How many backlinks do I have? How to check your backlink count

There is no single backlink count for your site. Each tool crawls the web itself and counts links its own way, so the same site shows a different number in every tool you open. Google Search Console shows the links it reports for a site you verify. Ahrefs, Semrush, Moz and Majestic each show what their own crawler has found. This page shows where each number is printed, what each tool counts as one backlink and one referring domain, and why the totals differ from one tool to the next. For your own site, read the count in Google Search Console's Links report; for any site, type the domain into Ahrefs' or Semrush's free Backlink Checker. The list of linking pages behind either number is your backlink profile.

Where to read your backlink count, tool by tool

Each tool prints your backlink count in a named report, and this table lists the report that holds the count and the free access as each vendor prints it.

Every cell in the table is taken from the vendor's own page, read on 4 October 2026; Bing's page was read on 3 October 2026. For Search Console and Bing, the last column gives the report's own table and export limits.

How to check backlinks in Google Search Console

Open Google Search Console and open the Links report for a site you verify: that is where your count lives. Google's help page for the report, read on 4 October 2026, defines a backlink in one sentence: "A backlink is a link on a page from another site that links to a page on your site."

Under External links, the report has three views, in Google's words:

• Top linked pages: "Pages most linked to on your site"
• Top linking sites: "Sites that link to you the most"
• Top linking text: "Most common text in links to your site"

Read Top linked pages first: it shows which of your pages the reported links point to. Top linking sites is the referring-domain view, one line per site. Top linking text shows the anchor text found in the reported links.

Google's help page describes the report as a whole this way: "It shows a sample of internal and external links to help you understand your site’s overall link profile." On counting, the same page says: "Duplicate links are combined." Linking sites are grouped by root domain, so repeated links from one site still appear as one linking site.

The same page sets the limits: each table shows up to 1,000 rows and may be truncated on a larger site, and the Export button gives up to 100,000 rows in two slices, named Latest links and More sample links.

Because the report is a sample, the totals it shows are the sample for your site, not a full list of every link. Visits from other sites are a different report from links: reading website traffic is a separate job from counting backlinks.

What Ahrefs, Semrush, Moz, Majestic and Bing each show

Each vendor prints the count in a named report with its own free limit. The vendor pages quoted in this section were read on 4 October 2026, apart from Bing's help page, which was read on 3 October 2026.

Ahrefs' free Backlink Checker lists the number of referring domains and the number of backlinks for the domain you enter, alongside Domain Rating and Ahrefs Rank. In Site Explorer, the reports are the Backlinks report and the Referring domains report (Help Center article dated 3 September 2026). The free account, formerly Ahrefs Webmaster Tools, is now called Ahrefs Free, and Ahrefs says it can be used on an unlimited number of verified websites. For the workflow beyond the count, see our guide to using Ahrefs for link building.

Semrush prints the headline figure as "Total backlinks: The total number of backlinks pointing to the analyzed domain." Its Knowledge Base calls the report the Backlinks tool, with an Overview report and a Backlinks report. The free checker shows up to 15 backlinks for the domain you enter, sorted by Authority Score, and can be used once a day without an account. Semrush also prints a caveat about its own count: "The tool may not show all of the backlinks leading to a domain, for example, when they are blocked from our crawlers."

Moz's Link Explorer has sections named Inbound Links, Linking Domains and Discovered & Lost. Inbound Links is the backlinks view, and Linking Domains is the referring-domain view; Moz's own name for the unit is the linking root domain. A free Moz Community account gets 10 queries a month.

Majestic's Site Explorer reads two indexes: the Fresh Index, which holds the most recently crawled data, and the Historic Index, which in Majestic's words "spans back to 2006". We put the two indexes side by side in Ahrefs vs Majestic.

Bing Webmaster Tools has a Backlinks report, and its help page says of the report: "The details of backlinks profile is a representative set of links from different domains, using different anchor texts; it is not a complete backlinks profile."

Some checkers read another vendor's index: LinkMiner's page says its database includes Majestic's fresh and historic index.

Backlinks and referring domains: what each tool counts

A backlink is a single link; a referring domain is a single site, however many links that site sends you. The two counts answer different questions, and each tool defines the pair in its own documentation. The pages quoted in this section were read on 4 October 2026.

Ahrefs' Help Center, in an article dated 3 September 2026, defines the pair this way: "Backlinks are hyperlinks that point from one website to another. You can have multiple backlinks from a website or web page." And: "Referring domains are domains from which the target website or web page has one or more backlinks." Its worked example: "If it has two backlinks from the New York Times, then it still has one referring domain."

Moz states the same rule for its own count: "Two links from the same website will only be counted as one linking root domain."

Majestic keeps more than one link count. Its glossary defines External Inbound Links as "Sum of all links pointing to target. Not limited to one link per referring URL". A second Majestic figure, External Referring URLs, counts the linking pages rather than every link, and long-term Majestic users know it as the classic External Backlinks number.

So "backlinks" can mean every link found, or one link per linking page, depending on the tool you open. Two tools can report different backlink totals for the same site on the same day partly because they count different things. "Referring domains" follows one rule in every vendor's definition: a domain that links to you counts once, however many links it sends. The unit can still differ, since Moz counts root domains and Search Console groups subdomains under their root domain. Read them side by side: they measure different things.

Why the tools show different numbers

The numbers differ because each tool crawls the web with its own crawler, on its own schedule, and counts what it finds in its own way. The vendors say so themselves. The pages quoted in this section were read on 4 October 2026.

Ahrefs' Academy says it is normal for its backlinks and referring domains metrics to differ from other tools, because each tool crawls the web differently. Moz's help hub says: "Every index uses its own crawler to gather data and will build up a slightly different picture of the web based on the links indexed." Majestic's guide to this very question says: "At best, we can have a partial snapshot of what the situation was yesterday."

Update speed is the first named cause. Semrush states: "We update the backlinks data in the interface every 15 minutes." Moz says newly found links appear "within about 3 days of being found." Sistrix's FAQ, published on 18 March 2022, says: "Our own link index is fully updated about once a month."

Lost links are the second cause. Moz states: "When a link is marked as Lost, this means our crawler attempted to recrawl that link and wasn’t able to." Each index drops pages on its own schedule, so one tool can keep counting a link that another has already marked as gone.

The third cause is the counting itself. Google Search Console combines duplicate links; Majestic prints both a de-duplicated count and a full count. And some pages a crawler cannot read at all: Semrush's blocked-crawlers sentence in the section above covers that case.

One independent study found, on its own sample, that the indexes did not all hold the same sites. In a 2023 paper in the journal Profesional de la información, Reyes-Lillo, Morales-Vargas and Rovira took 3,151 domains from 61 searches and found: "10% of the domains do not appear in one or more of the three indicators". Across the whole sample, the paper found the three tools' scores agreed closely. The three indicators were the Moz, Semrush and Ahrefs authority scores, so the study measured scores, not backlink totals. The authors say a missing score meant the domain was not in that platform's index, and they read this as a sign that the three tools run different indexes.

Two people who put the same site through more than one report

Two practitioners have published their own numbers for this question, and both are worth reading with the sample attached. Both ran the same site through more than one report and printed what they saw.

Tessar Napitupulu, founder and CEO of the agency Arfadia, tested Ahrefs, Semrush and Moz on four domains between 21 and 25 September 2026, with Ahrefs on a paid account and Semrush and Moz on free accounts. On one of the four domains he reports: "Ahrefs counts 26.7M backlinks to ahrefs.com. Moz counts 4.8M. Same domain, same day." For his own agency's domain, the three tools showed 71.7K, 30.6K and 66.2K backlinks (Ahrefs, Semrush, Moz). In his table, Ahrefs counted the most backlinks for its own domain and for his, while Moz counted the most for Semrush's domain and for its own. His conclusion from the test: "Pick one tool for link work and measure change over time inside it."

Barry Schwartz of Search Engine Roundtable compared the old and new Google Search Console link reports for his own site on 22 August 2018: "The new report shows for this site a total of 2,563,119 external links while the old report shows 2,552,763 total external links." That is one site, one day and two reports from the same company, 10,356 links apart. The new report was built to replace the old one.

Four domains in one test, one site in the other, and the same lesson both times: the number depends on the report you read it in.

What to do with the number

Once you have the number, put it to work in three steps. None of the three needs a threshold or a target; they turn one total into a habit.

1. Read the same report in the same tool each time. The vendors say their counts differ from each other's, so two readings from one tool compare like with like, and a reading from another tool does not. Switching tools between readings can look like growth or loss when it is neither.
2. Read referring domains beside backlinks. One site can send many links, so the two totals move differently, and the pair tells you more than either total alone.
3. Look at which pages the links point to. Google Search Console's Top linked pages and Ahrefs' Best by links both show where the links land. A count can rise while the pages you care about gain no new links.

Whether the number is enough is a different question, and the answer depends on the pages you compete with for the same search. We take that question up in our guide to how many backlinks you need to rank. And when you want a fuller review of the whole list, page by page and domain by domain, that review is a link audit.

What we report on an order

When we place a link for a client, each live URL is reported to the dashboard only after our post-publication check. The check has four parts: the page is live, the link is in the body copy, the anchor and target URL match the order, and the page is indexable. We run those four checks in that sequence before any URL is reported, and the list can then be exported as an unbranded file.

On Curated Links, the tier is set by the placement site's referring domains, which we measure with Majestic. Our product page puts it this way: a website with 15,000 backlinks from 536 different domains has an RD of 536.

Our free DA and DR checker shows Moz's Domain Authority and Ahrefs' Domain Rating for a domain, and we explain the two scores in our guide to Domain Authority and Domain Rating. A count is only as useful as its definition, so we name the tool behind each number we print.

Frequently asked questions

How do I check how many backlinks my website has?

Open Google Search Console and open the Links report for a site you have verified. Under External links, the views named Top linked pages, Top linking sites and Top linking text show where the links point and which sites send them. For a second reading, or for a site that is not yours, enter the domain in Ahrefs, Semrush, Moz or Majestic and read the count each one shows.

Why do Ahrefs, Semrush, Moz and Search Console show different numbers?

Each tool crawls the web with its own crawler, updates its index on its own schedule, from every 15 minutes to about once a month, and counts links its own way. Duplicate handling and pages a crawler cannot read add to the gaps. The vendors state all of this in their own documentation.

Should I track backlinks or referring domains?

Track both, in the same tool each time. Backlinks count the individual links pointing to your site; referring domains count the separate sites those links come from, and one site can send you many links. The two counts answer different questions, so read the pair side by side.

What is a good number of backlinks?

There is no fixed number, and no total works as a target for every site. Whether your count is enough depends on the pages competing for the same search, so compare your page with the pages that rank where you want to rank and read the gap, not a quota.

Do Domain Authority and Domain Rating count backlinks?

No. Domain Authority is a score from Moz and Domain Rating is a score from Ahrefs, and each is measured on a 100-point scale. They are scores, not counts of backlinks or referring domains. Our free checker reports the two scores and no backlink count.

How often should I check my backlinks?

The tools update on different schedules, from every 15 minutes to about once a month, so no single interval fits all of them. Reading the same report in the same tool on a regular day shows change you can act on; beyond that, we recommend no set interval.