If you're a developer who ended up owning the SEO side of a side project or client site, you don't need to onboard onto a paid SEO platform just to answer one question: who's linking to this domain, and is that link actually doing anything?
The One Source of Truth: Google Search Console
For a domain you control, Search Console's Links report is authoritative, it's pulling directly from Google's own index, not a third-party crawler's approximation. No rate limits, no signup cost beyond verifying domain ownership, which you've probably already done for other reasons (Analytics, indexing checks, etc.).
For Anything You Don't Control
● Ahrefs free backlink checker: no auth required, hit it directly in a browser, top 100 backlinks per domain
● Moz Link Explorer: rate-limited to 10 queries/month on the free tier, worth reserving for real comparisons rather than casual lookups
● Majestic: free sample data, different metric philosophy (Trust Flow / Citation Flow instead of DA), useful as a sanity check against Ahrefs/Moz
Why the Numbers Never Match Across Tools
Each of these runs an independent crawler with its own crawl budget and refresh interval, think of it like three separate search indexes built by three separate teams, none of which are Google's.
That's the whole explanation for why Ahrefs, Moz, and Search Console will each report a different backlink count for the same domain. It's not a bug, it's just non-overlapping data collection.
A Quick Sanity-Check Workflow
Pull the domain through Ahrefs' free checker first (fastest, no auth). Cross-reference anything surprising against Moz if you have queries left for the month.
For your own domains, treat Search Console as ground truth and use the others purely for competitive comparison, not as a substitute.
Full write-up, including how to confirm a link is actually indexed and not just sitting live-but-uncrawled, is here: free backlink checker tools for beginners.
Originally published on SEO Inbounds.
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