How to Find Links to Your Website (Backlinks and Internal Links)

“Find links to my website” can mean two different things, and the tools for each don’t overlap much.

External links (backlinks): other websites linking to yours. You find these with search engine data or a backlink index, because no crawler of your own site can see links that live on someone else’s.
Internal links: your own pages linking to each other. You find these by crawling your site.

This post covers both. The free methods come first, since for most sites they’re enough.

Why Google’s link: search doesn’t work anymore

Older guides say to search link:example.com. Google stopped supporting the link: operator in 2017, and today it returns nothing useful. The replacement is Search Console.

1. Google Search Console Links report (free, your site)

This is the most accurate free source of backlinks, because it’s Google’s own data about links it has found.

Open Search Console and select your property.
Go to Links in the left menu.
Look at Top linked pages under External links to see which of your pages get the most links, and Top linking sites to see who links to you.
Click Export external links in the top right and choose Latest links to download a list of linking URLs with the date Google first crawled them.

To see who links to one specific page, click that page under Top linked pages. You’ll get the sites linking to it, and clicking a site shows the exact linking URLs.

Limits: you can only see sites you’ve verified, the data is a sample rather than every link, and exports are capped. Links that Google has found but ignores still appear, so a long list doesn’t mean every link counts.

2. Bing Webmaster Tools Backlinks (free, and it shows competitors)

Bing Webmaster Tools has a Backlinks report with referring domains, anchor text and linking pages for your site. It also lets you enter other domains and compare their backlinks against yours, which is the only free way I know to see a competitor’s links from a search engine’s own index.

If your site is already in Search Console, you can import it into Bing Webmaster Tools in a couple of clicks instead of verifying again.

3. Ahrefs Webmaster Tools (free for verified sites)

Ahrefs offers a free Webmaster Tools account that shows backlinks, referring domains and anchor text for sites you verify. For sites you don’t own, the free backlink checker on their site shows a limited sample of the top links. Semrush and Moz have similar free tiers with tighter limits. All three use their own crawlers, so their numbers won’t match Google’s or each other’s.

4. Search for mentions of your domain

Links often come with a mention of your brand or domain. This search finds pages that mention your domain but aren’t on your site:

"example.com" -site:example.com

Replace example.com with your brand name to find mentions that didn’t link at all. Those are worth a polite email asking for the link.

5. Check referral traffic in analytics

Links that send visitors show up in analytics. In GA4, go to Reports → Acquisition → Traffic acquisition and change the primary dimension to Session source / medium. Rows with the medium referral are sites that sent you visits through a link.

This won’t find links nobody clicks, but it does find the links that matter most for traffic, and sometimes ones the backlink tools missed.

Which backlink method should you use?

Method	Cost	Your site	Other sites	Data source
Search Console Links	Free	Yes	No	Google
Bing Webmaster Tools	Free	Yes	Yes, for comparison	Bing
Ahrefs Webmaster Tools	Free	Yes	Limited sample	Ahrefs crawler
Mentions search	Free	Yes	Yes	Google search
GA4 referrals	Free	Yes	No	Your visitors

For your own site, start with Search Console and Bing, and add Ahrefs Webmaster Tools if you want anchor text in one place. For a competitor, Bing’s comparison and a paid backlink tool are the realistic options.

Finding internal links to a page

Internal links are the part you control completely, and they’re how search engines discover and weigh your own pages. The question is usually “which of my pages link to this one?”, and the answer comes from crawling your site.

Search Console gives a quick version under Links → Internal links → Top linked pages. It’s a sample, and it only covers pages Google has crawled.

For a complete answer, crawl the site. With bseoa, which I build:

black-seo-analyzer \
  --url-to-begin-crawl https://example.com \
  --disable-external-links \
  --output-type json \
  --output-file site.json

Each page in the output has a link_analysis list with every link on that page. To list every page that links to your pricing page:

jq -r --arg target "https://example.com/pricing" \
  '.pages[] | select(any(.complete_analysis.link_analysis[]?; .url == $target)) | .url' \
  site.json

Run it against a page you care about. If an important page only has one or two internal links, that’s usually a quicker ranking win than chasing another backlink.

A few things this finds that backlink tools can’t:

Orphan pages: pages with zero internal links. Nothing on your site points to them, so crawlers rarely find them. How to see all pages on a website shows how to find them by comparing a crawl with your sitemap.
Links to redirects and 404s: internal links that point at old URLs. The broken links report lists each one with the page it’s on and the anchor text.
Links only JavaScript can see: if your navigation is rendered client-side, add --spa to the crawl so links are collected after rendering.

Seeing all the links on a single page

To list every link on one page, including links to other sites, open the page, press F12, and run this in the Console tab:

[...new Set([...document.links].map(a => a.href))].join('\n')

That’s the fastest way to check a page someone says links to you, too. Search the output for your domain.

What to do with the list

Once you have your backlinks, the useful follow-ups are:

Fix links that point to broken pages. If a site links to a URL that now returns 404, add a 301 redirect to the closest current page. You keep the link without asking anyone for anything.
Strengthen the pages that earn links. Your most-linked pages pass the most authority through their internal links. Link from them to the pages you want to rank.
Ignore most spammy links. Google has said for years that it ignores most low-quality links on its own. The disavow tool is for manual actions and clear link schemes, not routine cleanup.

bseoa won’t find backlinks on other sites, because no crawler of your own site can. What it does is the internal half: every link, redirect and broken URL on your site, in one crawl on your own machine. There’s a 14-day free trial with every feature if you want to run the commands above.

-Sethers