Having good backlinks is a great way to get a higher rank when it comes to SEO. 

To make the task of backlink building easier, a backlink checker tool is must-have for every SEO and digital marketer. It is useful in doing competitor analysis and finding the links that point to your competitor sites. Also, backlink checker can help you keep track of who is linking to your site to figure out what tools or strategies you need to employ to build some higher-quality backlinks.

In this guide, we’ll list 11 of the best backlink checker tools that you can use to audit your site’s backlinks as well as competitor backlink profile. You can get both free and paid options according to your preference.

11 Best Backlink Checker Tools

1. Ahrefs

Ahrefs is our top recommendation for a backlink checker. It is one of the most popular link checker tools that draws data from one of the largest backlink indexes.

The backlinks checker is easily accessible through the “Site Explorer,” and allows you to quickly export the data for further analysis. You can also access the sections on the left sidebar to explore each backlink feature more in-depth.

The tool makes it incredibly easy to perform deep backlink audits – analyze anchor text distribution, spot negative SEO attacks, identify low quality inbound links, spot PBNs, monitor CTLDs, build disavow files inside the application, identify potential risks and do competitor backlink analysis.

Here are 4 ways you can use Ahrefs to perform competitor backlink analysis:

• Use the Domain Comparison tool to get a side-by-side view of how your site’s domain rating, backlink count and distribution stacks up against the competition.
• Monitor the link acquisition rate of top competitors.
• Identify which content types and topics present the greatest potential for new links.
• Use link intersect reports to surface your highest-probability link targets.

Read more to learn how to use Ahrefs backlink checker to its full potential

Pricing: Start out with a $7 trial for seven days to see if you like what this great tool has to offer. Plans and pricing range from $99 per month for smaller businesses to $999 for larger businesses.

2. Sitechecker

Sitechecker developer a free tool called Backlink Checker. This tool can analyze the entire backlink profile of your website. you can also use it for free to perform backlink audits of your competitors.

Simply enter a URL in this tool, and then you’ll view a detailed report on the status of backlinks which include dofollow and nofollow links, the total backlinks, and referring domains. 

However, the details of every backlink are limited. You are able to see only 20 backlinks. So, this tool is best for those who has tight budget, but wants to get an overview of the backlinks of any website.

Pricing: Sitechecker costs from $29/month ($23/month paid upfront annually). Also, there’s a 7-day free trial.

3. SEMrush

SEMrush is an excellent tool that lets you search for keywords, check backlinks, and spy on competitors’ ranks.

To use the backlink features, login to SEMrush, select ‘Backlink Analytics’ and type in the name of the domain you want to investigate. You’ll then see lots of information about the domain and its backlinks. If you want to dig into more details on any section of this overview, just click the link beneath that section to view the full report.

With its huge database of 26,5 trillion backlinks, SEMrush offers a lot of revealing charts showing new & lost backlinks, authority ranks of all referrals, the evolution of backlink generating processes, and much more.

Pricing: A pro plan begins at $99.95 per month and is great for freelancers, small startup companies, and other marketers looking to get some backlink information for their site. Other plans range from $199.95 per month to $399.95 per month. There is also an option for enterprise plans if companies are looking for more features in checking their backlinks for SEO purposes.

4. Moz Link Explorer

Moz is another giant in the search marketing world, and its “Link Explorer” is considered one of the best tools available for backlink analysis.

It gives you the number of links for a site, of course, but also information like the newest links, the page authority, the spam score, and domain authority.

One of Link Explorer’s distinctive features is Anchor Text Analysis, which shows the most common anchor text in a website’s backlink profile. 

Pricing: Moz costs from $99/month ($79/month paid upfront annually). There’s a 30-day free trial, though, which gives you full access to all their tools.

5. Open Link Profiler

Open Link Profiler is a free tool that lets you analyze the backlinks of any domain. It comes from SEO Profiler (a paid tool) and gives you free access to link data.

It works the way a lot of the other tools do. Put in a URL and get a link profile. The information offered is much more extensive though, including breakdowns of links by age, industries, context, countries, and more.

You can download 1000 links per website, though you’ll need to create an account in order to that.

Given that it’s free, it offers an impressive number of options and a large volume of data. It’s not going to be a match for all the features and power of paid tools like Ahrefs and SEMrush, but it’s worth using if you can’t afford a paid tool.

Pricing: Open Link Profiler is free. You’ll need to create a (free) account and sign in to access some features.

6. Majestic SEO

As one of the bigger brands in the online marketing space, Majestic SEO has a lot to offer those who have a strong interest in their backlink profile.

What distinguishes Majestic from other backlink checkers (except for Ahrefs) on the list is that it maintains two backlink databases, these are Fresh Index (1.2 trillion links) and Historic Index (8 trillion links). If you’re willing to see only newly acquired links, use the Fresh Index that shows links crawled in the last 90 days. But if you need to access all lifetime links, utilize the Historic Index instead.

Except for Majestic’s index, the tool has a lot of killer features to offer. Firstly, Majestic lets you see all the links pointing to a site at a glance, analyze them against the most important SEO indicators (domain strength, Domain Alexa rank, Anchor URL, Anchor text, etc.), and see time-specific charts for external links as well as referring domains.

Secondly, the software allows you to analyze 10,000 domains by just uploading .csv or .txt files, which makes Majestic a perfect tool for those who need to work with large amounts of data.

Majestic also offers domain comparison feature. You can compare 5 domains, which may be enough for smaller businesses, but too few for large companies and SEO agencies.

Pricing: The plans range from $49.99 per month to $399.99 per month. The Lite Starter plan is perfect for small or new businesses. For more established businesses a Pro plan will cost about $99.99 per month. The API plan will allow more users to be under one account, which can be beneficial for larger businesses.

7. Google Search Console

Google Search Console is a completely free backlink tool with a large data allowance, but limited opportunities for backlink analysis.

You can only use the Search Console to check out links on your own site, but it is an important resource to find backlinks that Google recognizes. These backlinks may be different from the backlink profile on other tools (in fact, they might be quite different). This is because Google ignores many links if it considers them spammy or low quality backlinks. 

Once you get your ownership verified, you’ll see a list of backlinks drawn directly from Google’s index. However long the list, you can only view the top 1,000 results. No additional metrics and no analytics features are provided on-site, but you are free to export the data and analyze it using other tools.

Pricing: Free

8. LinkMiner

Link Miner is a quality tool that aids in checking for backlinks on your page and a competitor’s site.

Just by typing in your own or your competitor’s domain name, it can identify its most powerful backlinks, evaluating them with renowned metrics such as Citation Flow, Trust Flow, and others.

You can also filter your backlinks by new, Dofollow, lost and deleted links. This is particularly helpful if you want to keep a list of deleted or lost links that you want to recover for your site. It’s also a handy way of seeing new backlinks straight away as they appear.

Pricing: A Basic Plan is $29.90/month while a top tier Agency Plan is $79.90/month. 

9. Ubersuggest

Ubersuggest is a tool from Neil Patel. The main tool offers keyword research features, but there’s also a Backlinks tool that you can use to view details of your site’s backlinks.

Ubersuggest lets you know the domain score of the website and helps you know the total number of backlinks, no-follow links, referring domains including .edu and .gov domains, backlink over time growth chart, backlinks you have lost, etc. 

You can use the free version to see this information, but you’ll only get details of a small number of backlinks for each domain. You need to upgrade to the paid version of Ubersuggest if you want everything.

Pricing: Ubersuggest Pro version costs $29/month, or $290/year

10. CognitiveSEO

CognitiveSEO is a full-featured SEO tool which offers a range of features that allow site owners to perform a site audit, check on backlinks, look at local SEO, research penalties, better understand how their content performs, and see how their site ranks against the competition.

CognitiveSEO’s backlink checker starts by gathering information about all the links to your website. Then, it crawls and analyzes each link to give more context.  

Finally, it generates an easy to navigate (but detailed) report listing new and lost links, nofollow/dofollow link information, unnatural links, and more.

The following are worth it point about backlink analysis provided by this tool.

• Cutting-edge link audits which are easy to understand.
• Identify & prevent unnatural link penalties
• Instant backlink checker and site explorer
• Assess your competitors’ link strategy
• Identify valuable link opportunities
• New/lost links email alerts delivered directly to your inbox.

Pricing: It costs $129.99/month or $89/month on an annual payment.

11.  Buzz Sumo

BuzzSumo is designed to let you analyze your content and your competitors’ content. It’s a great way to come up with topic ideas, but you can also use it to help you with your backlink strategy.

You can simply type in a keyword or a domain name to see the most popular content for that keyword, or the most popular content on that domain. You can then click the link icon next to any of the results to see the backlinks for that piece of content.

You can even type in the URL of a specific piece of content and see just the backlinks that point to that. This could be a great way to see which sites are linking to your competitors’ top posts.

Pricing: Plans start at $99 per month, and you have the option to switch at any time during the trial period. The plans are dependent on the number of alerts and mentions you’d like to have, and you can choose to pay monthly or yearly.

Which is The Best Backlink Checker Tool?

Manually checking and evaluating your backlinks is always going to be a time consuming and boring process. Any of the backlink checker we listed above can help you build your site’s backlinks or analyze your competitor’s backlinks.

Which is the best backlink checker for you?

For the most comprehensive backlink checker tool, our top recommendation is Ahrefs. If you’re on a tight budget, you can use Google Search Console and Open Link Profiler. Both of them are completely free, but provide good value.