How to check the backlinks of any website
The full procedure for auditing the link profile of a domain, your own or someone else’s: what can be done for free, which metrics decide something, and the layer almost nobody audits yet — brand mentions that carry no link.
Published 20 September 2026
Short answer
Checking the backlinks of a website means listing which domains link to that site, seeing which pages they link from and with what text, and separating earned links from the ones that exist only to manipulate search rankings. The profile of a site you own comes free from Google Search Console; the profile of someone else’s domain needs a paid tool, and always arrives as a sample. The metrics that decide anything are the count of distinct referring domains and the relevance of the linking site, not the total number of links. And now that assistants answer by citing sources, the audit covers unlinked brand mentions too.
What is the link profile of a website
Three terms get mixed up constantly and are worth separating before opening any tool, because each one is counted differently.
The link profile of a website is the set of links other sites point at it, described by three things: which domains they come from, which pages they land on and what text they link with. That third one, the anchor, describes what a site is taken to be about. A backlink is each one of those links, and a referring domain is each distinct site that sends at least one.
The difference between backlinks and referring domains is the one that changes the most decisions. A forum carrying a URL in one user’s signature produces hundreds of backlinks and is still a single referring domain. A profile is therefore read in both columns at once: the first says how often something repeats, the second how many distinct people back it.
How to check the backlinks of a website step by step
Four steps, in this order. The first two are free and answer most questions; the last two turn a list of links into a diagnosis. If someone else is going to do it, this is exactly what to ask them for.
- 01 / DATA
Export your own site’s profile from Search Console
The Google Search Console links report is free and visible only to whoever has the property verified: it gives the top linking sites, the most linked pages and the anchor texts. Its own documentation states two limits plainly: it is not a comprehensive list of every link but a sample, and its tables are capped at 1,000 rows. It diagnoses; it does not count.
- 02 / COMPETITORS
Pull a third-party domain with a tool that runs its own index
For a site you do not control there is no official data, so the only route is a tool running its own crawl of the web’s link graph. Each one discovers a different set of links, which is why two tools never return the same number for the same domain. The absolute figure matters little: what gets compared is referring domains.
- 03 / SCREENING
Sort by referring domain and read the top ones by hand
A useful audit works on domains, not on individual links. Sort the list by referring domain, keep the first fifty and open them: check whether the site publishes on the same subject, whether the linking page has content of its own and whether the link sits inside a sentence or in a footer. Half an hour of manual review discards more noise than any automated score.
- 04 / TARGETS
Check which pages the links land on, and whether those pages are indexed
A link pointing at a page Google has not indexed does not do what it is expected to do. Close the audit by crossing the most linked pages with the Search Console indexing report: behind the ones receiving links while staying out of the index there is usually an old redirect, a URL with parameters, or a page that never reached the sitemap.
Which backlink metrics matter and which can be ignored
Tools offer a dozen metrics and only three change a decision. The rest describes the market for tools more than the market for search.
| Metric | What it actually says | When it can be ignored |
|---|---|---|
| Referring domains | How many distinct sites back the website. The figure that holds up best over time | Almost never: it is the headline metric of the audit |
| Total number of backlinks | How often a link repeats, not how many people placed one | Whenever it is used to compare two domains against each other |
| Domain authority score | One tool’s estimate of how strong a site is | When it is presented as a figure from the search engine, or as a target |
| Topical relevance of the linking site | Whether the link comes from where the audience is. Judged by reading, not by measuring | Never, and it is the one demanding the most manual work |
| Link attribute | Whether the site marks the link as advertising or as user-generated content | Once the linking page has been confirmed to have content of its own |
The link attribute is read in the HTML and documented by Google: rel="sponsored" marks links that are advertisements or paid placements, rel="ugc" marks links coming from user-generated content such as comments and forum posts, and rel="nofollow" covers the remaining cases where a site does not want to endorse the destination, per Google’s documentation on qualifying outbound links, last updated on 10 December 2025. A profile where nearly everything arrives marked as advertising describes a strategy without anyone having to ask.
Indexing of the target deserves its own check, because it is not automatic. Across DoGeo’s projects publishing content at scale, between 60% and 70% of the pages Google knows about end up indexed, that is, eligible to appear in its results. That is a reference range from two projects and not a market standard, and it does not mean the rest are bad pages: Google leaves pages out of the index for many reasons.
None of these figures means anything without a date beside it, and a single snapshot detects no pattern. What turns a list into a diagnosis is the same measurement taken twice, with the same tool and the same filter, compared against itself.
What is a toxic link, and when to disavow one
The word «toxic» came from the tools, not from the search engine. Google defines a narrower and more concrete category, and it is worth reading literally.
Google calls link spam «creating links to or from a site primarily for the purpose of manipulating search rankings», in its spam policies for web search, last updated on 28 August 2026. The definition puts the weight on the intent a link was created with, not on the score of the domain it comes from. Its examples include buying or selling links for ranking purposes, using automated programs to create them, and requiring a link in a contract without letting the author qualify it.
That definition leaves out almost everything a tool flags in red. An old directory, an aggregator that copied a headline, or a small domain that linked because the article interested someone are not link spam: they are noise, and noise is ignored. What deserves a note is a pattern: dozens of new domains pointing at the same target with the same commercial anchor over a few weeks.
The disavow tool exists for those patterns and little else. The Search Console documentation says so in its first step: in most cases Google can assess which links to trust without additional guidance, so most sites will not need to use the tool, and using it wrongly can harm the site’s performance in Search. Disavowing as a precaution, off a list produced by an automated score, is the most expensive mistake in this audit.
What is an unlinked brand mention and how to audit it
An unlinked brand mention is an appearance of a brand name on a third-party page that does not link to its site. No backlink tool reports it, so it is searched for separately.
Auditing unlinked mentions means searching the exact brand name in the search engines and discarding the brand’s own domains, which is the free version, or using a listening tool that flags every new appearance. The resulting list differs from the backlink list and is almost always longer, because naming someone costs less than linking to them.
Three things get recorded for each mention: whether the name is written exactly as on the brand’s own site, whether the page describes correctly what the brand does, and whether that page belongs to a site the search engines and the assistants already cite on that subject. The first two are fixed by writing to whoever published it; the third decides which ones are worth that email.
Three cases that turn up in every mention audit, and what to do with each:
- The brand appears spelled correctly and described correctly: no link needs to be requested. The mention is already doing its job of tying the name to the category.
- The brand appears misspelled, or mixed up with a company of the same name: this is the one request that is almost always accepted, because correcting a fact is a favour to whoever published it.
- The brand appears in an industry roundup with information missing: the useful request there is not a link but the correct description sentence, the same one the brand uses on its own site.
Why mentions carry as much weight as links in AI answers
Assistants build an answer out of what they find written about an entity, and a name cited in a source they already consult counts even with no link attached.
The clearest published figure on this comes from Ahrefs, which analysed 75,000 brands to see which factors accompany a brand appearing in Google’s generated answers. Brand web mentions correlate at 0.664 with that appearance, and the number of backlinks at 0.218. Those figures come from a study published on 26 May 2025 and updated on 27 April 2026, and they are correlations: they describe what appears alongside what, not what causes what.
The practical consequence is one of order rather than replacement. Links keep doing their work in classic search, and the same study places them among the factors that accompany the appearance. What changes is that an audit listing only links leaves out half the material an assistant builds its account of a brand from.
That is why a mention in a source the engine already cites is worth more than a link from an irrelevant domain: the first enters the material the answer is drawn from and the second never gets used. Which sources each engine consults, and how it picks them, is written up separately.
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Want us to look at your link profile and your mentions?
DoGeo audits both at once and tells you what it finds: which domains genuinely back you, which patterns deserve a note, and which sources already name you without linking to you. Four details are needed: your name, your company, your site and a work email.