How to check backlinks to your website

Checking backlinks usually means answering three questions. Who links to my website? Are those links any good? Have I lost any, or are some pointing at pages that no longer exist?

There are two practical ways to answer them. Google Search Console is free and shows links to sites you own. A backlink tool covers any site, including competitors, and adds details Search Console leaves out. This post covers both, using CalmSEO inside an AI assistant for the second, with real output from our own site, calmseo.com.

The free route: the Search Console Links report

If you have verified your site in Google Search Console, you already have a free backlink report:

1. Open Search Console and select your property.
2. Click Links in the left menu.
3. Under External links, look at Top linking sites, Top linked pages, and Top linking text. Click any row for more detail.
4. Use Export external links at the top to download a list of linking pages as a spreadsheet.

This is Google's own view of your links, and it costs nothing. It is also limited. It only covers sites you have verified, so you cannot look at a competitor. It does not mark links as nofollow, does not score how strong a linking site is, and has no list of lost links. Google also does not promise that it lists every link.

One more limit if you use AI tools: Google's Search Console API does not include the Links report. CalmSEO's free Search Console tools can read your clicks, queries, pages, sitemaps, and index status, but not this report. For links inside an AI chat, you need a backlink data source. Bing Webmaster Tools also has a free backlinks report for sites you verify there.

Checking backlinks in an AI chat

CalmSEO is an MCP server that adds SEO tools to Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, and other AI clients. Its backlink tools use the DataForSEO Backlinks API, which is built on DataForSEO's own crawled backlink index. Once CalmSEO is connected (the setup docs cover each client), you ask in plain language and the assistant calls the tools.

Start with the overview:

Use CalmSEO to get a backlink summary for example.com.
Explain the rank, referring domains, nofollow share, spam score, and broken backlinks in plain terms.

This calls get_backlink_summary, which costs 5 credits, about $0.17. Here is what it returned for calmseo.com on November 11, 2026:

You can also pass a full page URL instead of a domain to see the links to a single page.

What the numbers mean

Backlinks and referring domains

Backlinks counts every link. Referring domains counts the sites they come from. One site can link many times, from a footer, a sidebar, or several posts, so referring domains is usually the better measure of how many sites link to you. Our 284 backlinks came from 123 domains. Referring main domains (119 for us) counts subdomains of the same site once, so blog.example.com and example.com count as one.

Rank

Rank is DataForSEO's 0 to 100 score for how strong a site or page is, based on the links pointing to it. It is useful for comparing sites with each other in the same tool. Other backlink tools use their own scales, so a number from one tool says little about a number from another.

Nofollow

A nofollow link carries a rel="nofollow" attribute (or the related ugc and sponsored values). Google treats these as a hint and generally does not count them the way it counts other links, though they can still send visitors. The summary counts referring domains with nofollow links. To see only the links without it, ask for dofollow links in the backlink list.

Spam score

DataForSEO gives a 0 to 100 spam score, where higher means more spam signals. The summary reports two: the average for the links pointing to you, and the score for your own site. A high backlink spam score is a reason to look at the linking sites, not proof that something is wrong.

Referring IPs and subnets

These count the distinct IP addresses and subnets behind your referring domains. If a large share of your linking sites sit on a few IPs or subnets, the links may come from one owner's network of sites.

Broken backlinks

A broken backlink points at a URL on your site that returns an error, usually a 404 after a page was moved or deleted. Those links no longer help the page they were meant for. We had 7. They are usually the easiest backlinks to recover, covered below.

Top TLDs and countries

The summary also lists the most common domain endings and countries among your linking sites. Treat the country list loosely. In our data, .ai and .io sites showed up under the country codes AI and IO.

See who links to your website

The summary gives totals. To see the actual links, ask for the list:

Use CalmSEO to list the backlinks to example.com, dofollow only.
Show the linking site, linking page, anchor text, rank, and first seen date.

This calls get_backlinks. By default it returns one link per linking site, strongest site first, so a site that links 50 times takes one row. Up to 100 rows costs 5 credits, about $0.17. Up to 1,000 rows costs 15 credits, about $0.50. Our dofollow list had 82 linking sites. Two of the rows:

Each row also includes the linking URL, the page on your site it points to, the anchor text, the linking page's title, and new, lost, and broken flags. The second row was flagged as new. Its rank of 0 means the index sees little link strength for that site so far.

Other useful variations of the same tool:

• Newest first. Ask for the newest backlinks to see links the index found recently.
• Every link. Ask for every link instead of one per site when you need all the linking pages from a site.
• One page. Pass a page URL to see who links to that page only.

Find lost and broken backlinks

Lost links

A lost link is one the index saw before and no longer finds. Ask for them directly:

Use CalmSEO to list lost backlinks to example.com.
Group them by linking site, sorted by rank, and include the last seen date and the page they linked to.

For each strong one, open the linking page. If the page was removed or rewritten, there may be nothing to do. If the link was dropped from a page that still covers your topic, a short note to the site owner sometimes brings it back. If the link still exists but points at a URL you changed, that is a broken link on your side.

Broken links

Broken backlinks are worth fixing first because you do not need anyone else to act. Find the URLs they point at:

Use CalmSEO to list every backlink to example.com, not one per site, up to 1,000 rows.
Show only the links flagged as broken, grouped by the URL on my site they point to.
For each URL, suggest the closest live page to redirect it to.

Then add a 301 redirect from each broken URL to the closest live page. One 1,000-row call costs 15 credits, about $0.50 and covers every link for a site with fewer than 1,000 backlinks. Search Console's Page indexing report also lists 404 URLs Google has found, which is a useful free cross-check.

Prompts to copy

Use CalmSEO to get a backlink summary for example.com and explain what stands out.

Who links to example.com? List the 50 strongest linking sites with the linking page and anchor text.

Show the newest backlinks to https://example.com/blog/my-guide and tell me which ones are dofollow.

Compare backlink summaries for example.com and competitor.com. Which has more referring domains, and how do their ranks compare?

Get my top pages from Search Console for the last 90 days, then get a backlink summary for the top three URLs. Do the pages with more clicks also have more referring domains?

The last prompt mixes free Search Console data with paid backlink data in one conversation. To find sites that link to competitors and not to you, see the guide to backlink gap analysis.

What it costs

A backlink summary costs 5 credits, about $0.17. A backlink list of up to 100 rows costs 5 credits, about $0.17, and up to 1,000 rows costs 15 credits, about $0.50. Dollar amounts use the Lite rate of $10 for 300 credits. New accounts start with 30 free credits, enough to try a summary and a list. Search Console tools are free. Full pricing is on the backlink MCP page.

Limits worth knowing

• Every backlink tool runs its own crawler, so counts differ between tools. DataForSEO's index is smaller than Ahrefs', and no index finds every link.
• CalmSEO shows current links, lost links, and first and last seen dates. It has no historical charts or timelines of new and lost links over time.
• If you do link building every day, a full suite such as Ahrefs or Semrush is the deeper tool. The Ahrefs MCP alternative and Semrush MCP alternative pages compare them with CalmSEO.