Whether you’re auditing your own site or researching a competitor, checking backlinks comes down to a few reliable methods.
Free: Google Search Console
If it’s your own site, Search Console’s “Links” report is free and comes straight from Google — it shows top linking sites, top linked pages, and top anchor text. It won’t show competitor data, but for your own site, it’s the most authoritative free source available.
Third-party backlink checkers
Dedicated SEO tools crawl the web independently and maintain their own link indexes, which is how you can check any site — including competitors. Most offer a limited free lookup with paid tiers for full data. Each tool has a somewhat different index, so numbers vary between them; that’s normal; treat any single tool’s count as an estimate, not an absolute figure.
What to look at once you have the data
- Referring domain count and trend over time
- DoFollow vs. NoFollow ratio
- Anchor text distribution — is it natural, or suspiciously repetitive?
- Which of your pages attract the most links, and why
If reading the data is easy but acting on it isn’t, that’s exactly what our Link Building Services are for.