// TOOL 09 — LINK GRAPH TRAVERSAL: ONLINE
Backlink Checker
Enter a root domain and get its authority score, referring-domain count, and the top sites linking to it — ranked by the linkers' own authority, pulled from a 4.3-billion-edge Common Crawl link graph.
What the check returns
- C-01
Editorial authority score
A 0–100-style domain rating weighted toward wiki, .edu, .gov, and news referrers — the links that actually move trust, not raw volume.
- C-02
Referring domains & total inlinks
How many unique domains link in, and how many total links they send. A high inlink-to-referrer ratio usually means sitewide footers or templated links, not editorial citations.
- C-03
Top linkers, ranked by their authority
The linking domains that matter most, ordered by their own authority. Run it on a competitor to see exactly which referrers you're missing.
Why check backlinks against Common Crawl
Common Crawl is the corpus most large language models are trained on. A backlink that exists in this graph is a link the AI systems answering your customers' questions have actually seen — which makes it the closest free proxy for how visible and citable your domain is to ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google's AI Overviews. If your profile is thin here, you're not just under-ranked; you're under-referenced.
// RELATED PROBLEMAI assistants never mention your brand? That's a referencing problem. →FAQ
Where does the backlink data come from?
From a 4.3-billion-edge link graph built on Common Crawl, the open web crawl used by most AI training pipelines. It is a point-in-time snapshot of the web's link structure — not a live monitoring index like Ahrefs or Moz — which makes it ideal for a fast, free profile check.
What is the authority score?
A 0–100-style editorial-authority rating, comparable to domain rating metrics you know from paid tools. It is weighted toward links from wiki, .edu, .gov, and news domains — the referrers that both Google and AI systems treat as trust signals.
Why does my count differ from Ahrefs or Semrush?
Every index crawls a different slice of the web at a different time. Common Crawl skews toward pages that matter — the same corpus LLMs learn from — so a link that shows up here is a link AI systems have likely seen. Treat the numbers as directional, and compare domains against each other within the same tool.
Do backlinks still matter for AI search?
More than ever, just differently. ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google's AI Overviews decide who to cite partly on the same authority signals links create. A domain that authoritative sites link to gets mentioned; one nobody references stays invisible — in both the rankings and the answers.