You can audit a backlink profile properly without paying for a tool. Search Console gives you Google’s own view, Ahrefs Webmaster Tools gives you full data on sites you own, and the free tiers cover competitor spot-checks. Here is the workflow.
Backlink tools cost between roughly $100 and $500 a month, which is a difficult first expense for a site that has not started ranking yet. The good news is that the free tiers have become genuinely capable, and for a site with a few hundred referring domains they are close to sufficient. The limitation is not depth on your own site — it is competitor research, where the free options are thin. This is what each free tool actually gives you, what it holds back, and a workflow that uses them together.
Google Search Console: free, and the only authoritative source
Start here, always. Search Console reports links Google has actually found, which is the view that determines your rankings. Every commercial tool is an approximation of this.
Setup: add your property at search.google.com/search-console and verify ownership, usually via a DNS record, an HTML file upload, or your existing Google Analytics tag. Verification takes minutes; data begins accumulating from that point, though existing link data appears fairly quickly.
Where the links are: Links, in the left menu. Four reports:
- Top linking sites — a referring domain view of your profile, which is the number you should be tracking
- Top linked pages — which of your pages attract links. Frequently reveals that your best-linked page is not the one you assumed
- Top linking text — your anchor text distribution, sitewide
- Internal links — how your own pages link to each other, which is the free diagnostic for the internal linking problems covered in the website traffic stopped growing guide
Export: the arrow at top right gives CSV or Google Sheets. Do this monthly and you have a survival record without any tooling.
The limitations, which are real: Search Console shows a sample rather than every link, caps exports at 1,000 rows per report, does not show DR or any authority metric, does not distinguish dofollow from nofollow, and reports nothing about any site you do not own. It tells you what you have, not what anyone else has.
Ahrefs Webmaster Tools: the strongest free option for your own site
Free for verified site owners and considerably more detailed than Search Console on the metrics side.
Setup: verify ownership at ahrefs.com/webmaster-tools, most easily by connecting the Search Console property you just created.
What you get: full backlink and referring domain data for your verified sites, Domain Rating, URL Rating at page level, dofollow versus nofollow filtering, anchor text reports, and — the genuinely valuable part — a record of lost and broken backlinks over time. That last report is the one to check monthly. Links disappear through redesigns, content pruning, and expired domains, and without it you will not know which of your links are still live.
The limitation: verified sites only. You cannot point it at a competitor.
Checking competitors without paying
This is where free gets thin, and it is worth being direct about it.
Ahrefs free backlink checker — ahrefs.com/backlink-checker. A small number of lookups for any domain, showing DR, top backlinks, and referring domain count. Sufficient for spot-checking whether a prospective partner is real, insufficient for a full competitive analysis.
Moz Link Explorer — a monthly quota of free queries after signup, giving Domain Authority, linking domains, and top anchors.
Semrush free account — a small daily allowance of requests across its reports, including Backlink Analytics.
Ahrefs SEO Toolbar — a browser extension showing DR and UR inline as you browse. The highest-leverage free install, because it lets you evaluate sites while you are already looking at them rather than switching tabs.
The realistic constraint: the daily and monthly caps mean competitor research is a matter of a few careful lookups rather than bulk analysis. Choose your queries deliberately — check the exact URLs outranking you rather than domains, since that is the number you actually need.
A workflow that fits the free tiers
Monthly, about twenty minutes.
- Search Console → Links → export Top linking sites. Compare against last month’s export. New domains and lost domains both matter
- Ahrefs Webmaster Tools → check the lost backlinks report. Anything valuable that dropped is worth investigating; sometimes a page moved rather than the link being removed
- Record four numbers in a sheet: total referring domains, new this month, lost this month, and referring domains to your primary target URL
Quarterly, about an hour.
- Anchor distribution on your two or three commercial pages, using Webmaster Tools with the mode set to exact URL
- Your own outbound linked domains — Webmaster Tools shows these, and most site owners have never looked
- Two or three competitor lookups using the free checker allowance, at page level rather than domain level
- Survival check: of the links you recorded six months ago, how many are still live
That is a genuine audit programme and it costs nothing.
The manual checks that need no tool at all
Is a specific link live? Open the page and use Ctrl+F for your domain. Ten seconds, completely reliable, and better than any tool because you are seeing the current state rather than an index.
Is it dofollow? Right-click the link, Inspect, and read the rel attribute in the highlighted HTML.
Is the page indexed? Search site:example.com/the-page-url in Google. If it returns nothing, the page is not indexed and the link on it is doing very little.
Does the page get traffic? Check your own analytics for referral traffic from that domain. This is the most honest signal available and it costs nothing — a link sending real visitors is demonstrably on a real page.
Does the linking site look real? Read two articles. No metric substitutes for noticing that a site’s content was generated in bulk — a check that matters more as generated content spreads, as covered in the how to get backlinks guide.
What you actually lose by not paying
Worth being honest about, so you know when to upgrade.
Bulk competitor analysis. Comparing twenty competitors, or exporting a competitor’s full referring domain list to find link gaps, is not achievable on free tiers. This is the main reason to pay. Historical data. Paid tools show profile growth over years. Free tools mostly show now, which is why the manual monthly record matters.
Link intersect. Finding domains that link to three competitors but not you is one of the highest-value reports in link building and is paid-only everywhere.
Scale. Managing several sites or client accounts breaks the free model quickly.
The upgrade trigger: when competitor research becomes your bottleneck rather than execution. If you know what to do and cannot find enough prospects, that is the point. Until then, the free tiers are not a compromise — the domain rating explained guide covers which metrics are worth checking at all, and the answer is fewer than most tools display.
What the audit is actually for
Checking backlinks is diagnosis. At some point it has to turn into acquisition, and the free workflow above is what tells you which kind you need.
If your referring domain count is flat, the constraint is acquisition and nothing in a report changes that.
If it is growing while rankings are not, check where the links are landing. A profile growing steadily while your commercial pages receive nothing is a distribution problem, not a volume one.
If your lost-links report is busy, you are replacing rather than growing, and your real rate is lower than your export suggests. Linkexchange addresses the first of those from inside your WordPress dashboard — you post what you want, qualifying publishers take the offer, settlement runs on credits, and referral traffic is attributed per link, which is the same honest signal the manual checks above rely on. Placements are monitored too, which is the paid-tool feature this free workflow substitutes for with a monthly export and a spreadsheet. The internal linking tools are included free and they address the second case. Analysis costs nothing — orphan pages, weak pages, authority flow, and the connections your site is missing. On a site where the links exist but are not reaching the right pages, that is where the faster gain sits.
Why your numbers will never match across tools
Run the same site through Search Console, Webmaster Tools, and a free checker and you will get three different referring domain counts. This is normal and it confuses people into repeated re-checking. The counts differ because each source maintains its own crawler and index. They have found different subsets of the web, they refresh at different rates, they disagree on how long a removed link stays in the report, and some filter out domains they classify as low value without telling you. Search Console will typically report fewer links than the commercial tools. That is not an error — it is a sample of what Google has found, and Google is the one that matters.
The rule that saves you time: pick one source and track the trend in it. Direction and rate of change within a single tool are reliable. Absolute counts across tools are not comparable, and switching sources mid-programme then reading the jump as growth is a specific and common mistake. Use Search Console as your reality check and Webmaster Tools as your working dataset. If the two disagree sharply on something important — a link you were counting on that Google has not found — that gap is itself worth investigating, since a link Google has not discovered is doing nothing for you regardless of what any other tool reports.
A caution about free checker sites
Searching for free backlink tools returns a long tail of sites offering unlimited checks. Treat these carefully. Most are affiliate funnels or lead capture, and the data quality is generally poor — small indexes, stale results, and inflated counts. Some ask for site access or credentials, which you should never give to a tool you cannot identify. The tools named above are the free tiers of established commercial products, which is why the data is the same data their paying customers get, just rationed. That distinction is the whole point. If you are evaluating a prospective link partner and the only data you can find comes from a checker you have never heard of, treat the site as unverified rather than as verified by a weak source. The manual checks above will tell you more.
