel="nofollow" for everything else they don't vouch for. Google reads all three as hints, so these links may carry little ranking weight, but they still bring visitors. If most of a rival's links are sponsored, it paid for its visibility.
Links that disappeared. When a strong site stops linking, the usual reasons are a moved page, a rewritten article, or a link that now lands on a 404 on your side. A redirect fixes the last one, and a short, polite email often fixes the first two. Search Console does not warn you about lost links, so repeat the check on your top linking sites every few months.
Two things to ignore
Disavowing because a score looks bad. Google's disavow help page says that "most sites will not need to use this tool". It reserves disavow for sites with a considerable number of spammy or artificial links that have caused, or will likely cause, a manual action. No bought links and no manual action means no disavow file.
Third-party authority scores. These are each vendor's own model, not a Google figure, and they move whenever the vendor changes its formula. Junk scraper sites linking to you are also normal for any site that ranks, and the same disavow guidance covers them.
Which route to use
Use Search Console for your own site's view from Google, since it costs nothing. Use Backlink Finder when you need to see who links to a site you don't control, or want a spam and followed-share read on your own. If you need every single link on a very large domain with years of history, a full link suite is the better fit; seogeoaeo.ai keeps no link history. For a quick, priced-per-run answer to "who links to this site", start with a lookup.