How to Check Backlinks: 6 Methods, From Free Reports to Single-Link Checks

How to check backlinks, in short: for your own site, start with Google Search Console (Links → Top linking sites) and Bing Webmaster Tools (Backlinks), both free. For other sites, including competitors, use a third-party backlink index. And to confirm a specific link is live, followed and on an indexable page, check the linking page itself with a backlink checker or your browser's inspector.

Each method answers a different question. Search engine reports tell you which links the search engine knows about. Third-party indexes add history, lost links and competitor data. Single-link checks tell you whether a link is actually working right now. Most people need all three at different moments.

This guide shows exactly where to click in each tool, why the numbers never match, how to verify any individual link in under a minute, and a simple routine for monitoring links over time.

Every method compared

How to check backlinks in Google Search Console

Search Console's Links report is the most authoritative free source for your own site, because it comes from Google's own crawl. You need to have verified the site as a property first.

1. 1

   Open the Links report

   Sign in to Search Console, choose your property and click Links in the left menu (near the bottom).
2. 2

   Read the External links section

   Three tables: Top linked pages (which of your pages get the most links), Top linking sites (which domains link to you most) and Top linking text (the most common anchors).
3. 3

   Drill into a site or page

   Click any row in Top linking sites to see which of your pages that domain links to; click a page in Top linked pages to see which sites link to it.
4. 4

   Export the data

   Use Export external links at the top right. More sample links gives a broad sample of linking pages; Latest links lists recently found links with crawl dates. Export each table you need as well.

Check backlinks to one specific page

Often you don't need your whole profile, just the links to one page: a guide you've been promoting, a product page that dropped, or a URL you're about to redirect. In the Links report, open Top linked pages, search or sort for the URL, and click it. You'll see the sites linking to that page; click a site to see the individual linking pages. Do this before deleting or redirecting any page, so you know which links you're about to move.

Read the anchor text table

Top linking text shows the most common anchors across all your external links. It's a quick sanity check: in a natural profile, your brand name, your domain and generic phrases dominate. If one commercial keyword sits near the top, look at which sites use it; that's usually a past campaign. Paste the exported anchors into our anchor text analyzer for a full breakdown by type.

What Search Console won't tell you

• It's a sample. Google says the report doesn't show every link it knows about.
• It's not real time. New links can take a while to appear, and removed links can linger.
• No rel attribute. It doesn't separate followed from nofollow, sponsored or ugc links.
• No judgment. Links Google ignores as spam can still appear. Being listed doesn't mean a link counts.
• No competitors. It only covers properties you've verified.

How to check backlinks in Bing Webmaster Tools

Bing runs its own crawler, so its view of your links overlaps with Google's but isn't identical. It's free, and if you already use Search Console you can import your verified sites rather than verifying again.

1. 1

   Add or import your site

   Sign in to Bing Webmaster Tools and add your site, or import it from Search Console.
2. 2

   Open Backlinks

   The Backlinks report lists referring domains with the number of links from each, and lets you drill down to linking pages and anchor text.
3. 3

   Compare with other sites

   The report also lets you add other domains to compare backlink profiles, which makes it a free starting point for competitor research.
4. 4

   Export

   Download the data and merge it with your Search Console export, removing duplicates.

In practice, the two together give you noticeably better coverage of your own links than either one alone. That combined list is the foundation of a proper backlink audit.

Third-party backlink indexes

Commercial SEO platforms run their own web crawlers and build their own link indexes. You can look up any domain, see when links were first found and lost, and filter by anchor, rel and authority. Most offer limited free lookups and charge for full access. Our roundup of link building tools covers the main options at a high level.

Why every tool shows a different number

• Different crawls. Each crawler visits different pages, at different frequencies, and some sites block particular crawlers.
• Different rules. Tools differ on whether they keep links from redirects, canonicalized pages, images, or pages they haven't recrawled in a long time.
• Different units. “Backlinks” counts individual links, often thousands from one sitewide footer. “Referring domains” counts unique sites, which is usually the more meaningful number.
• Different freshness. A link removed last week may still be listed in one index and gone from another.

How to verify a single backlink

A list tells you a link existed at some point. It doesn't tell you whether the link is still there, whether it passes ranking signals, or whether the page is even in the index. When a link matters (one you paid for, negotiated or rely on), verify the page itself.

Option 1: a backlink checker

Paste the linking page URL and your domain into our backlink checker. It fetches the page, finds every link to you and reports the rel value (followed, nofollow, sponsored, ugc), the anchor text, where on the page the link sits and whether the page is set to noindex.

Option 2: check it by hand

1. Open the page, find the link, right-click it and choose Inspect.
2. Read the highlighted <a> tag: the href should point to your exact URL, and the rel attribute shows whether it's qualified.
3. Check the page's indexability: view source and search for noindex, or run it through our indexability checker, which also checks status codes, redirects, canonical tags and robots.txt.

<!-- Followed: no rel qualifier -->
<a href="https://yoursite.example/guide">a detailed guide</a>

<!-- Not followed: qualified with nofollow, sponsored or ugc -->
<a href="https://yoursite.example/guide" rel="sponsored">a detailed guide</a>

<!-- Page-level problem: the whole page is excluded from the index -->
<meta name="robots" content="noindex">

Our guide to dofollow vs nofollow links explains what each rel value means for rankings.

How to check a competitor's backlinks

You can't use Search Console for sites you don't own, so competitor checks rely on third-party indexes and Bing's comparison feature. The goal isn't to copy every link. It's to find sites in your niche that link to similar businesses and might link to you too.

1. 1

   Pick three to five real competitors

   Sites that rank for the keywords you want, not just businesses you compete with offline.
2. 2

   Export their referring domains

   From a third-party index, or from Bing's comparison view.
3. 3

   Find the overlap

   Domains that link to two or more competitors but not to you are your strongest prospects. A COUNTIF across the lists does it in a spreadsheet.
4. 4

   Look at what earned the links

   Which pages attract the links: guides, tools, data, partner pages? That tells you what to build.

Our full guide to competitor backlink analysis turns this into a repeatable prospecting process.

Other ways to find links and mentions

• Analytics referral reports. Your analytics tool's referral traffic shows which sites send visitors. Any link that sends real traffic is worth knowing about, followed or not.
• Brand searches. Search your brand name in quotes, excluding your own site ("your brand" -site:yoursite.example), to find mentions. Mentions without a link are easy wins: ask the author to add one.
• Links to missing pages. In Search Console's Pages report, look for not-found URLs, then check which of them have links pointing at them. Redirecting or restoring those pages recovers the value. See our guide to link reclamation.

How to monitor backlinks over time

Links disappear quietly. Sites get redesigned, posts get pruned, editors swap links out, and paid placements expire. A light routine catches most of it:

If you're building links through several channels, keep a single tracking sheet with the linking URL, target, anchor, date and how you got the link. It turns monitoring from detective work into a quick review.