Free Backlink Checker: See Who Links to Any Site

6 Steps to Get AI to Recommend Your Brand

FREE Backlink Checker

Discover who’s linking to you and your competitors to find the latest opportunities and enhance your backlink profile.

Backlinks boost your search engine rank by demonstrating your site’s credibility. Get an overview of the websites linking to your domain and those of your closest competitors.

Powered by Semrush’s database of 43 trillion backlinks, this tool provides valuable insights for your link-building strategy.

In this guide, you’ll learn what backlinks are and how to use the free tool to find them. Then when you’re ready to start link building, we show you how to evaluate backlinks. This ensures you have enough high-quality ones to help your pages rank.

What are Backlinks?

[Backlinks](/content/hub/seo/backlinks "What Are Backlinks in SEO?"/index.html)—high-quality ones, push your content ahead of others in the search results.
Good backlinks bring the right type of audience to your content.
A backlink is when a website (e.g., Backlinko) links to another website (e.g., Semrush) through a hyperlink.

For example, here is a high-quality link from Hubspot to Backlinko.

The backlink from Hubspot is a strong vote of confidence in Backlinko which can improve search rankings for the target URL. But not all backlinks will help with keyword rankings—only high-quality or highly relevant backlinks will move the needle.

What are Nofollow, Sponsored, and UGC Backlinks?

Nofollow links are links with a rel="nofollow" HTML tag applied to them. However, nofollow links can directly help with your search rankings if they are placed on a high-traffic page, potentially bringing substantial referral traffic.

What Are They Important for SEO?

There are three primary reasons why backlinks are critical for SEO success:

  1. They provide a vote of confidence in your website
  2. They improve search rankings
  3. They drive referral traffic to your content

1. Provide a Vote of Confidence in Your Site

Each backlink you get from an authoritative and trusted website is a vote of confidence in your content.

2. Improve Search Rankings

Backlinks improve search rankings by building upon strong foundations of [technical SEO](/content/technical-seo-guide "Technical SEO: The Definitive Guide"/index.html) and [on-page SEO](/content/on-page-seo "On-Page SEO: The Definitive Guide"/index.html).

3. Drive Referral Traffic to Your Site

Referral traffic is another important way to increase visitors to your content, services, or products—even from nofollow or sponsored links.

How to Analyze Your Site’s Backlinks For Free

Put your website’s URL in the above tool.

You can choose from three options:

  1. *.domain.com/* the tool will gather all known backlinks across the entire website, including subdomains.
  2. domain.com/* will gather all known backlinks on the root domain.
  3. URL: analyzes the exact given path on the website.

You’ll then see a row of key metrics and a table of individual backlinks.

Analyzing Competitors' Backlinks

Use the free backlink checker to reverse engineer what’s working for your competitors.
You may do this in two ways:

What Is Considered a Good Backlink?

The measure of a good backlink comes down to six factors:

Top Backlink Checker Tools: An In-Depth Comparison

Choosing the right tool to check backlinks involves looking at how they perform in terms of speed, number of backlinks they find, and their quality.

Speed of Backlinks Discovery

Semrush and Ahrefs lead in discovering backlinks quickly compared to other tools.

Quantity of Backlinks Discovered

Semrush discovered the most backlinks during a stress test involving multiple domains.

Quality of Backlinks Discovered

Quality measurements can vary, and Semrush tends to maintain robust performance in quality discovery.

How to Get High-Quality Backlinks

Develop a plan to earn backlinks from big publications, expanding your reach and improving your credibility.