SE Ranking Backlink Checker: How to Use It and Its Limits

What the Backlink Checker does, and how much it sees

SE Ranking's Backlink Checker analyzes the links pointing to any domain or page, with Domain Trust, toxicity and anchor data ^[1]. You enter a domain, choose how to scope it, and read five views: the overview, referring domains, backlinks, anchors and pages. The index is large for the price. Three limits shape what you see, though: the tables show a capped sample, extra reports cost money past the plan's limit, and monitoring your own links is a separate tool. This tutorial uses SE Ranking's help center and product pages as of 12 October 2026.

The size and freshness of the index

SE Ranking's help center lists 2.7 trillion backlinks and 6 billion pages crawled daily, while the Backlink Checker page says 2.9 trillion backlinks and 411 million referring domains. The figures change by page, so treat them as a rough size, not a count. Freshness matters more than size when you check whether a link you paid for is still live. SE Ranking says 58% of backlinks are updated within 90 days, and its 2024 database upgrade reported that 26% of backlinks are updated monthly and that referring domains in the database grew by 24%.

Why counts dropped in 2024

That same upgrade removed outdated backlinks and referring domains, and SE Ranking warned that reports would look different, with fewer links. When a page holds several links to you, only the most impactful one is added to the report. So if your totals fell after 2024, do not panic. Lower counts can mean cleaner data, not lost links.

The crawler behind the index

SE Ranking's crawler identifies itself as SERankingBacklinksBot and respects robots.txt. SE Ranking says it collects nothing from your site but the links on your pages. Its default crawl delay is 3 seconds when none is set, and changes to robots.txt can take up to a day to stop crawling. Several Trustpilot reviews complain about crawler load. If your server feels it, a slower crawl delay is the recommended first step before blocking the bot outright.

Running a check: scope, overview and trend

Step 1: choose the scope

There are three scopes: domain with subdomains, domain without subdomains, and exact URL. Domain with subdomains loads links to every page of the site and its subdomains, while exact URL loads only links to that one page. The middle option drops the subdomains and keeps the rest. Pick the scope that matches the question you are asking.

Step 2: read the overview, then the trend

The overview shows Domain Trust and Page Trust, referring domains, backlinks, referring IPs, top anchors and the counts of broken and toxic backlinks. A Dynamics section charts referring domains, backlinks, organic traffic and trust over 7 days to 12 months, and the gained-and-lost charts compare referring domains and backlinks by day, week or month. Start with the trend, not the totals. A spike in lost domains after a site migration usually means broken redirects. Fix those first.

Reading Domain Trust without fooling yourself

What the score measures

Domain Trust is SE Ranking's own authority score from 0 to 100, calculated from the number and quality of backlinks and referring domains using PageRank principles. It is recalculated several times a month. It will not match Ahrefs' or Moz's scores. Compare sites with one metric only.

A known bias toward small sites

SE Ranking's own blog warns that its algorithms tend to give smaller domains a more optimistic score and are stricter with large sites. Compare domains of similar size and industry. A small blog with a decent score is not necessarily stronger than a large publisher with a lower one. Remember that when you sort prospects by score.

What counts as a good score

Domain Trust is comparative. SE Ranking's own example: if competitors score between 80 and 100, a 75 puts you behind; if most score 0 to 30, a 35 can give you an edge. Compare with the sites ranking for your keywords, not with the web. For a quick look at a prospect, the Domain Trust checker page gives an authority score with backlink and referring domain counts without an account. The paid version checks up to 100 sites at once across dates.

The reports, one tab at a time

Referring domains and backlinks

The referring domains table lists each domain's Domain Trust, total traffic, number of backlinks and first-seen date, with separate tabs for new and lost referring domains. Expand any row to see the individual links, and export to CSV or XLS for outreach. Each backlink row shows the linking page, Domain and Page Trust, toxicity score, traffic, anchor, target URL, link type and check dates. You can filter by status, indexing, trust, anchor or target URL. Filtered views export cleanly.

Anchors

The Anchor Texts tab lists the most common anchors with the share of domains and backlinks using each, and you can filter by word count, referring domains or dofollow links. An anchor profile dominated by exact-match keywords is a warning sign. Branded anchors are normal.

Pages, IPs and countries

The Pages tab lists every page on the analyzed domain that receives links, with backlink and referring domain counts. On a competitor, it shows which content earns links; on your own site, filtered for pages with few links, it shows where internal linking or outreach should go next. The IPs tab shows the IP addresses and subnets of linking sites and where referring domains are located, and the overview lists top countries by referring IPs. Many links from one subnet can point to a network of related sites. Use it as a check on link schemes, not as a verdict. Location matters too: a US clinic with most links from unrelated foreign sites has a relevance problem.

The limits that change what you see

The sample behind the tables

This is the limit that surprises people. Top-line totals show the whole profile, but the tables are "built from an analysed sample of that profile" ^[2]. The sample is capped by plan, for example 10,000 analysed backlinks, and large profiles can shrink to a few dozen domains in the export. The help center's own example is an export of roughly 47 to 60 rows against 2,600 referring domains, about 2% of the profile. An outreach list built from the export alone covers the strongest few dozen domains, not the long tail.

Getting the full list through the API

The help center's answer is the Data API. Listing backlinks there costs 1 credit per backlink, so Core's 25,000 monthly credits retrieve 25,000 links. For a competitor with millions of links, budget Wallet credits. At the Wallet's US$50 per 250,000 credits, pulling one million backlinks costs about US$200, cheap for a one-off audit of a large competitor but expensive if the same pull runs every month. The Backlinks API returns counts, referring domains, anchors, link types, InLink Rank scores, referring IPs and subnets, and it streams up to 100,000 backlinks per call with cursor pagination. Through the API, history also includes the reason a link was lost.

Report allowance and overage

Each plan includes a number of Backlink Checker reports. Past that limit, SE Ranking charges an over-limit fee of $1 for each report ^[1], so ten extra reports in a busy week cost US$10. It adds up quietly for agencies that audit prospects on top of client work. Run fewer, larger reports where you can, and use the free Domain Trust checker for quick looks that do not need a full report.

Refreshing link status costs extra

The Backlink Checker has no automatic age-based recheck. The paid Check all parameters action refreshes crawl status, presence and index status, and it is charged to your account balance, per backlink checked ^[3]. It does not recalculate toxicity. Check the cost box first.

Toxic links and the disavow file

The Toxicity Score runs from 0 to 100 and sorts links into high, medium, low and non-toxic. It uses five markers with weights from 0 to 10; one example is a domain at least a year old with Domain Trust below 20. Review high scores by hand. A low-trust link from an old local directory may be harmless, while a cluster of new links with identical anchors from unrelated domains is the pattern search engines penalize, and the score alone cannot tell those cases apart. Context matters.

Two details change how you read the totals. Toxic totals are calculated from active links only, so once a link is marked lost it stops counting, and a clean-looking total can still include links that have quietly disappeared. Marking a link as disavowed in SE Ranking does not remove it from the totals either. SE Ranking builds a disavow file from links you select, exportable as TXT for Google. But marking a link in SE Ranking "does not mean that you’ve marked it as unwanted for Google" ^[4]. You still have to upload the file in Search Console. Disavow with care.

Finding new links: gaps and broken pages

The Backlink Gap Analyzer

The gap tool compares your domain with up to five competitors and shows domains linking to them but not to you, and it can show up to 10,000 backlinks for each domain or URL. Sort by Domain Trust and export. Those domains already link to your niche. For a local bakery compared with two rival bakeries and a food blog, the domains linking to the rivals but not to the bakery are usually local press, event listings and supplier pages, the easiest links to ask for.

Broken link building

The Broken Backlink Checker lists referring pages that link to dead pages, with traffic, toxicity, anchor and Domain Trust. On your own site, redirect or restore those pages. On a competitor's, offer your page as a replacement, which is classic broken link building. The broken link page recommends starting with the most visited referring pages, because a dead link on a page with steady traffic is the one an editor is most likely to fix, and the replacement should cover the same topic. For broken internal links, the Website Audit is the tool. SE Ranking's pages quote anywhere from 100+ to 130+ checks for it. The exact number matters less than running the audit.

Automating outreach

The help center describes teams that track new and lost links on a schedule and trigger outreach when a competitor gains a link from a domain that does not link to them. Others filter prospects by where a site's traffic comes from, to avoid authoritative sites with the wrong audience. Through MCP, an assistant can also run backlink overviews, top referring domains, anchors and gap comparisons from a plain prompt. Each call spends API credits. For a monthly client check, that is often faster than clicking through five tabs.

Backlink Monitoring: a ledger for links you own

A separate tool with weekly checks

Backlink Monitoring tracks a list of links you add, while the Backlink Checker explores any domain. Monitored links are checked automatically every week. You can add them by hand, by file, or by importing from Google Search Console: connect Search Console and turn on the GSC toggle in the backlink dashboard to sync links automatically. That catches links you did not build yourself, which deserve the same toxicity check as any other link. The number of links you can monitor depends on the plan and can be raised from the subscription page. Monitored links in inactive projects still count against limits, so prune links you no longer care about.

What it records for each link

Monitoring records status, Google index status, anchor, target URL, link type, Facebook shares, external links on the page and referring IP. It tracks dofollow and nofollow, plus the newer UGC and sponsored attributes, and whether a link sits in text or an image. It also stores a price and a responsible manager per link, which makes it a ledger for paid placements. SE Ranking pitches this for agencies that want to know whether guest post spending is paying off. Sum spend per referring domain each quarter.

When to act on a change

Monitoring notifies you by email when a tracked backlink changes, so set the alert recipient to whoever manages outreach. A paid link that turns nofollow has lost most of its value. Check after every renewal. A link on a page that dropped out of Google's index passes little value too; ask the publisher to fix indexing or move the link. Lost links take time to show. A backlink stays active until a live recheck fails to find it, and with automatic checking on, pages unvisited for more than seven days are rechecked, so a link that vanished yesterday may still show as active for a few days.

A link audit in one hour

The reports above fold into a short routine that works for a client, a prospect or your own site. Finish with three exports: the strongest referring domains, the links to review by hand, and the gap list.

1. Run the overview and note the trend.
2. Sort referring domains by trust.
3. Check toxic links by hand.
4. Review anchors for over-optimized text.
5. Open the pages report to see what earns links.
6. Finish with the gap tool against two competitors.

The common mistakes are just as short. Do not compare Domain Trust with other tools' scores. Do not treat the exported sample as the full profile. Do not assume a disavow in SE Ranking reaches Google. And do not run dozens of overage reports when fewer, larger ones would do. Each one is avoidable. For tracking the rankings those links are meant to move, see our SE Ranking rank tracker guide.

How it compares with Ahrefs on backlinks

Ahrefs reports its own index in pages rather than links, so the two totals do not compare directly. For local businesses and niche sites, SE Ranking's data usually covers the links that matter. For large-scale link prospecting or digital PR, Ahrefs' depth is worth paying for. Our Ahrefs vs SE Ranking comparison covers the rest of that choice.

The bottom line

SE Ranking's Backlink Checker is a strong, affordable tool for audits, gap analysis and monitoring. Know its three limits before you rely on it: the analysed sample behind the tables, the per-report overage and the manual status refresh. Read Domain Trust only against Domain Trust, review toxic links by hand, and remember that a disavow file only counts once it reaches Search Console. For complete link lists, pull them through the API.