The Best Backlink Checker in 2026: Free vs. Paid, Compared Honestly
"Best" for a backlink checker almost never means the biggest number. It means you can see who is actually linking to you, not just how many. We built a free one on that idea, and this page compares it against what the paid tools charge for the same underlying data.
Every serious backlink checker on the market, including ours, ultimately reads from a crawl of the web. Ahrefs and Semrush run their own crawlers continuously and sell access to what they find. Open PageRank, a free competitor worth naming here, says plainly on its own methodology page that "every score comes from one open, public source, the Common Crawl web graph." That is the same source we use. The difference between the tools below is not who has secretly better data. It is what each one lets you see, and what it charges you to see it.
What the market charges for a referring-domain count
| Who | What you get | Price | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Semrush (SEO) | Backlink Analytics inside the SEO toolkit | €134.00/month | source, read 2026-09-07 |
| Ahrefs (Lite) | Full backlink and referring-domain data in Site Explorer | €119.00/month | source, read 2026-09-07 |
| Majestic (Lite) | Referring domains and referring IPs, Fresh Index (last 120 days) | €46.99/month | source, read 2026-09-07 |
| Ahrefs (Starter) | Site Explorer with limited rows per report | €27.00/month | source, read 2026-09-07 |
| Open PageRank (free tier) | A 0-10 score only - no list of referring domains. 30,000 domains a month, and it needs an API key | free | source, read 2026-09-07 |
Every price above was read on the vendor's own pricing page on the date shown, not copied from a summary somewhere else. That is the same rule `attrezzi_confronto` enforces on the tool pages, because a price without a source and a date is exactly how a wrong number (WhoisFreaks at "$59 a month") stayed on a page we sell for weeks.
Read that table twice. Open PageRank uses the identical public graph we do and still gates it behind an API key and a monthly cap of 30,000 lookups, and it hands you a single 0 to 10 score with no list behind it. Ahrefs' own free checker stops at the first 100 backlinks, which happens to be the exact cap we chose for our free tier, minus the account it asks you to create first.
The part every comparison article skips: read the list
A count by itself can flatter a domain that does not deserve it. We ran our own tool on gumroad.com, which our checker puts at 5891 qualified referring domains as of 2026-09-07. The top five by our authority-weighted ordering are: gum.co, trends24.in, okuha.com, git-scm.com, pomodorotechnique.com. That is a genuinely mixed set, a payment shortlink, a trends tracker, a Git handbook, a productivity site and a music platform, and it is the kind of variety you want to see. A list that returns the same five household names for every domain you check, which is what a raw popularity ranking gives you before it is corrected for how much a site links out, tells you nothing about the site you actually searched for. That correction is the whole reason the tool exists.
value = authority ÷ log10(outbound domains + 10)
Authority here is a rank in the graph, not a count, so it cannot be bought by trading links; a domain that links out to six million others gets divided down hard, because linking to everything is not the same as recommending you specifically. Ahrefs' DR, Moz's DA and Majestic's Trust Flow are all closed formulas that the vendor will not publish. Ours is the one line above, and anyone can rebuild it from the same public graph and land on our numbers.
When the paid option is actually the right call
We are not going to pretend the free tool covers everything a working SEO team needs, because it does not. Ahrefs and Semrush crawl continuously and carry anchor text, historical link dates and traffic estimates; we ship a snapshot released a few times a year, at the domain level, with none of that. If your job depends on catching a link within days of it appearing, or on reading the exact anchor text a competitor is building, pay for one of the tools above; that is precisely what the monthly fee buys. If your question is narrower, "does this domain have real, varied referring domains, and who are they," the free tool answers it completely, and paying would not change the answer.
Questions
Is the free checker actually free, or is there a paid tier hiding behind it?
It is free the way the rest of this site's tools are: no account, no card, no daily limit. The file we sell next to it is a separate product, a set of already-screened expired domains, not a locked version of this tool.
Why trust a number from a company selling a related file?
Because you do not have to take our word for the count: the underlying data slice is public, every price above links straight to the vendor's own pricing page dated the day we read it, and the scoring formula is printed on this page instead of kept as a trade secret. Check any of it yourself.
How often is the underlying graph refreshed?
Whenever a new Common Crawl release comes out, which runs a few times a year, not on a fixed weekly schedule. That is slower than a continuous crawler like Ahrefs runs, and it is the honest tradeoff for the data being free and unlimited.
We sell a €23 file on this: The Expired Domain Field Guide: 15 Checks That Rejected 45%. This page does not need you to buy it. Everything above works whether you do or not, and the file exists for the one thing the free numbers cannot tell you: what a domain was before it expired, not just how many places still point at it.
More guides
Same rule as the tools next to them: every number sourced, dated, and rechecked on a schedule instead of frozen the day it was written.