Finding a client's existing backlinks without paying for Ahrefs

You've taken on a client and you need to know what links they already have. The obvious answer costs a few hundred a month, and for one local business that's hard to justify.

There are two free sources that between them cover most of it, and one of them is better data than anything you can buy.

Search Console, which is Google's own view

This is the good one. Search Console shows the external links Google actually knows about — not a third party's crawl, but the link graph Google itself uses.

Search Console → Links → External links → Export external links → More sample links. You get up to 100,000 rows as CSV or a Google Sheet.

Two things worth knowing before you rely on it.

There's no API for it. The Search Console API covers search analytics, sitemaps and URL inspection, but the Links report is deliberately UI-only. Anyone promising automated Search Console backlink data is getting it somewhere else.

Export the right sheet. "Top linking sites" gives domains and counts — useful for a summary, useless as a list of links. You want "More sample links", which has the actual URLs.

It's a sample, not an exhaustive list, and Google doesn't say how it's chosen. But it's free, it requires nothing but access you should already have, and it's the closest thing to ground truth that exists.

Bing Webmaster Tools, which people forget

Bing has its own backlinks report, it's free, and unlike Google's it has an API. The index is smaller, but it surfaces things Google's sample misses — and for a local business, "different" is more useful than "bigger".

Ten minutes to verify the site, and it's a second independent view.

Fingerprint searches, which find what neither has

Both of the above only see links to a site. Neither finds the pages that mention a business without linking — and for a local business those are often the more valuable discovery.

The technique is to search the business's fingerprints rather than its name:

"(941) 555-0142"

The phone number in quotes is the single most productive query. Directory listings, chamber pages and aggregators nearly all carry the phone, and almost nothing else on the web contains that exact string.

Then, in rough order of yield:

"1204 8th Avenue West" Bradenton
"Xtreme Grill Clean" -site:xtremegrillclean.com
"xtremegrillclean.com" -site:xtremegrillclean.com
"Mike Potts" "Xtreme Grill Clean"
"Xtreme Grill Clean" chamber
"Xtreme Grill Clean" supplier OR certified OR installer

The last two are how you find the trade-specific links that are worth more than any directory — the chamber membership page, the manufacturer's installer locator, the association directory.

Check what you find

A search result is not a link. A page can appear for a business's phone number and contain no link at all — a listing without one, a mention in an article, a scraped aggregator.

So fetch each candidate and look. If there's an <a> to the client's site, it's a link, and its rel tells you what kind. If there isn't, it's a mention.

Mentions are not failures. Someone chose to write about this business and didn't link. That's the warmest outreach list you will ever get — far better than cold prospecting, because the relationship already exists. No backlink index will ever surface it, because to Ahrefs it simply isn't a link.

The one you already have

Before any of this: your client's confirmed directory listings are already backlinks.

If you know their Yelp URL, their BBB profile, their chamber page — those are inbound links you built or inherited, and they belong in the ledger whether or not a tool discovered them. Most people rediscover their own citations through a backlink tool and pay for the privilege.

Worth noting that most of them will be nofollow, and that's fine — it just means you measure them on accuracy rather than authority.

When to actually pay

Free sources stop being enough when you need competitor link data, or historical trends, or you're doing this across enough clients that the manual work costs more than the subscription.

At that point DataForSEO is the pay-as-you-go option worth starting with, Majestic is cheaper than Ahrefs with a respectable index, and Ahrefs has the best data at the worst price.

For one local business with forty links, none of that is necessary.

Placemark imports the Search Console CSV directly, runs the fingerprint searches for you, and fetches every candidate to confirm whether the link is real. Free for one business.