How to Check Backlinks to Your Site or a Competitor's

What is a backlink in SEO, and why check them?

A backlink is a link on one website that points to a page on another website. In SEO (search engine optimization), backlinks act as signals of trust. Google looks at who links to a page, and how, to judge whether that page deserves to rank. Checking backlinks means finding those links and judging their quality.

You check backlinks for three reasons. First, to know where your own site stands. Second, to see what links your competitors have that you do not. Third, to catch problems early, like a good link that vanished or a wave of spam links that just appeared. Each reason calls for a slightly different method, and we cover all three below.

One more definition before we start. A referring domain is a website that links to you at least once. If a blog links to you from five pages, that is five backlinks but one referring domain. Most of the time, referring domains are the number that matters. Our guide on referring domains vs backlinks explains why.

How to check backlinks in Google Search Console

Google Search Console is the only free source that shows links Google itself has found to your site. It costs nothing, but it works only for sites you own and have verified. Here is how to check backlinks in it, step by step.

1. 1

   Open Search Console and pick your property

   Go to search.google.com/search-console and sign in. Choose the property for your site. A Domain property shows links to every subdomain and protocol at once, which is what you want here.

2. 2

   Click Links in the left menu

   The Links report sits near the bottom of the sidebar. It has two halves: External links and Internal links. External links are your backlinks. Ignore the internal half for now.

3. 3

   Read Top linked pages

   This table lists the pages on your site with the most backlinks. Your homepage usually sits at the top. Look for content pages that earned links on their own, because those tell you what other sites find worth citing.

4. 4

   Read Top linking sites

   This is your referring domain list. Click More to see the full table, then click any domain to see which of your pages it links to. Sort by the number of linking pages to spot sites that link to you sitewide, such as from a footer.

5. 5

   Check Top linking text

   This shows the anchor text, meaning the clickable words in the links. A healthy profile has mostly brand names, URLs, and natural phrases. A long list of exact keyword anchors you did not ask for is a sign of spam, which we cover in our guide on toxic backlinks.

6. 6

   Export the data

   Use the Export button at the top right of any table. You get a spreadsheet you can sort, filter, and compare against last month. Google caps each export at 1,000 rows, so large sites see only part of the picture.

7. 7

   Know what the report leaves out

   Search Console shows a sample, not every link. It does not show whether a link is dofollow or nofollow, and it gives no quality score. It also has no data on competitors. For those, you need a backlink checker.

Free backlink checkers: what they show and what they miss

A backlink checker is a tool that crawls the web on its own and stores every link it finds. You type in any domain and it shows the links pointing there. That is how you find backlinks to a website you do not own. The big SEO tool companies each run one, and most offer a free version with limits.

Free checkers are good for a quick answer. How many referring domains does this site have? Which pages earned the most links? What does its authority score look like? They are less good when you need the whole list, because the free view usually stops after the top results.

One warning about numbers. Every checker has its own index, so the same domain can show 800 referring domains in one tool and 1,200 in another. Neither number is wrong. They just crawled different parts of the web. Pick one tool and compare sites inside it, rather than comparing numbers across tools.

How to find backlinks to a competitor's website

Checking a competitor's backlinks is where the real value sits. Their link profile is a map of who in your industry gives links, and to what kind of content. Start with two or three sites that rank where you want to rank. If you need help picking them, competitor keyword research shows you who wins your target terms.

Enter each competitor domain into your backlink checker and look at three views. The referring domain list tells you who links to them. The top linked pages tell you which of their content attracted links. The anchor text shows how people describe them. Then ask a simple question for each good link: could we earn one like it?

• Resource pages and directories. If a trade association lists your competitor, it will likely list you too.
• Guest posts and interviews. A site that published them once may accept a pitch from you.
• Statistics and studies. If they earned links by publishing data, an updated or better dataset can earn the same.
• Broken links. A dead page on a competitor site still has links pointing to it. You can offer a live replacement. Our guide on how to fix broken links covers the outreach side.

How to analyze backlinks once you have the list

A raw list of links is not useful yet. You need to sort it into links that help, links that do nothing, and links that could hurt. Five checks cover most of it.

1. Count referring domains first

Sort the list by domain and count unique sites. This single number is the best quick read on a link profile. A site with 40 referring domains and 60 backlinks is usually stronger than one with 5 domains and 500 backlinks, because the second one is probably a sitewide footer link.

2. Check dofollow versus nofollow

A link tagged rel="nofollow", rel="ugc", or rel="sponsored" tells Google not to pass trust through it. Google treats these tags as hints rather than strict rules, but in practice the links carry less weight. Most tools show a link type column. Filter to dofollow to see the links that count most.

3. Read the anchor text

Natural anchors are brand names, bare URLs, and sentences like "this study found". A profile stuffed with exact keywords, such as "cheap insurance quotes" a hundred times, looks built rather than earned. Google's spam policies list this kind of pattern as link spam.

4. Look at the linking page, not just the domain

Open a few linking pages. Is the link inside the main content or buried in a sidebar? Does the page have its own traffic and links? Is it on the same topic as your page? A link from a relevant article beats a link from an unrelated page on a big site.

5. Flag the odd ones

Links from sites in a language you do not serve, from pages with hundreds of outbound links, or from domains with nothing but ads are worth a second look. Most tools give them a spam score. Do not panic over a few, since Google ignores most of them. Do keep a list.

Turn a one-time check into ongoing monitoring

Checking backlinks once tells you where you stand today. It does not tell you when a good link disappears, or when a competitor picks up twenty new domains in a week. Those changes are what you can act on, and only if you hear about them in time.

A backlink monitoring tool watches a set of domains and records changes. When a link is lost, you can email the site and ask for it back while the editor still remembers you. When spam links pile up, you can add them to a disavow file before anyone asks. When a rival earns a strong link, you can go after the same source.

Are backlinks still relevant in 2026?

Yes, though less than they were. Google still describes links as one of the ways it discovers and evaluates pages, and its spam policies still spend a whole section on link schemes. You do not write rules against something that does not matter. At the same time, Google has said for years that content quality and relevance carry more weight than raw link counts.

Large studies still show a correlation. Backlinko's analysis of 11.8 million Google results found that the number of referring domains to a page correlated with higher rankings more than most other factors they measured. Correlation is not cause, but the pattern has held across many such studies.

The practical takeaway: a few links from relevant, real sites still help, and a great page with no links is harder to rank for competitive terms. If you want to see who currently ranks for a keyword before you go after it, our free SERP checker shows the live top results for any location. Then check those sites' backlinks and you know what you are up against.