How to check backlinks to your website
Start with Search Console's Links report, because it comes from Google's own data rather than another company's crawl. In Search Console, open Links from the left menu. The External links section has three tables. Top linked pages lists the pages on your site with the most links from other sites, Top linking sites lists the domains that link to you most, and Top linking text shows the anchor text those links use most often.
Use the Export button to download the list, up to 100,000 rows, as a spreadsheet. Google is clear that the report is a sample rather than "a comprehensive list of every link on your site", but for your own domain it's the closest thing to ground truth you can get for free.
Bing Webmaster Tools has a Backlinks report too, and it's free once you verify your site. Ahrefs Webmaster Tools is also free for sites you verify. Each draws on a different crawl, so it's normal for the counts not to match.
How to find backlinks to a specific page
In Search Console, go to Links, then Top linked pages under External links, and click More. Select the page you care about, and Search Console lists the sites linking to that URL. It takes about a minute.
It's the quickest way to see who links to a particular article or service page, and it helps after a redesign too, because a page that used to have links but now shows none may have lost them when its URL changed.
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Get a Free AuditHow to check a competitor's backlinks for free
Search Console only covers sites you've verified, so for anyone else you need a third-party tool. Ahrefs' free backlink checker shows the top links pointing at any URL, along with referring domains and anchor text. Moz's Link Explorer offers a limited free allowance. Bing Webmaster Tools lets you compare your link profile with other sites, and it can show domains that link to a competitor but not to you.
These tools run their own crawlers, following links from page to page the way Googlebot does, and none of them sees the same web Google sees. That's why two tools can disagree so widely about the same domain. Each one reads its own partial snapshot.
Referring domains matter more than total backlinks
Total backlinks are easy to inflate without meaning much. One site that links to you from its footer can produce a thousand backlinks on its own, while carrying roughly the weight of a single site vouching for you once.
Referring domains count the unique sites that link to you. Write that number down. Google's link signals reward many distinct sites choosing to link to you more than one site repeating the same link, so a domain with 40 referring domains is usually in a stronger position than one with 800 links from 12 sites.
Anchor text patterns worth checking
Every checker breaks out the anchor text on each link, and it's worth reading as a pattern. Natural links tend to use messy anchor text: your brand name, the bare URL, a phrase like "this article" and only occasionally the exact keyword you want to rank for.
A profile where one commercial phrase appears as the anchor on a large share of links looks like a link-building campaign rather than organic citation, and Google's spam policies treat links built to manipulate rankings as link spam. Nobody links to a plumbing company with "best plumber in Denver" over and over. They use the company name, the article title or the URL.
A handful of exact-match anchors is normal. What deserves a flag is a heavy skew toward one commercial phrase across a large share of the referring domains, whether you find it on your own site or a competitor's, because that's the shape of profile that has drawn scrutiny before.
Nofollow doesn't mean invisible
Most checkers mark each link as follow or nofollow, and the label is easy to misread. A nofollow attribute asks search engines not to pass ranking credit through that link, and Google announced in 2019 that it treats nofollow as a hint rather than a strict rule. A nofollow link from a relevant, trusted page can still help Google understand your site, so don't write those links off automatically. Keep them in the picture.
Watch the timeline, and the lost links
Most checkers show referring domains over time as well as a current total. A site that gains a few new referring domains each month for two years tells a different story from one that jumped from 20 to 400 in a single month, even if both land on the same number today.
A sudden spike usually has one of three causes: content that took off or got picked up by the press, a compressed link-building campaign whose value tends to fade, or, less often, someone pointing low-quality links at a site on purpose. The timeline tells you which.
Lost links matter as much as new ones. A steady trickle is normal, because pages get deleted and sites get redesigned. A sudden cluster of lost links pointing at one of your pages often traces back to something on your side, such as a redesign that changed URLs without redirects. The lost-links report can show that before the traffic drop does.
What no free tool can tell you
Free tiers cap what you see. Ahrefs' free checker shows a sample of top links rather than the complete list, and most competitors work the same way, keeping the full data behind a paid plan.
No tool, free or paid, can tell you which links Google currently counts and which it ignores, because that judgment happens inside Google's systems and isn't exposed through any report or API. A checker shows you what exists. Nothing more.
Spam scores and toxicity ratings are the tool's own guess, based on traits common in low-quality link networks. A high score is worth a look, but it doesn't mean Google has penalized you. Treat it as a lead to check.
Use the numbers as direction
Start with your own domain in Search Console, since that's the most reliable data you have. Then run competitors through a free third-party checker for a directional read on how many distinct sites link to them, and what kind of sites they are.
Treat every number as a sample. What matters is the pattern: whether a competitor's links come from a wide spread of relevant sites, or from a handful of low-value domains repeated many times.
A backlink checker says nothing about whether the linked pages load quickly, which how to read a PageSpeed Insights report covers. If you're tempted to ask a chatbot for the audit instead, ChatGPT can't see your site the way a crawler can.
Once you can see the gap, work through it in order. The 30-Day SEO Quick Wins Plan sets out a sensible sequence, and the free SEO report tool grades your site's technical health in one pass.
