Most "best free backlink checker" lists are written from the tools' own feature pages. Nobody types a domain in, so nobody notices that the tools disagree with each other. Sometimes by a factor of four.
We did type one in. On 14 October 2026 we ran our own domain, edvido.com, through eleven free backlink checkers in the same browser on the same afternoon. No paid accounts, no trials. We wrote down exactly what each tool showed before asking us to sign up, and we took a full-page screenshot of every result. You can open each one below.
The headline finding came quickly. One tool said edvido.com has 14.9K backlinks. Another said 65.6K. Both are "right" by their own rules, and the rest of this piece explains why that matters more than which logo you pick.
The short answer
If you only have a minute, this is the table to bookmark. It is based on what each tool actually returned for our domain, not on what its landing page promises.
| If you want to… | Use | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Get a quick, credible headline number for any site | Ahrefs Backlink Checker | DR, backlinks, referring domains and dofollow share in one box. No account, just a captcha. |
| Export a real list of links for free | SEO Review Tools | Top 100 links (one per domain) with anchor text, DA and CSV export. No login. |
| See link quality signals, not just counts | Majestic Site Explorer | Trust Flow vs Citation Flow, live vs deleted links, follow ratio. Free after a bot check. |
| Spot spammy anchors pointing at you | Ubersuggest | Shows anchor text distribution and 100 links with spam score on the first free search. |
| Know your own links with certainty | Google Search Console + Bing Webmaster Tools | First-party data for sites you own. Free, no limits worth worrying about. |
| Use Semrush data without a Semrush account | SEO Review Tools or Small SEO Tools | Both returned Semrush's numbers for us, while Semrush itself showed a sign-up wall. |
Same site, very different numbers
Here is everything the free versions told us about edvido.com. Read across the rows before reading down the columns.
| Tool | Backlinks | Referring domains | Authority score | Links you can see free | Account needed? |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ahrefs | 35K (62% dofollow) | 2.0K | DR 62 | ~20 top links, one per domain | No (captcha) |
| SEO Review Tools | 65.62K | 2.91K | DA 37 (Semrush score) | 100, CSV export | No |
| Small SEO Tools | 65.62K | 2.91K | "Domain Rating" 37 | Top links, one per domain | No |
| Ubersuggest | 52,101 (4,693 nofollow) | 1,343 | DA 29 | 100 of 1,343 | No for 1 search, yes for 3/day |
| Majestic (Fresh index) | 21,883 | 1,330 | TF 30 / CF 46 | Summary only | No (bot check) |
| SE Ranking | 14.9K (89.2% dofollow) | 1.2K | Domain Trust 83 | Summary only | No for 5 checks/day |
| Semrush | Nothing shown. "Register to get 10 free requests" wall. | 0 | Yes | ||
| Moz Link Explorer | Not tested. Requires an account plus email verification. | 10 queries/month | Yes | ||
| Seobility | No report. The counter read "0 of 0 checks left today" when we ran it. | 3 checks/day advertised | No | ||
| OpenLinkProfiler | The form did not return a report for us. | — | Registration offered | ||
| Reference: DataForSEO API (paid) | 24,042 live | 2,565 | — | — | Paid |
So the backlink count for one domain ranged from 14.9K to 65.6K. Referring domains ran from 1.2K to 2.9K. That is not a rounding problem.
Three things explain most of it. Each company runs its own crawler, so each index has a different size and a different idea of what is still live. Majestic makes this visible by splitting its numbers into a Fresh index and a Historic one. The tools also count differently. Some count every link on every page, some collapse sitewide footer links, some include image links and redirects, and some ignore nofollow. Finally, "backlinks" sometimes means links you have now and sometimes means every link they have ever seen.
The useful habit is boring: pick one tool, keep using it, and watch the trend. A jump from 2.0K to 2.4K referring domains in Ahrefs means something. Comparing Ahrefs' 2.0K to SE Ranking's 1.2K means nothing at all.
One more thing jumped out. Small SEO Tools listed 60.65K dofollow and 26.02K nofollow links. Added up, that is 86.67K, against a headline total of 65.62K. The tool doesn't say why the two don't match. It is a good reminder to treat any single free number as an estimate.
The authority scores aren't on the same scale
Every tool sells a single number that sums up a domain's link strength. For the same site, on the same day, we got 29, 37, 46, 62 and 83. None of them is wrong. They are simply different formulas with different names.
| Metric | Tool | edvido.com | What it roughly measures |
|---|---|---|---|
| Domain Rating (DR) | Ahrefs | 62 | Strength of a domain's backlink profile on a 0–100 log scale |
| Domain Authority (DA) | Moz / Ubersuggest | 29 (Ubersuggest's DA) | Predicted ranking ability based on links |
| Authority Score | Semrush (via SEO Review Tools) | 37 | Links plus organic traffic plus spam signals |
| Trust Flow / Citation Flow | Majestic | 30 / 46 | Link quality vs link quantity |
| Domain Trust | SE Ranking | 83 | SE Ranking's own domain strength score |
Majestic's pair is the most useful of the bunch for a quick health read. When Citation Flow runs far ahead of Trust Flow, you have lots of links but few from trusted sources. Ours is 46 to 30. Not alarming, but a sign that a chunk of the profile is low-quality, which the anchor-text data below confirms.
The tools, one by one
Every section below opens with a cropped view of the result. Click through to the full-page screenshot if you want to see everything the free tier shows, including what is blurred, locked or buried under ads.
1. Ahrefs Backlink Checker
Ahrefs' free Backlink Checker is the one most people reach for, and the test showed why. After a Cloudflare captcha, it opened a clean overlay with four numbers: DR 62, 35K backlinks (62% dofollow), 2.0K linking websites (33% dofollow). Below that sat a list of top referring pages, one per domain, each with its DR, the exact anchor sentence and the target URL. It came to roughly two dozen rows.
The list is the real value. It showed us a French guest post on sortlist.fr (DR 74) and a Dutch animation studio linking to our Amsterdam page with its own anchor text. That's the kind of context a raw count never gives you.
What you don't get: URL Rating (it pushes you to the toolbar), filters, export, history or anything beyond the top slice. A banner offers the Starter plan at €27/month, which is the price we saw during the test.
2. SEO Review Tools Backlink Checker
This one surprised us. No login, no captcha that we noticed, and the most generous free output in the test. SEO Review Tools returned 65.62K backlinks, 2.91K referring domains, 2.84K referring IPs and an authority score of 37, then a table of the 100 most valuable links with anchor text, follow/nofollow flag and DA.
It also lets you switch between links to the whole domain and links to a single page, and there are separate tabs for broken backlinks and new backlinks. The CSV export works without an account. For anyone who needs an actual list to work through, this beat every other free option.
The catch is that it is a window onto Semrush's index, not an independent crawler. Its numbers therefore sit at the high end of the range, and they move whenever Semrush's do.
3. Majestic Site Explorer
Majestic is the odd one out: older, denser, and more interested in link quality than in round numbers. The first attempt hit a "your browser failed verification" page. A second try passed, and the free summary turned out to be much richer than its reputation suggests.
For edvido.com it showed Trust Flow 30 and Citation Flow 46, then 21,883 external links and 1,330 referring domains in its Fresh index (33,830 links in the Historic index). It broke the links down further: 20,900 live versus 983 deleted, 92.6% follow, 99% HTTPS. After its own "noise reduction" the count dropped 42% to 12,673. That last figure is a nice illustration of how much of any backlink total is duplicates and sitewide repeats.
There was one genuinely useful diagnostic buried lower down. Majestic flagged that the top language of incoming links (57% Turkish) does not match the top language of our pages (49% English). For a site that runs English, Turkish and French sections, that is worth knowing.
Topical Trust Flow, the link graph and individual link lists are subscriber-only.
4. Ubersuggest
Without an account, Ubersuggest gives you exactly one search. Ours returned DA 29, 1,343 referring domains and 52,101 backlinks, of which 4,693 were nofollow. A free account raises that to three searches a day.
The charts over time are locked behind a trial. What isn't locked is more interesting: a referring-domains-by-DA histogram, the anchor text distribution, and a table of 100 links with Domain Authority, Page Authority, spam score, anchor, and first/last seen dates.
That anchor table is where the free data got uncomfortable, in a good way. More on that in the section on what we learned about our own site.
5. SE Ranking Backlink Checker
SE Ranking gives you five free checks a day and shows a tidy dashboard: Domain Trust 83, Page Trust 26, 14.9K backlinks, 1.2K referring domains, 89.2% dofollow. That was the lowest count in the test and, oddly, the highest authority score.
Almost everything underneath the headline is blurred with "Sign up to see the data": anchors, IPs, subnets, the homepage vs inner-page split. It is a decent second opinion for a single number. It is not a research tool on the free tier.
6. Small SEO Tools Backlink Checker
Same Semrush-sourced numbers as SEO Review Tools (65.62K backlinks, 2.91K referring domains, score 37), plus a referring URLs count of 18.66K. It labels Semrush's score as "Domain Rating", which is Ahrefs' term. That is the sort of mislabelling that ends up in client decks.
The screenshot speaks for itself on the experience: display ads above the form, a video ad on the right and an overlay across the results table. It works, and it's free, but SEO Review Tools gives you the same data with less noise and a working export.
7. Semrush Backlink Analytics
Semrush still ranks for "free backlink checker", and plenty of lists still say you get a few lookups without signing up. That wasn't our experience. The overview loaded as empty grey widgets under a modal reading "Register to get 10 free requests".
With a free account, Semrush's own pricing page lists 10 reports a day across its tools, which is generous if you are willing to register. If you're not, the two Semrush-powered tools above give you the headline data anyway.
8. Moz Link Explorer
Moz is honest about its gate. The page lists four steps: enter a URL, create a Moz account, verify your email, then get 10 free queries per month. We stopped at step two, so there are no Moz numbers in our table.
Ten a month is the tightest allowance in this test. It is still worth having if your agency or clients already talk in Domain Authority, because DA is the metric many link sellers and outreach platforms quote. Being able to check it yourself keeps people honest.
9. Seobility Backlink Checker
Seobility advertises three free checks a day without registration, and the counter did read "3 of 3" when we first opened it. When we came back to run the check it read "0 of 0 checks left today", and we got no report. The limit appears to be tracked per connection, so repeated visits from the same network can burn through it.
We are not going to guess at numbers we didn't see. If you try it, try it first thing, and know that the paid tier was listed at $69.90/month after a 14-day trial.
10. OpenLinkProfiler
OpenLinkProfiler used to be a favourite on these lists because it was free and fairly deep. In our session the form didn't return a report. The page underneath has become a long block of generic SEO copy, at one point describing a different product's backlink checker by name.
We would not build a workflow on it today. It stays in this test because it still ranks and still appears in other roundups, and you deserve to know what you'll find.
11. Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools
These two are a different category. They only show links to sites you have verified, and they are the only tools in this list working from a search engine's own crawl. In Search Console, the Links report lists your top linking sites, top linked pages and top linking anchor text, and lets you export samples. Bing's Backlinks tool does the same for your site and also lets you put your profile next to other domains for comparison.
Neither gives you a DR-style score, and neither will tell you anything about a competitor's links in Google. But when a third-party tool and Search Console disagree about your own site, Search Console wins. We apply that rule to every analysis we run on our own properties.
Need someone to turn a backlink report into an actual link-building plan? Compare vetted SEO agencies on Edvido.
Browse SEO agenciesWhat free tools told us about our own site
The point of a backlink checker isn't the number. It's what you do after you scroll past it. Here is what three free reports surfaced about edvido.com that we didn't fully expect.
Spam anchors are pointing at us. Ubersuggest's free anchor table showed "get higher rankings with expert seo backlinks" (12 links), a long one starting "high quality dofollow backlinks da 50 pa 40 premium pbn network service…", and bare spam domains such as vipan.xyz and vevotube.xyz used as anchor text. We never built those. Paid link networks routinely scrape and link to real, established sites to make their own pages look legitimate.
Google has said for years that its systems ignore most links like these, so a disavow file is rarely needed. We are watching the trend rather than reacting to it. But you would not have known these existed without looking, and a free tool was enough to find them.
Your own network inflates your numbers. The first link in Ahrefs' list came from dijitalajanslar.com, which belongs to the same group as Edvido. Ahrefs, SEO Review Tools and Small SEO Tools also showed edvido.ae linking to edvido.com. Those links are legitimate, but they are not third-party endorsements. When you size up a competitor, check whether their "top backlinks" are really their own sister sites.
Link language and page language don't match. Majestic's language breakdown showed most incoming links in Turkish while most of our pages are in English. That fits our history as a Turkish company and tells us where future link building for the English directory should focus.
A free backlink audit you can run every month
You don't need a subscription to keep an eye on your link profile. This routine takes about twenty minutes and uses only the free tiers tested above.
When free isn't enough anymore
Free checkers are fine for watching your own site and sizing up a rival. They start to hurt in three situations.
The first is volume. If you are checking more than a handful of domains a week, the daily caps (one search here, five checks there) turn into a part-time job of switching tabs. The second is history. None of the free tiers we tested would show us how our referring domains changed over time; the chart was locked in every case. If you are diagnosing a ranking drop, that history is usually the whole investigation. The third is outreach. A list of 100 links is a start, but finding link gaps across five competitors needs filters and full exports.
At that point you are choosing between a paid tool and paying someone who already has one. We compare paid suites in our roundup of the best SEO tools for agencies. If you would rather hand off the work, a specialist SEO agency or a broader digital marketing agency will run a full link audit as part of onboarding. It helps to know what a digital marketing agency actually does before you brief one.
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Get matched with an agencyFrequently asked questions
What is the best free backlink checker?
For a quick, credible read on any domain, Ahrefs' free Backlink Checker. In our test it gave DR, backlinks, linking websites and about 20 top links without an account. If you need an exportable list, SEO Review Tools gave us 100 links with a working CSV export and no login.
Why do backlink checkers show different numbers for the same site?
Each one crawls the web with its own bot, keeps links for different lengths of time and counts them by different rules. For edvido.com on a single day, free tools reported anywhere from 14.9K to 65.6K backlinks and from 1.2K to 2.9K referring domains. Pick one tool and track its trend.
Is Ahrefs' backlink checker really free?
Yes, with limits. It shows the headline metrics and a short list of top links, one per domain, after a captcha. Filters, exports, URL Rating and history need a paid plan. The Starter plan was shown at €27/month during our test.
Can I use Semrush to check backlinks for free?
Not without registering. During our test, Semrush showed a "Register to get 10 free requests" wall before any data. With a free account you get a limited number of daily reports. Tools such as SEO Review Tools display Semrush's backlink data without requiring an account.
How can I see exactly which sites link to my website?
Use Google Search Console's Links report and Bing Webmaster Tools' Backlinks report. Both are free, both use the search engine's own crawl, and both let you export the data. They only work for sites you have verified.
Should I disavow spammy backlinks I find with a free tool?
Usually not. Google says its systems ignore most spammy links automatically. Consider a disavow only if you or a previous agency built manipulative links, or if Search Console shows a manual action for unnatural links.
How often should I check my backlinks?
Monthly is enough for most sites. Check more often during an active link-building campaign, after a sudden ranking drop, or if you suspect a negative SEO attack.
