Table Of Contents

How to Find Which Websites Link to Your Website

Why backlinks matter in SEO

Backlinks—links from other websites to yours—are one of the most important ranking factors in SEO.

Search engines treat backlinks like votes of confidence. The more high-quality, relevant websites that link to you, the more trustworthy and authoritative your site appears. That can translate into higher rankings in search engine results pages (SERPs) and, ultimately, more organic traffic.

Besides rankings, backlinks help your content get discovered through crawling, bring referral traffic, and are a key metric to assess your content marketing and digital PR performance.

But to measure, improve, or protect your backlink profile, you first need to know who’s linking to you.

4 ways to find which websites link to your site

There are several ways to check backlinks to your website. Each method provides different levels of detail depending on the tool or platform you use.

1. Use Google Search Console

Google Search Console (GSC) is a free tool from Google that lets you monitor your site’s presence in Google Search results.

To find your backlinks:

Sign in to Google Search Console
Select your property (the website you’re checking)
Navigate to Links > External Links

Under “Top linking sites,” you’ll see a list of domains that link to your content the most. You can also export this data.

Pros:

Completely free
Direct data from Google

Limitations:

Limited to links found by Google
Lacks advanced filtering, freshness, or historical data

2. Use a backlink checker tool

Third-party backlink analysis tools often have a much larger and fresher index of backlinks than what’s shown in Google Search Console. They also offer richer features like filtering, sorting, anchor text analysis, and link growth tracking.

3. Analyze competitor backlinks to spot sites that might link to you

Once you’ve identified who’s already linking to your site, you can expand your link-building strategy by analyzing competitors’ backlinks.

Find websites that link to your competition but not to you. These sites are more likely to be open to linking to content in your niche.

Look for:

Guest post opportunities
Content that references similar topics
Broken links that your content can replace
Resource pages in your industry

This type of gap analysis allows you to build a strategic outreach plan based on who’s already linking to similar websites.

4. Set up alerts for new backlinks

Knowing who has linked to you in the past is useful—but knowing who links to you in real-time is even better.

Most advanced SEO tools let you set up link alerts. These notify you when your site acquires or loses backlinks.

Track:

New backlinks from PR campaigns
Unlinked brand mentions that you can turn into links
Sudden link spikes (could indicate spam or viral coverage)
Lost high-value links that you should try to reclaim

This kind of monitoring helps you react quickly—whether it’s building new links or preventing negative SEO attacks.

What to look for when analyzing backlinks

Not all backlinks have equal SEO value. Here’s what matters:

1. Domain authority

Links from authoritative websites pass more “link equity” and signal higher trust to search engines. While Google doesn’t report domain authority directly, tools offer domain metrics like Domain Rating (DR) or Domain Authority (DA) to estimate a site’s link strength.

2. Relevance

Links from websites in your niche or related industries are more valuable than links from unrelated sites. Google wants the link graph to mirror relevance and trust.

3. Anchor text

Anchor text is the clickable text in a link. Descriptive, relevant anchor text can boost rankings for those keyword phrases—but over-optimization (too many exact-match anchors) can look manipulative.

4. Link placement

Links within the main content of a page (“editorial links”) usually carry more weight than those in sidebars, footers, or author bios.

5. Dofollow vs. nofollow

Dofollow links pass link equity and influence rankings. Nofollow, sponsored, and UGC (user-generated content) links don’t pass much value—but can still bring referral traffic or brand visibility.

6. Traffic

Backlinks from pages that get actual traffic are more likely to send visitors to your site, which has both SEO and business benefits.

Common backlink issues to watch out for

Not all backlinks are good. Some can even harm your site under certain circumstances.

Here are common problems to look out for:

Spammy or low-quality links: Links from adult, casino, or unrelated spammy domains may be toxic, especially if done at scale.
Negative SEO: Competitors may build malicious backlinks to trigger penalties. Set up alerts to monitor this.
Broken backlinks: If pages on your site change URLs or are deleted, you may lose valuable links unless you redirect them (using 301 redirects).
Lost links: Sometimes, links are removed or replaced. Check regularly and reclaim what’s important.

Summary

Knowing which websites link to your site is crucial for improving SEO performance and building a healthy backlink profile.

Here’s a quick recap of how to find them:

Google Search Console: Free, straightforward view of your backlinks from Google’s perspective.
Backlink checker tools: In-depth reports, historical data, and advanced filtering.
Competitor analysis: Spot linking opportunities by checking who links to your rivals.
Link alerts: Get notified when you gain or lose links in real-time.

Regularly auditing and monitoring your backlinks not only helps with rankings—it also helps you protect your site from SEO threats and uncover future link-building opportunities.

How to find which websites link to your website