4 Best Backlink Checker Tools (Free and Paid)

Backlinks are among the strongest ranking signals for Google. If you want to understand why your competitor’s website is ranking at the top, you should first examine their backlinks.

Best online backlink checker websites you can use to check how many backlinks your website has gotten. In this guide, we discuss the best backlink checker tools that can help you monitor your competitor’s strategy and discover new link-building opportunities

Why you need backlink checker tools?

If you are serious about ranking on search engine, backlinks are your competitive edge. Beyond rankings, backlink data helps you catch problems early. Ahrefs analyzed over a billion web pages in 2025 and found that 96.55% of pages receive zero organic traffic from Google, while the pages that do rank have a higher number of ‘referring domains’.

Backlinks act as trust signals, so having high-quality backlinks is crucial. Backlink checker tools are useful for assessing the quality of backlinks.

Beyond rankings, backlink checker tools help you quickly identify issues. If a spammy site suddenly links to yours in large numbers, you have the option to disavow those links via Google.

A sudden drop in your site’s ranking is often caused by an influx of toxic backlinks. In SEO, understanding your link profile is not just a task—it is a fundamental necessity.

Best Backlink Checker Tools

1. Collaborator Free Backlink Checker

The Collaborator Free Backlink Checker is a no-brainer addition to your SEO workflow. Unlike general SEO tools, Collaborator explicitly highlights whether a competitor’s referring domain is available for guest posting or link placement.

Key Features

✅ Data Limits: Provides a snapshot of the 100 total backlinks per search.

✅ Essential Metrics: Displays Domain InLink Rank, Page InLink Rank, anchor text, dofollow/nofollow status.

✅ “Best link” highlights the highest-authority links automatically.

2. Semrush Backlink Chcker

The Semrush Backlink Checker uses one of the largest backlink databases. The index refreshes every 15 minutes for new links and every week. The free version only provides a quick snapshot of a website’s backlink profile.

Key Features

✅ Backlink Analytics: full referring domain list, anchor text distribution, link-type breakdown.

✅ Backlink Gap: compare your profile against up to 5 competitors at once

✅ Brand Radar: track how often a domain is cited across AI search such as ChatGPT

✅ Link Building Tool: finds prospects and manages outreach in-platform.

3. Ahrefs Free Backlink Checker

Ahrefs is a recent addition and a popular backlink checker tool. Its backlink index is one of the largest available, crawling more than 8 billion web pages every 24 hours.

Aside from checking backlinks, you can also use Ahrefs to discover keywords, audit your website, track your rankings. Ahrefs also provides a wealth of domain and page-level metrics that can help to check backlink strength and authority. The lowest plan, Lite, starts at $108 per month if paid annually.

Key Features

✅ Site Explorer: deep-dive any domain’s full backlink profile, top pages and anchor text.

✅ Broken Link Checker: find dead pages with strong links to replicate

✅ Automatic daily new/lost-link alerts enable real-time reporting.

4. SE Ranking

SE Ranking is an SEO suite that offers the feature of checking backlinks. Its live backlink index covers about 2.9 trillion links across 400 million domains. Its Backlink Checker pulls data on referring domains, anchor texts, link types, and authority scores.

SE Ranking features Backlink Gap analysis, broken link analysis, and anchor text analysis. It comes with two tools to help you analyze backlinks: the Backlink Checker and the Backlink Monitor.

Key Features

✅ Backlink Checker: domain and URL-level analysis with Domain Trust and Page Trust scores.

✅ Backlink Monitor: tracks campaigns, flags lost links and sends alerts.

✅ Pages report: ranks a site’s URLs by number of backlinks so you can find its strongest pages

✅ Built-in toxic-link scoring with one-click disavow export streamlines cleanup.

How to Choose the Right Backlink Checker

The right tool depends on three factors: your budget, your use case. If you are managing a small seo service and checking backlinks occasionally, Google Search Console and Ubersuggest covers most scenarios at minimal cost. 

Conclusion

Building a strong and diverse link profile ensures better long-term website visibility in search engines. However, achieving this requires a solid link strategy.

Start with a free tool such as Google Search Console, understand the data, then upgrade to Ahrefs, Semrush or SE Ranking. You can easily find high-quality backlinks for your website using these tools.

Frequently asked questions