Google Search Console Backlinks: How to Find, Export and Read the Links Report (and Check a Domain You Don't Own)

Google Search Console is the only place that lists the backlinks Google itself found pointing at your site. It is free and it answers the one question no vendor can, which is what Google knows about your links. It also stops at the edge of your own property. This guide covers where the report is, what it shows, where it runs out, how to export it, and what to do when the domain you want to check is not one you own.

A backlink is a link from a page on another site to a page on yours. The site that gives the link is the referring domain. How backlinks work covers the rest of the vocabulary.

Where is the backlinks report in Google Search Console?

Open Search Console, pick the property, and choose Links in the left-hand menu. Google's Links report documentation calls the external half "Links report > External links" and describes the whole thing as "a sample of internal and external links to help you understand your site's overall link profile."

You need a verified property first. Verification is proof to Google that you control the site, and Google's ownership verification page lists the methods: an HTML file upload, a meta tag, a DNS record, Google Analytics or Tag Manager. A domain property, verified by DNS, covers every subdomain and protocol at once and is the one to use if you can edit DNS. If the site has never been verified, the report has no data until Google has had time to populate it after verification, and I have seen that take a few days.

What does the Search Console Links report show?

Three external tables and one internal one, in Google's words.

"Top linked pages (Pages most linked to on your site)". Your URLs, ranked by how many external links point at each one, with the count of linking sites beside it. Click a row to see which sites link to that page.

"Top linking sites (Sites that link to you the most)". The referring domains, ranked by how many of your pages they link to and how many links in total. Click a row to see which of your pages that site links to, then click again to see the linking pages on their side.

"Top linking text (Most common text in links to your site)". The anchor text, the clickable words, ranked by frequency. This table is the one most people skip and the one that tells you the most about how a link got there.

"Internal links" covers "Top linked pages from within your own site", which is a different job and not the subject here.

One thing to hold in mind while reading any of the three. "Data is actually grouped by root domain in the Links report; protocol (http/https), subdomain (m., www) and subdirectories are stripped and grouped together." So a table row that says a site links to you 40 times might be one link on 40 pages, or 40 links across a blog subdomain and a forum subdomain that Google folded into one name.

What the Links report will not tell you

The report is a sample, and Google says so. Its own doc states "Tables are limited to 1,000 rows, so tables may be truncated in larger or more linked-to sites." If your site has 3,000 referring domains, the Top linking sites table shows 1,000 of them and no indication of which 2,000 it left out.

There are no metrics. No authority score, no traffic estimate for the linking site, no spam score, no date the link was first seen. The report does not mark a link as dofollow or nofollow either, so you cannot tell from the table alone whether a link is one Google has been asked to ignore. Google's guidance on qualifying outbound links explains those attributes and says "Links marked with these rel attributes will generally not be followed." Dofollow vs nofollow links goes further.

There is no competitor view. Search Console shows links to properties you have verified and nothing else. There is no historical chart, so you cannot see links gained or lost by month. And the list is not live. A link Google saw last year that has since been removed can sit in the table until Google recrawls the page and notices.

Those limits are why the question "how many backlinks do I have" has no exact answer inside Search Console. It has a floor.

How do I export backlinks from Search Console?

Two exports, and they are not the same.

The button at the top of the Links landing page exports "up to 100,000 rows" across the report. Google offers two slices when you press it, "Latest links", the most recently discovered ones, and "More sample links", a sample drawn from the full set. Take both if you want the widest view. Each arrives as a spreadsheet you can open in Sheets or Excel or save as CSV.

The download button on any single table is smaller. It will "export the entire table (up to 1,000 rows)", which is the same 1,000 rows you can already see on screen.

The 100,000-row export is the most complete free list of Google-known links you will get for a site, and it still says nothing about which of those links carry weight. For that you combine it with a second source, below.

How to read what comes back

Start with Top linking sites, not Top linked pages. The number of distinct referring domains matters more than the number of links, because one site can put a footer link on every page and produce thousands of links from a single decision. A hundred links from fifty sites is a stronger profile than a hundred from five.

Then read Top linking text. A natural profile is mostly the brand name, the bare URL, and phrases like "this page" or "source". When the same commercial phrase appears in a third of the anchors, either somebody built those links on purpose or somebody is building them at you. Google's spam policies define link spam as "the practice of creating links to or from a site primarily for the purpose of manipulating search rankings", and repeated exact-match anchors are the clearest tell.

Then open a few of the linking pages. Search Console tells you the page exists and links to you. It does not tell you whether the link sits in a sentence someone wrote or in a list of 400 outbound links on a page nobody reads. That takes a click per link, and for a shortlist it is worth doing.

If you want a number to sort the linking sites by, run a handful through the domain authority checker. It returns a 0 to 100 score from the site's position in the Common Crawl web graph, which is a sorting aid and not a verdict.

How do I check backlinks for a domain I don't own?

Search Console cannot do it. There is no way to add a property you cannot verify, and no way to see another owner's report.

The gap is biggest for expired domains. A domain that has dropped has no owner, so it has no verified property and nobody who could open one. Any Search Console data it once had is gone with the account that held it. The backlinks are still on the web, though, pointing at a name nobody holds.

For those, use an index that crawled the linking pages rather than the target. Our backlink checker is built on the Common Crawl web graph plus our own crawls, works on any domain, and needs no account. For each referring domain it shows a source page, the anchor text, the link type and the crawl that saw it. Common Crawl publishes the web graphs it is built from, with the caveat on that page that "all types of links are listed, including purely 'technical' links pointing to images, JavaScript libraries, web fonts, etc." So a raw edge count from the graph overstates editorial links, and the checker is there to read past that.

Pair it with the Wayback Machine. A backlink to a site that was a school for ten years and a casino affiliate for the last one is a link to both histories.

The trade-off is coverage. Search Console sees what Google crawled, which for your own site is a lot. A public index sees what it crawled, which for any given site is less. The two answer different questions, and the table below is how I decide which to open.

How to check any site's backlinks for free compares the other free sources, including the vendor free tiers and Common Crawl itself.

FAQ

How do I see backlinks in Google Search Console? Verify the site as a property, then open Links in the left menu. The External links section lists top linked pages, top linking sites and top linking text. Click any row to drill down to the individual linking pages.

Does Google Search Console show all backlinks? No. Google describes the report as a sample, caps each table at 1,000 rows, and caps the export at 100,000 rows. Larger sites will see truncated tables. It also shows no metrics and no dofollow or nofollow flag.

Can I see a competitor's backlinks in Google Search Console? No. The report only covers properties you have verified. For any other domain, use a backlink checker built on a public crawl.

How do I find backlinks using Google if I don't have Search Console? Google web search does not list links to a site. Search Console is the Google product that does, and it requires ownership. For a domain you do not own, an independent index is the only route.

Why does Search Console show fewer backlinks than Ahrefs or Moz? Different crawls, different counting, and a row cap. Search Console counts what Google found and truncates at 1,000 rows per table. Vendor indexes crawl on their own schedule and count links their own way. The sources rarely agree, and each is truthful about its own crawl.

When the domain you are sizing up is one nobody owns, the Revised directory of expired domains with backlinks has already run the link and history checks. Every listing shows the referring-domain band and the named sources linking in before the name is revealed, and the Wikipedia and edu source hubs start from referring domains you would trust in any report.