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Search backlinks screen

Search backlinks compares your backlink profile against your rivals' in this . Links from other sites remain one of the strongest signals search engines use to decide who ranks - and increasingly one of the signals AI assistants inherit when they choose which sites to read and cite.

This is a domain-level report: each brand is measured on its own web address, so platform and topic filters do not apply. The brand filter and the date range do. Brands default to you and your primary competitors so one giant rival cannot flatten the chart; open the menu to add or drop anyone. The date range defaults to the last 12 months — backlink history is monthly, so a 30-day window hid the trend — and it does not follow the date range you picked on Rankings or Visibility. Standings always show the latest measurement. Presence refreshes the numbers on its own schedule, roughly once a week.

The three numbers

  • Referring domains - how many distinct sites link to a domain. A hundred links from one site still count as one referring domain, which makes this the best single measure of a backlink profile's health: growth means new sites choosing to link.
  • Backlinks - every individual link, so one enthusiastic site can contribute thousands. Read it beside referring domains: a high backlink count over few referring domains means the profile leans on a handful of sites.
  • Domain rank - an authority score from 0 to 1000, higher is better. The scale is logarithmic, like PageRank: climbing from 300 to 400 is much harder than from 100 to 200. Use it to compare your domain against your rivals', not as an absolute grade.

The toggle above the chart switches all three views: the trend shows one line per brand, and the standings beside it rank every brand in the workspace by the chosen number, with movement since the previous measurement. Click a row to see who links to that brand - the referring domains behind its numbers, strongest first, including your own brand's. The ⋯ menu on each row carries the usual brand actions - report, responses, edit, visit the website.

Backlinks belong to a domain, not to a page, so each domain is measured once. A brand whose web address sits on another tracked brand's domain, like iPhone at apple.com/iphone beside Apple at apple.com, shows Shared instead of a number. Its row opens the profile of the brand that holds the domain.

The drill-down behind each standings row lists the strongest sites linking to that brand - up to 100, ranked by their own authority - with each site's link count, when it first linked, and the same plain-language description the gap table uses (site kind, editorial links, likely spam). Search the sites by name, sort by any column, filter by authority, links, first-seen date or spam score, and export the list as CSV. Use it on a rival to see where their authority comes from and which of their referring domains you would want too; use it on yourself to see the profile behind your own numbers. It reads data the weekly measurement already collected, so it is always as fresh as the standings.

The trend starts with up to a year of monthly history from the backlink index, filled in when a brand is first measured, and grows a new point with each weekly measurement from then on.

Referring domains gained and lost

Below the trend, a bar chart shows your referring domains gained (green) and lost (red) per month - sites that started linking to you, and sites that stopped. The backlink index reports this churn once a month, so the bars are monthly even though the trend above gains a point each week. A healthy profile gains more than it loses; a red month worth investigating usually means a directory purge, a site closure, or a template change that dropped a sitewide link.

The table at the bottom lists referring domains that link to your rivals but not to you - each row is an outreach idea. The brand marks show which rivals a domain links to, and Links to rivals counts those links.

The list opens with the best opportunities first. Opportunity scores each site from 0 to 100 on how worth pitching it is: the site's own authority, how many of your rivals it links to, and whether its links are genuine editorial links placed in content rather than nofollow or sponsored placements. Sites the backlink index flags as probable spam are marked and sink to the bottom, so you never have to learn to skip them. The line under each domain says in plain words why it scored the way it did - "Blog linking to 3 of your rivals. Links appear in article content."

Authority is the referring domain's own strength (0 to 1000, higher is better), the same scale as domain rank above. Filter by how many rivals a domain feeds - a site that links to every competitor at once is the strongest candidate on the list.

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