Competitor backlink checker
See who links to any competitor. Get a clear map of their referring domains, with no account and no dashboard.
Enter a competitor domain to see who links to them.
Free and instant. We pull their referring domains live.
From a competitor’s domain to your next link
No spreadsheets, no dashboard to learn. Three steps, and the third one is the whole point.
- 01Enter a competitor domain
Any site you compete with in search. No account, no credit card, no setup. Just the domain.
- 02We map their referring domains
We pull the sites linking to them from a live backlink index and lay them out as a network you can actually read.
- 03See your gap and go earn it
Add your own domain to reveal the links they have that you do not, ranked by how realistically you can win each one.
A competitor’s whole profile, in plain language
Every metric is defined right on the page and none of it needs a manual. Here is what the checker returns the moment you run it, free.
The full count of unique sites linking to the target, with the top 25 by authority shown free and the complete list in your emailed report.
A 0 to 100 Authority Rank for each linking site, so you can tell a link from The Times apart from a forgotten directory.
Which links actually pass authority and which do not, labeled per domain so you are not guessing.
Freshly earned referring domains flagged, so you can see which tactics a competitor is running right now.
What a report looks like when it comes back
Referring domains, strongest first. Below is the format, filled in with example rows so you can see the shape of it before you run anything.
Referring domains
illustrative exampleAR = Authority Rank (0 to 100). Higher is stronger.
How to read it
A deep, long-running relationship rather than a single mention: a partnership, or a resource they get cited in repeatedly. The hardest row to replicate and the most useful to understand, because it usually explains where the domain’s strength came from.
A tactic they are running right now. This is the most actionable row on any report, because whatever pitch or campaign earned it is still live and the same door is still open to you.
Passes no ranking authority, so it will not move you up the results. It still sends real visitors and costs nothing to replicate, which makes it worth doing once and not worth obsessing over.
A backlink is a vote. A competitor’s links are a ballot box you can copy from.
Google ranks pages partly on who vouches for them, and most of a competitor’s links are reproducible tactics: a guest post, a resource page, a tool roundup, a podcast. Each referring domain you see is a site that already links to a business like yours, which makes it the most realistic link you could earn next. Getting the data was never the hard part. Knowing which links to chase is, and that is exactly what your gap tells you.
When free is genuinely enough
Most people researching a handful of competitors never need a subscription. It is worth knowing where the line actually falls.
- Reading any competitor’s referring domains end to end
- Finding your gap against them, ranked by what you can win
- Checking a handful of rivals before a campaign
- Deciding which links are worth chasing this quarter
- You want daily alerts the moment a rival gains or loses a link
- You need years of historical trend data, not today’s snapshot
- You are auditing hundreds of domains, or reporting to clients
- You want link intersect across ten or more competitors at once
When you do cross that line, our paid reports are a one-off purchase rather than a subscription. See pricing, or read the free Ahrefs alternatives comparison first.
Is this backlink checker really free?
Yes. You can check any competitor domain and see its referring-domain map, top linking sites, authority scores, and dofollow split without paying or signing up. The complete referring-domain list and CSV are delivered free by email.
Do I need an account or a credit card?
No. The checker runs with no account and no card. You only enter an email if you want the full report sent to you, and you can create a free account later if you want to save your reports.
How do I check a competitor’s backlinks?
Enter their domain above and the checker pulls every site linking to them from a live backlink index, sorted strongest first. You get the total referring domains, an authority score per linking site, which links are dofollow, and which arrived in the last 30 days. Add your own domain afterwards and it shows the ones linking to them but not to you, which is the list actually worth acting on.
What is a competitor backlink analysis tool, and do I need one?
It is a tool that reads the links pointing at a competitor and tells you where their authority comes from. You need one because there is no way to see another site’s backlinks from the outside: Google does not publish them and the site itself has no reason to. A crawler that has indexed the web is the only route, which is why this cannot be done manually.
What is a backlink spy tool?
It is the same thing as a competitor backlink checker, just a more dramatic name for it. Nothing covert is involved. Backlinks are public by definition, since a link is a page on the open web pointing at another page, and any crawler can see them. "Spying" here means reading published information that happens to be tedious to collect by hand.
Can a competitor tell that I looked at their backlinks?
No. The scan reads a backlink index that has already crawled those pages, so running it does not touch their site and leaves nothing in their analytics or server logs. Checking a competitor is invisible to them, the same way their checking you would be invisible to you.
Where does the backlink data come from and how accurate is it?
We pull from a live, continuously crawled backlink index, so you see referring domains as they exist now rather than a stale snapshot. As with every backlink tool, no crawler sees the entire web, but the picture is more than accurate enough to find the links worth chasing.
What is the difference between a backlink and a referring domain?
A backlink is a single link from one page to another. A referring domain is a unique website linking to you, no matter how many links it points your way. We count referring domains because ten links from one site is one relationship, not ten.
What is a backlink gap?
Your backlink gap is the set of referring domains that link to a competitor but not to you yet. Because those sites already link to a site like yours, they are the most realistic links to go earn. Enter your own domain after a scan to reveal your gap.
How is this different from Ahrefs or Semrush?
The enterprise suites are powerful and priced for full-time SEOs. This tool does one job well, reading a competitor backlink profile, and explains it in plain language for a fraction of the cost. See our Semrush vs Ahrefs and free Ahrefs alternatives comparisons for the full picture.