Free tier
Check backlinks online free: the first look costs nothing
Four actions need no key and no credit. Used in the right order they remove most bad offers before you spend a cent, and they never replace the paid calls for the finalists.
Try the free domain call
Type a domain and read its DR from our own index. This is the same free action the API exposes, with no sign-in.
What the free calls cover
Free means four actions: domain, overview, stats and suggest. They need no key.
The domain call returns the DR, which comes from the number of referring domains on a log scale, so you can reproduce it by hand with a calculator. Overview and stats add the headline counts out of an index of 181,132,097 domains, and suggest helps when you only half remember a hostname.
Be realistic about what that buys. It tells you whether a site is tiny, mid-sized or large. It says nothing about the wording of its links or which pages hold them, and for those you need the 2-credit calls described in the field reference.
Think of a house survey. Walk past the house first. You learn the street and the size. You do not learn about the damp. Google, Ahrefs and Semrush each publish their own ratings, and ours is a fourth, so keep the sources apart.
Order beats tool. Free calls go first because a rejection there is free, and every rejection saves the 2 credits you would have spent on the next step. Across a list of 200 sellers, that adds up to a few hundred credits kept in your balance.
The free pass, in order
- Run domain on the seller. Below your DR floor? Stop here.
- Run overview and compare the totals with what the seller claims
- Run domain on two rivals and note the gap, not the absolute number
- Use suggest if the spelling or TLD is uncertain
- Write down today's date next to every reading
- Only now decide which finalists deserve a refdomains pull
What a free look cannot confirm
- Whether the links to the seller are earned or ordered (needs anchors)
- Which of the seller's pages carry the weight (needs toppages)
- Whether a link placed this month exists yet, since the index refreshes about monthly
- Whether the seller shares sources with your rivals (needs intersect)
- Whether Google will count a particular link, which nobody outside Google can confirm
- Anything about traffic or rankings; use Search Console for those
Free-tier questions
Can I really check backlinks online free without an account?
Yes for the four free actions. The DR checker on this page calls the domain action without a key. For lists of referring domains, anchors or linked pages you need a key, and the sign-up credit of $100 covers a very large number of those calls.
Is the free data a cut-down version?
No, it comes from the same index. It is limited in scope, not in freshness: you get the headline readings, not the lists. The index refreshes roughly once a month for free and paid calls alike.
What is the next step after the free pass?
Pull refdomains for the finalists at 2 credits each, then read anchors. The scoring model shows how to turn those into a single number you can compare with the price.
Why check a seller's DR before the price?
Because the price is an opinion and the DR is arithmetic. Reading the DR first keeps you from anchoring on the asking price. If a site with a DR of 14, which is about ten referring domains, asks $200, you have your answer in seconds.