How to Check Backlinks - 2026 Edition

Nowadays, the vast majority of digital marketing strategies focus on optimizing for generative AI summaries and managing the backend elements with a direct effect on content indexability. Backlinks, although still relevant, are no longer at the forefront of digital marketing blueprints and their importance has evolved alongside the latest core algorithm updates implemented by Google. Yes, backlinks still influence domain authority, can make your website more relevant in search results and they are a way to increase your relevance for core audiences. But, in 2026, a good backlink will be intertwined with the E-E-A-T framework.

How to Check Backlinks Illustrative

Backlinks, since the PageRank days, are a way through which search engines can assess the authority rating of your pages and investigate the credibility of your indexable content. But, in the modern digital age, the sheer number of backlinks is less important than the link equity. Google primarily determines the trustworthiness of your pages via algorithm checkers that look at the authority of the websites that link to your content. In other words, websites with more trust and digital relevance have more link equity, and therefore, a backlink from them will have more weight than one from a random blog.

Backlinks are a way to conform with E-A-A-T signals and check the online relevancy of indexable content. Backlinks from first-hand sources can increase the Experience signal of your pages, a backlink from an industry authority would raise your Expertise signal, while the Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness signals associated with your website will be enhanced by citations in industry-relevant publications, as well as by the DA of the pages that cite you as a source. Our team’s link-building packages can help you expand your backlink gathering strategy, and we are confident we have what it takes to improve the contextual relevance of your existing backlinks.

What Are Backlinks?

Definition and Concept of Backlinks

To make it simple, a backlink can be looked at as a digital connection between the content of two different pages present in search results. A publication has cited some of your content in one of its pages? In that case, that’s what is called an inbound backlink, and it is an excellent way to increase the authority of your pages. Yes, we are far removed from the early days of search engine algorithms, in which the sheer number of backlinks was a differentiating search results factor.

What are backlinks? – Video

That said, even now, in 2026, the equity of inbound backlinks represents one of the main signals crawling algorithms use to check the trustworthiness of a website. So, our link-building services will concentrate on finding connections with domains relevant to your activity, not on obtaining as many backlinks as possible.

How do inbound backlinks pass authority and influence the efficiency of SEO services? Well, it’s quite simple. Not all indexable websites present the same domain authority. Did one of your articles receive an inbound link from a random blog? That’s fine, but likely it will not have a groundbreaking effect on your search results ranking. However, if one of your articles was used as a citation in a major publication or by a website such as Science Direct or PubMed, then that will be a high authority signal, and your online trustworthiness score will rise accordingly. In other words, are you cited by the big dogs? Then, you must be doing something right, and Google’s checkers will notice.

Types of Backlinks:

Backlink Type	Link Equity	Passes Authority?	E-E-A-T Impact	When to Use
Dofollow	High	Yes	Strong boost	Editorial, contextual links
Nofollow	Low	No	Minimal	Forums, citations, Wikipedia
UGC	Low–Medium	Sometimes	Weak–Moderate	Reviews, comments, community content
Sponsored	None	No	No impact	Paid partnerships
Editorial	Very High	Yes	Strongest	Natural citations from authority sites
Manual	Medium	Yes (if high quality)	Moderate	Guest posts, outreach campaigns

Backlink Metrics Table

Dofollow backlinks:

A dofollow backlink is a default type of link connection that’s utilized in citing websites or transferring search ranking power between pages. A dofollow backlink is a fantastic tool for boosting the DA of a site and can be used for enhancing your website’s search results position by aligning your content with the E-E-A-T framework.

Nofollow backlinks:

A nofollow backlink, as the name suggests, is the diametral opposite of a dofollow backlink, and in an HTML context, it is a tool utilized for paid backlinks or untrusted sources that could have a negative effect on your website’s search ranking. Nofollow backlinks make use of the rel=”nofollow, attribute, which pretty much tells search engine crawlers to ignore them. They don’t directly improve search results rankings, but, in some circumstances, they are a good tool to increase referral traffic.

UGC backlinks:

This type of backlink is generated by users, and it can refer to forum posts, reviews, comments, and article summaries that are linked from external directories. A UGC backlink is identified by the rel=”ugc” attribute in the anchor tag of the link, so it is placed in the <a> HTML section. This type of backlink is characterized by less link equity than conventional dofollow backlinks. However, it’s a tool that can still be useful for increasing the CTRs of your services and attracting new traffic.

Editorial backlinks:

Editorial backlinks are the most important type of backlink available to a modern website, as they are naturally earned when a part of your content is utilized as a citation by a website with a high DA rating. Was your content utilized by an online science publication, and did you receive a backlink from it? Then, that can be interpreted as an editorial backlink, which is the best way to boost your link equity and E-A-A-T signals. They are a fantastic tool for increasing CTRs and they contribute decisively to authority enhancements.

Manual backlinks:

While important for long-term link-building strategies, the relevance of manual backlinks as an E-E-A-T signal will be reduced compared to what’s provided by an editorial backlink. And that’s because manual backlinks are achieved via deliberate guest posting strategies and outreach campaigns carried out by experienced search engine optimization specialists. Manual backlinks can be high-quality, that’s true, and they are a useful tool. But, these types of backlinks also carry the risk of making your website be identified as spammy by search engine crawlers.

Why Backlinks Are Still Crucial in 2026?

While backlinks in 2026 are no longer as influential as a search ranking tool as they were ten or fifteen years ago, their inclusion in a comprehensive digital marketing campaign is still more than necessary. Backlinks are treated by Google’s checkers as an endorsement for your site, and if obtained from websites with a high DA, their link equity can directly correlate with an increase in search results visibility. But of course, the most important thing, at the end of the day, is to obtain a backlink from a website with a reputation score that’s at least equal to yours.

Backlinks Image

Backlinks from high-authority websites can contribute to conventional search rankings. But in the context of GEO, high-authority backlinks are quickly transforming into signals that shape how AI models perceive your brand. Context, in a modern backlink strategy, matters more than quantity, and the backlinks you obtain from external websites will interact with other search ranking factors such as the topical relevance of the indexable website and the overall quality of your page’s elements. Around 94% of all indexable pages still get no backlinks. And this remains one of the primary reasons for the atrocious search results visibility of most sites.

Why Do Backlinks Matter for Trust, and Why Use a Checker?

Even after the plethora of core algorithm updates released in the last couple of years, backlinks remain one of the most relevant SERP signals that Google utilizes to check the overall digital search ranking of indexable websites. Backlinks, in a way, can be looked at as digital highways that link your site’s content to other websites, relevant to the preferences of core audiences.

The more of these highways connect to a place, the greater its reputation. In the digital world, things work pretty much the same. Do you want to become visible in search results? Well, it wouldn’t hurt to attract connections with highly reputable websites. But the simplicity of the general process behind determining backlink authority is masked by the complex mechanism involving trust signals and crawling algorithm variables. Do you want to check backlinks? Then, there are a couple of elements to be aware of:

Domain Authority: The Reputational Score of a Site

Our team’s modern search engine optimization techniques can only make use of backlink strategies once we understand the current DA score of the site that requires on-page and backend modifications. In order to investigate your site’s authority score, our agents will utilize tools like Moz’s DA checker or Ahref’s Domain Rating tool in order to at least gather an approximation of the scoring checker rating utilized by Google when assessing websites SERP positions. When a site with a good DA score utilizes backlinks and connects to your content, a part of its authority score will automatically be transferred to your pages.

This is what it’s called “SEO equity”. But the keyword here is high DA. It doesn’t matter if the backlink check determines your content was linked by 1000 websites, as long as those domains are cataloged as spammy or are active in a niche that’s not relevant to your site’s content. In order to increase your site’s authority, our team will utilize tools like Ahrefs and SEMrush to audit the source of the backlinks connecting to your site. And once this audit is complete, we will adjust our content-creation blueprint accordingly.

Trust Signals: The Main Tools Used by Google’s Checkers to Score Credibility

Trust signals can be looked at as the top tools Google uses in order to determine if the backlinks gathered by a certain website are legitimate or not. First introduced in 1998, alongside the PageRank algorithm, trust signals have now evolved to utilize LLMs and anti-spam detection checkers in order to assess the provenance of the backlinks and the semantics surrounding them. Google doesn’t just analyze the structure of certain backlinks, but also investigates the semantic context around them, and their velocity.

The indexable pages of your site only gathered around five to ten new backlinks per week? In that case, Google will likely check if this growth was natural. However, if its backlink check algorithms determine that your pages got linked to thousands of different sites, in only a couple of days, then something is likely wrong, and Google might flag this pattern and submit a manual action against your site.

How Can Google Check Backlink Relevance?

To get a bit more technical than it’s probably appropriate, in order for Google’s checkers to determine the DA of your website based, in part, on backlinks, the search engine’s crawling agents will make use of search ranking LLMs and advanced neural networks, which will check the topical authority of your site’s content and the link’s contextual vectors. The core vector utilized by Google to link factual information between entities is the Knowledge Graph, which can be looked at as a large-scale machine-readable network that handles Google’s AI semantic understanding algorithms.

Within KGs, Google utilizes system checkers like Topic Layer, a semantic AI-based tool, that can identify subtopics inside larger, more complex ones, and determine which type of content should be promoted in the search results. Once the content is cataloged in topical clusters, Google will utilize NLP, semantic vector embedding, and entity extraction in order to check the linking page taxonomy node and match it to a topical score.

In other words, in order for Google’s checkers to determine the search ranking factor of a certain backlink, it will use its NLP algorithms to determine if the topical semantics between the two linking domains are a match. Then, the same crawling agents will read the context surrounding the backlink, plus the anchor texts, and determine exactly why your site is being linked to another domain. Semantic understanding is everything in modern backlink strategies and is one of the reasons why a website with only 10% of the backlinks of a larger site can win the SERP race, as long as its connections come from sites with high authority scores and topical relevance for their indexable content.

Four Best Backlink Checker Tools (Reviewed & Compared)

Ahrefs: Best Overall Digital-Marketing Tool

Ahrefs Dashboard Image

Ahrefs is one of the most powerful, comprehensive AI-based marketing platforms, usable for both search engine optimization as well as GEO and backlink investigations. If you decide to utilize our high-quality services, we will make use of Ahrefs to analyze the characteristics of your rival’s sites, research keywords, explore the semantic structure of your content, and discover backlink opportunities with sites relevant to the core interests of your main clients. Its backlink index is optimized to check the incidence of backlinks directly from the tool’s integrated platform, and over time, the app has transformed into an all-in-one solution for all things GEO.

Ahrefs features a clean UI and an industry-leading backlink index alongside a site explorer checker that can allow us to see referring domains and identify the ways through which rivals earn backlinks. Ahrefs can allow you to view the AI visibility of your brand in no less than six AI indexes; it features a historical backlink index, and its site explorer integrates with organic search metrics relevant for traditional SERP-increasing strategies. As for price, the lite subscription starts at $129/mo and allows for up to 750 tracked keywords, while the standard plan is $249/mo and allows for up to 20 projects.

SEMrush: The Best Tool for Professionals

Dashboard SEMrush Image

SEMrush is a comprehensive, all-in-one marketing platform that combines the functionality of an AI-based backlink checker with comprehensive keywords and PPC insights, which can be utilized for the implementation of a long-term ad campaign. SEMrush is a complex marketing suite with built-in social media tracking tools that can be utilized for local website-optimization procedures, as well as for conducting back-end or on-page audits that will influence your likelihood of attracting backlinks.

Its position checker tool permits the verification of your site’s SERP ranking, via daily updates and its content templates and built-in writing assistant are tools that can contribute to a well-established content-creation blueprint. SEMrush has one of the largest toolkit integration frameworks in the search engine optimization sphere and it’s a great option if you’re interested in determining the spam rating of inbound keywords.

With that being said, overall, Ahrefs’ backlink index is a bit stronger. SEMrush is a better choice if you’re interested in accurate SERP tracking and want to leverage the strongest keyword databases in the industry, while investigating backlink strategies. That said, SEMrush is also a bit more expensive than Ahrefs, as its basic starter plan costs $165 per month.

Moz Link Explorer: A Great Tool for Anchor Text and Spam Score

Moz Link Explorer is a comprehensive backlink checker that’s built directly in the Moz platform. Its Spam Score and Anchor Text tools are primarily accessible in the app’s Link Explorer subcategory, and they are a way to 1) determine the quality of the inbound backlink and 2) analyze how other sites link to your pages, by analyzing the anchor text distribution.

The Anchor text checker will permit us to determine the backlinks that use them, while the Spam Score checker will allow us to sort inbound backlinks based on their exportable ranking. Moz largely has a lower crawling power for wide-spectrum audits, at least compared to solutions like Ahrefs or SEMrush. That said, its price is more competitive, the starter subscription commanding a price of only $49 per month.

Google Search Console: Best Free Tool for Checking Backlinks

GSC is not a third-party backlink checker, but rather is a quality webmaster’s tool developed by Google that can be utilized to monitor the impressions and CTRs of your website in search results, inspect URLs, check the indexing coverage of your site’s pages, and, of course, submit XML sitemaps that can be utilized by Google’s crawling agents.

GSC is the main tool for reviewing your site’s Core Web Vitals. It allows the monitoring of top-linked pages and anchor texts, and of course, it can be utilized to identify errors in your page’s HTML implementation of schema markup. GSC is less aggressive than third-party tools like Ahrefs when crawling your site’s backlink profile. But it is free, and therefore its limitations are easier to glance over. GSC is useful for identifying which backlinks are coming from a site indexed by Google, while third-party tools are better for link outreach campaigns.

Tool	Best For	Backlink Index Strength	Extra Features	Price	Verdict
Ahrefs	Overall SEO & backlinks	Excellent	AI visibility, keyword explorer, site audit	$129–$249/mo	Best overall
SEMrush	Professionals & SERP tracking	Very Good	PPC tools, content templates, social tracking	$165/mo	Best for pros
Moz	Anchor texts & spam score	Good	DA, spam score, on-page tools	$49/mo	Best budget option
Google Search Console	Free backlink insights	Basic	Core Web Vitals, indexing, sitemap	Free	Best free tool

Tool Comparison Table

Strategies for Earning Natural Backlinks in 2026:

HARO:

Help a Reporter Out (HARO) is a digital platform that was launched as a tool to link journalists with relevant sources. HARO can be one of the best tools to obtain high-authority backlinks from websites relevant to the interests of your core audiences and enhance search results visibility. Moreover, our team can utilize it to find content collaborations in your niche.

Digital PR:

When we say digital PR, we refer to the practice of promoting your site’s content to bloggers, media outlets, online communities, or domains active in the same niche as you, that might be interested in a long-term mutually-beneficial partnership with a site with a growing DA. The goal? To attract backlinks. Our team will develop a data-driven campaign that will naturally increase the likelihood of attracting the attention of both AI-driven indexing bots and authors who can provide you with backlinks. With a bit of luck, if your content manages to attract backlinks from a site with a high authority score, then your pages should hopefully begin to be cited as a source in AI overviews.

Content Collaborations:

Content collaborations involve partnering with another brand or website with the goal of developing content that will be mutually beneficial for both parties. Our team will scour the web for backlink collaboration opportunities with domains relevant to your niche, we will check the backlink profile of your rival’s pages for any 404 errors that we can exploit, and we will develop a content-creation strategy with a high CTA that will encourage guest posts from authors with a high DA score. It will take a while, but content collaborations are one of the best ways to attract high-authority backlinks.

About Author

Loredana Mihai

Loredana is our project manager. She supervises each step of your project and ensures everything is kept on schedule. Implementing content ideas, managing processes, editing, and reporting are part of her daily activities.

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How to Check Backlinks: Best Backlink Checker Tools – 2026 Edition

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