Are you trying to find your own or your competitor’s backlink sources? Looking for the best free backlink checker tools? You’re in the right place.
Quality backlinks can help you with so many things, including;
- Increasing your search rankings
- Faster indexing
- Referral traffic from other websites and more
If you’re not building high-quality backlinks to your website, you won’t rank in Google search results. It’s as simple as that. You should ALWAYS keep an eye on your website’s backlink profile.
Sometimes, you might want to find your competitors’ backlinks as well. It helps you find opportunities to build high-quality, relevant links to your website.
So, how can you track both your website’s backlinks and your competitors’? Here’s where backlink checking tools come in handy.
In this post, we’ll cover some powerful backlink-checking tools
Let’s get started without much ado!
Table of Contents
Best Backlink Checker Tools to Use In 2026
Here’s a list of 5 of the most powerful backlink checker tools that are used by millions of people around the world.
1. Semrush Backlink Analytics Tool
Hands down, the Semrush Backlink analytics tool is the most powerful backlink checker tool for analyzing any website’s backlinks.
Did you know that Semrush crawls over 17,280,000,000 URLs every single day? It also has a huge backlink database that consists of over 41,263,000,000,000 total backlinks.
With the Semrush Backlink analytics tool, you can easily discover new and lost backlinks of any website in the world and find new opportunities to build backlinks.
Features of the Semrush Backlink Analytics tool:
- You can easily filter the backlinks: dofollow, nofollow, sponsored links, etc
- Find inbound links and linking domains, subdomains, URLs, etc of any site
- Find the domain’s authority to discover the trust level of referring domains
- The ability to identify backlink types: text, image, form, or frame
- You can get informed when backlinks are deleted
How much does it cost?
Semrush currently offers three pricing packages with a free trial, listed below:
| Plan | Monthly | Annual (per month) | You Save |
| Starter | $199 | $165.17 | $33.83/mo |
| Pro+ | $299 | $248.17 | $50.83/mo |
| Advanced | $549 | $455.67 | $93.33/mo |
2. Serpstat Backlink Analysis
Serpstat is a powerful all-in-one SEO tool with a massive database of 7.46B keywords, 1.51B domains, and 1.1T backlinks, making it ideal for keyword research, competitor analysis, and a backlink tracking tool for 1.1 million users worldwide.
Features list of the Serpstat Backlink Analysis tool:
- Get full backlinks data, which is collected over the last two years
- Access to the quality scores of referring domains
- Discover pages that attract the most backlinks
- Easily examine backlinks and anchor list of your top competitors
- Find internal links, linked domains, referring domains, etc of any website
How much does it cost?
| Plan | Monthly | Annual (per month) | Monthly Savings |
| Individual | $69 | $50 | $19/mo |
| Team | $129 | $100 | $29/mo |
| Agency | $499 | $410 | $89/mo |
3. Ahrefs Backlink Analyzer
Ahrefs claims to run the second most active web crawler in the world after Google, and its data infrastructure indexes massive SEO datasets, including trillions of backlinks and hundreds of millions of domains.
Its database includes over 35 trillion live backlinks and hundreds of millions of indexed domains, with billions of pages discovered and updated every day, making it one of the most powerful tools for backlink analysis and SEO research.
Ahrefs doesn’t offer free trials. But the good thing about Ahrefs backlink analyzer tool is that it also offers a free version that you can use to find backlinks of any site. So if you want to see how their backlink checker tool works, you can try their free tool for free.
Features list of the Ahrefs Backlink Analyzer tool:
- Find the total number of referring domains of any website
- Discover the total number of backlinks of any domain
- Find key backlink metrics such as Domain Rating (DR) and URL Rating (UR) to know the quality of the links
- Easily find new & lost backlinks
- Find backlinks by link type (“dofollow” and “nofollow”)
- See the most linked-to pages, which help you easily discover what type of content attracts more links in your industry .
- See a complete list of anchor phrases pointing to the target website
- Find out whether a target site has broken links pointing to it
How much does Ahrefs cost?
Ahrefs currently offers FOUR pricing plans, listed below.
| Plan | Monthly Price | Annual Price | Monthly Equivalent (Annual) |
| Lite | $129/mo | $1,290/yr | $108/mo |
| Standard | $249/mo | $2,490/yr | $208/mo |
| Advanced | $449/mo | $4,490/yr | $374/mo |
| Enterprise | — | Starts at $14,990/yr | Custom |
4. Moz Link Explorer
Moz Link Explorer has one of the largest backlink indexes in the SEO industry, with over about 45 trillion links from more than 1 billion domains, giving marketers deep insights into link profiles, referring domains, and authority metrics for competitive analysis and backlink research.
Features list of Moz Link Explorer:
- You can easily discover the backlinks of any website
- Research your competitor links to find their backlink sources
- Find broken links on your website
- Check the Spam Score of backlinks
- Monitor new and lost links of any site
- Get access to key metrics including Domain Authority (DA), Page Authority (PA), Spam Score, and more
How much does Moz cost?
Moz has the following four pricing plans;
| Plan | Billing | Monthly Price | Annual Price | Savings |
| Standard | Monthly | $99.00 | $1,188.00/year | No discount |
| Annually | $79.00/month | $948.00/year | Save $240.00 | |
| Medium | Monthly | $179.00 | $2,148.00/year | No discount |
| Annually | $143.00/month | $1,716.00/year | Save $432.00 |
5. Majestic SEO Backlink Checker
Majestic is one of the most popular SEO backlink checkers and link building toolkits that help you find any website’s top backlinks. It also helps you easily discover link-building opportunities, no matter what industry you’re in.
Majestic also has one of the biggest link history indexes that crawled over 2,557,578,195,115 unique URLs so far. With their huge backlink database, you can identify the complete backlink profile of any website in the world.
Features list of Majestic SEO Backlink Checker:
- Discover backlink opportunities of your competitors
- Find mutual links between any two websites
- Gives you access to a unique feature called “Trust Flow” (TF) which represents the quality of links that point to URLs and websites
- The ability to upload up to 1 million websites at once to get key backlink metrics of any site
- Also, it offers free SEO browser plugins that will show the backlink data of any site
How Much Does Majestic Cost?
Majestic SEO tool offers you the following three pricing packages;
| Plan | Monthly (Pay Monthly) | Annual (Billed Annually) |
|---|---|---|
| Lite | $49.99/mo | $41.67/mo (~$499.99/year) |
| Pro | $99.99/mo | $83.33/mo (~$999.99/year) |
| API | $399.99/mo | $333.33/mo (~$3,999.90/year) |
Why are backlinks important?
In simple terms, backlinks are any links that are either pointing to your web pages, or going out from websites.
SEO is the real key to any website’s success. SEO can make or break a profitable site, it’s that important.
If you are making a blog or started a blog already, you need to optimize your blog posts for the search engines.
If you don’t do SEO on your sites, no matter how many posts you write, you won’t receive much traffic from Google. So always make sure to optimize your posts before hitting the Publish button.
Google depends on different search engine ranking factors to rank different sites and web pages. There are upwards of 200 different search ranking factors Google considers and one among them is ‘backlinks’.
If you give top priority to building high-quality backlinks to your websites, your SEO efforts will be more fruitful. Observe any successful blog in your niche, they all have quality backlinks pointing to their web pages.
That is the reason why they are ranking high for almost every keyword relating to their niche. That’s what you exactly need to do if you are aiming for top search results on Google, aim for building quality backlinks over quantity.
So make sure to optimize your SEO efforts by focusing on building quality external backlinks and don’t use black hat SEO tactics, and you will be fine.
Top 3 Ways to Build Quality Backlinks to Your Website
It doesn’t matter even if you build thousands of backlinks from poor sites, you won’t get better SERP rankings for your keywords without having quality backlinks.
Then how to get quality backlinks to your sites in 2026?
1. Guest blogging
If there’s ONLY one way to boost your SEO of your sites, it is getting links from the top blogs. You can use guest posting strategy to get it done.
Read top blogs in your niche and find out what their readers are craving for, then write guest posts according to their needs. You will see a dramatic change in your SERP rankings once the top blogs link to your sites.
Guest blogging is still one of the finest ways to build backlinks. Most people now are aware of the fact that, guest blogging links to false sites (negative sites) can penalize their sites in the search results. So most of the bloggers are now carefully selecting guest posts to publish on their websites.
That’s great news if you are focusing on getting quality backlinks by writing quality guest posts. All you have to do is to find out the best blogs that are still accepting guest posts, research the best topics for them, and pitch better guest posts to get links from them.
2. Link Building outreach
What if you are not interested in guest blogging? There’s one smart way to build quality backlinks without guest blogging. Write detailed blog posts on your websites and link to the relevant posts from other blogs in your niche. In other words, start linking to other blogs from where you want to get backlinks.
This doesn’t guarantee you getting backlinks, but if you email them about your stuff and convince them your posts will be useful to their users, they will definitely consider linking to your sites.
After all, everyone wants to give their blog readers quality stuff. So focus on writing great content for your blogs first and then start linking to others.
3. Creating infographics
Creating infographics is the latest trend and most people are now linking to quality infographics. So come up with a hot topic or trend, invest some money on creating visually appealing infographics and you are done.
Try to promote it to reach more people so that your chances of getting links from others to your infographics will increase rapidly.
Although there are hundreds of other ways to build backlinks, the above-mentioned ways always work, no matter what.
Final Thoughts
Backlinks are still one of the top-ranking factors in Google’s search ranking algorithm.
So all bloggers, SEOs, and website owners need to keep an eye on their backlink profile (or their competitors).
Unfortunately, building and managing backlinks is time-consuming. Here’s where the backlink checker tools come in handy.
What are your thoughts on the best backlink checker tools mentioned on this page? Let us know in the comments.
FAQs
A backlink is a link created when one website links to another. Backlinks are the links on other blogs or websites that navigate to your main blog URL or your blog posts.
Yes, backlinks help improve your website’s rankings and increase your blog’s overall authority. In fact, backlinks are one of the significant ranking factors in SEO.
Broken link building, blog commenting, Link reclamation, guest blogging, roundups, Quora, SkyScraper technique, Infographics, testimonials, and blogger outreach are some of the best ways to build backlinks.
Dofollow links are crucial for your blog as they pass the link juice to the website being linked. On the other hand, nofollow links have a nofollow attribute that makes search engine bots know not to follow the links.
Toxic backlinks are the harmful links that may affect the search rankings of your website, or even cause your site to be penalized by Google.
Semrush and Ahrefs are the most popular SEO tools for finding spammy or toxic backlinks on a website.
Hi Anil,
Thanks for sharing a great list of backlinks checker tools. I was using ahrefs
Hi Anil,
Thanks for sharing a great list of backlinks checker tools.
I just used Backlink Watch, will definitely look to another tools.
Hi Anil,
I am using Open Site Explorer to check DA and backlinks for my blog. But it has limitation and not free.
yap…
i’m also satisfied with @Nikhil mishra query i.e. alexa backlinks and Google backlinks differ.
Can you explain Anil in detailed. or can post an article on BP.
Best Regards
Hi
Backlinks shown by Alexa.com and Google.com when e use link: command are just sample URL’S from where a website getting back links. And in case you want to see the ultimate list of back links your website have, you should check them through your Google webmaster tools account.
And to find back links for your competitors websites you have to use the back link checker tools that are shared in this post. And from this list, opensiteexplorer is my favorite. I am using the paid version of Moz.com.
Nice list buddy . Thanks for sharing with us . It will help me in future but the problem is alexa backlinks and Google backlinks r different don’t know y
I was only aware of Majestic SEO tool. However, I found that very complicated (I don’t know why or how) so I left it midway. But I will give it a try again and also the other tools that you mentioned.
Thanks for the same.
Hey Anil,
Great List of backlink checker tools. I like Backlink watch. It’s free and great. Ahrefs is also great, but it shows limited results.
hey anil
great article on back links.
best part is great timing of article because i was searching for backlink checker tool.
alexa tell only rank not backlink.
thanks for post
anubhav
I think open site explorer is best among all.
but it is now being replace by Link Explorer
Hi Anil,
Thanks for sharing a great list of backlinks checker tools.
I just used Backlink Watch, will definitely look to another tools.
Checking our competitors backlinks is very important to beat them in ranking. It’s a great way to get to know what’s their strategy and how they are making the links to their sites. Specially for event niche blogs.
What do you say, Anil?
~Ankit
That’s true Ankit. We can find the details about how our competitor’s are building back links for their website. And this truth applies every niche including event based blogging.