Best backlink checker tools, ranked on the link index each vendor publishes

Every backlink checker runs its own crawl of the web, so no two of them return the same number for the same domain. That is the whole story of this category. A tool is not better because it reports more links; it reports more links because its crawler has been to more places, and the only way to compare crawlers before you pay is to read what each vendor is willing to write down in public.

So this page orders the tools on one criterion, stated here and applied to everybody including us: what does the vendor publish on its own page, today, about the size of its link index and how often that index refreshes? Not a review score. Not a feature grid. A number a buyer can confirm in a browser in two minutes.

The order, and the published figure that sets it

How to read those numbers without being misled by them

Three of the figures above are not the same kind of figure. Ahrefs counts historical records, which include links that no longer exist. Semrush counts a trillion scale total with an hourly refresh. Majestic splits the question in two and publishes both halves, which is why a Majestic number quoted without saying Fresh or Historic is close to meaningless.

The practical consequence is that a link count is only comparable against itself over time. Pick one tool, record the referring domain count on the first of the month, and watch the direction. Switching tools mid year resets the series and produces a drop or a jump that nothing in the real world caused.

The second practical consequence is about authority scores. Domain Rating, Authority Score and Trust Flow are each vendor property, computed from each vendor's own crawl, and Google uses none of them. They are useful for sorting a prospect list from best to worst inside one tool. They are the wrong number to report to a client as progress.

Which one to buy for which question

If the question is which domains link to a competitor, buy the biggest crawl you can afford, because the answer is only as complete as the crawl. If the question is whether a link you paid for is still live, the cheapest monitor beats the biggest index. If the question is whether anything pointing at you is a risk, use the audit report inside Semrush or the equivalent, because a risk report needs a judgement layer and not just a list. And if your site is under about 500 pages and the question is simply who links to you, Search Console answers it for nothing, inside its stated 1,000 row on screen limit.

Where every tool on this list beats us, said plainly

We publish no link index. We do not crawl the web for links, we sell no backlink checker, and on the subject of this page every vendor named above is ahead of us for a simple reason: they built the thing and we did not. A reader who came here to buy a backlink checker should buy from that table and stop reading.

Our rendered pricing page carries no SSO line, no white label, no SOC 2 and no ISO line, and it covers one business per plan on everything except the agency tier, which covers ten. If procurement needs any of those, the suites above are where they live.

The other list of sources, and the one rival that measures it too

A link is a bet that a crawler follows it and then a person does. An AI answer settles the same purchase without either of those things happening: the assistant reads sources, writes one answer, names two or three businesses, and the reader never clicks anything. A company can hold a strong link profile and still not be named in that answer, and nothing in the table above measures it.

That is a separate category of measurement and it is ours. AI Knows Us asks the buyer questions you choose across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude and Google AI Overviews and reports which businesses the answer named. Our pricing page publishes the arithmetic rather than an adjective: one credit is one buyer question asked on one AI app once, most checks use one credit, a Claude check uses 3 because Claude costs more to run, and checking 10 questions on 4 AI apps uses 40 credits. The published US floor is $149 a month for SEO Start, and llms.txt states that plan watches 0 buyer questions on 0 engines, so the cheapest plan that reads all five surfaces is Growth at $299.

Ahrefs is the one vendor in the table that genuinely does both jobs, and it is fair to say so. Its Brand Radar page states that each prompt uses 1 check per platform, location and update, that Claude consumes 8 checks per update, and that each prompt is checked daily on every selected platform. It lists AI Overviews, AI Mode, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Copilot, with Claude available on its AI Visibility Index. Read against our own page, Ahrefs beats us twice over on this job: daily where we check weekly, and two surfaces, AI Mode and Copilot, that we do not read at all. Rankscale beats us on engine count as well, naming ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Mode, AI Overviews, Gemini, DeepSeek, Mistral, Claude and Copilot on its pricing page, and it publishes a REST API and the removal of its own branding from shared dashboards, which we do not.

Where our published figure is the more specific one is the per engine cost. We state the weight of the expensive engine in credits; Ahrefs states it in checks per update; Rankscale publishes a flat typical 0.25 credits per engine per prompt and no per engine weight at all. On that one criterion, published per engine cost, our number is the most exact of the three, and that is the only sense in which this page puts us first.

Ahrefs sells enough separate products that the backlink checker is only one of them, and settling which of them your renewal is actually for is worth an hour. The breakdown by job, including the part Brand Radar prices on its own, is in our guide to Ahrefs SEO tools by job, and what Brand Radar prices separately. That page is worth the click for a second reason. We measured durable inbound links ourselves on 21 October 2026, reading 2,169 stored bodies (1,797 drafts plus 372 fetched) against all 2,082 pages tracked on this site: 932 of them, 44.8% of 2,082, carry no inbound link written into another page's body. No other page on this site links to that one.

Questions buyers ask about backlink checker tools

Why do two backlink checkers report different numbers for the same site?

Because each one reports its own crawl. Ahrefs publishes 493 B pages in its index and a 15 minute refresh; Semrush publishes more than 43 trillion backlinks refreshed at least hourly; Majestic publishes a Fresh Index of 187.6 billion URLs crawled over the past 120 days. Three different crawls produce three different totals for the same domain, and all three can be accurate descriptions of what that crawler saw.

Is the biggest index always the right buy?

Only for competitor work, where completeness is the whole point. For monitoring your own links, refresh frequency matters more than index size, and for your own site Search Console is free and authoritative about what Google itself saw.

Does a high Domain Rating or Authority Score make a link worth more to Google?

Those scores are vendor metrics built from vendor crawls and Google uses none of them. Use them to sort a prospect list inside one tool. Report referring domains and the pages that earned them instead.

How often should I pull a backlink report?

Monthly for the new and lost links view, and quarterly for a full audit. The new and lost view is the one that catches a paid placement being quietly removed, which is the most common way link spend disappears.

What does a backlink checker not tell me?

Which sources an assistant read before it named a competitor instead of you. That answer is written fresh for each asker, it differs by app and by country, and it leaves no link in anybody's index. It has to be asked for directly.