Recipe
How do I check my backlinks? A recipe with four requests
Four requests, one key, about 5 credits in total. Replace example.org with your domain and the rest runs as written.
Ingredients and method
- 1
Get a key
Sign in with Google at the account page. You receive $100 of credit, which is 1,000,000 credits, and a key starting sk_live_.
- 2
Take the overview (0 credits)
One free call confirms the domain is in the index and shows its headline totals.
- 3
Pull the referring domains (2 credits)
The list of distinct sites that link to you, up to 1,000 per call.
- 4
Read the anchors (2 credits)
The wording other sites use for you. Compare it with the brand name you would expect.
- 5
Screen your neighbours (1 credit)
Run bulk_dr on the sites that link to you, or on your rivals, to see where you stand.
The four requests
Swap the domain and the key. The header form keeps the key out of server logs.
KEY=sk_live_...
D=example.org
curl "https://linkmidasai.com/api.php?action=overview&q=$D&key=$KEY"
curl -H "Authorization: Bearer $KEY" "https://linkmidasai.com/api.php?action=refdomains&q=$D&per=1000"
curl -H "Authorization: Bearer $KEY" "https://linkmidasai.com/api.php?action=anchors&q=$D"
curl -H "Authorization: Bearer $KEY" "https://linkmidasai.com/api.php?action=bulk_dr&domains=rival1.com,rival2.com"Reading the plate
Taste before you season. Look at the totals before the lists, and at the lists before you draw a conclusion about anything.
If refdomains returns ten rows and your site is two years old, that may simply be the truth. If it returns ten and you ran a campaign six months ago, wait for the next monthly refresh before deciding anything, since new links reach the index late.
Every authenticated response carries a _credits field with the cost and the balance left, so a script can stop itself before it spends more than planned. HTTP 402 means the balance is gone.
For what to do with the numbers, go on to the scoring model or read the cost comparison.
One more habit helps. Store each response as a file named by date and action, such as 2026-10-29-refdomains-example.org.json. In three months you will have a record that no dashboard can reconstruct, because yesterday's view is gone from most tools the moment they refresh.
If you run the sequence for a client, add the date and the credit cost to the report. A buyer who sees that the whole audit cost half a cent will stop asking whether it is worth checking twice.
Three variations once the base works
Change one ingredient at a time. Each variation below reuses the same key.
Set a monthly watch. Put the overview call in a cron job on the first of the month and append the output to a dated file. The index refreshes roughly once a month. A daily run tells you nothing new.
For a rival comparison, run compare with up to 20 domains for a single credit and keep the table. Three rivals, once a quarter, is plenty.
Outreach next. Use intersect with two or three competitors lists the sites that link to several of them. Those sites already cite your category, so they make a better first email list than a cold directory. Run search (3 credits) with an exact phrase when you want to find who is linked with a specific anchor.
Total for all three: about 6 credits a month, or $0.0006. Even ten times that is under a cent.
Before you save the output
- Date written in the filename
- Key kept out of the repository
- per set to 1000 for list calls
- The _credits total noted
- A second run planned after the next monthly refresh
It will not show last week's links, keyword rankings or traffic. For those, Search Console and a fuller suite still come first.