Why backlinks are worth checking
A backlink is a link from another website to yours. Search engines still treat links as a sign that other people find a page worth pointing to, and AI answer engines lean on the pages search engines rank and other sites reference. When a competitor keeps outranking you for searches you both care about, the links behind each site are one of the first places to look.
Most people who check backlinks want a few plain answers. How many sites link to me? How does that compare with the competitor who keeps beating me? Is my number moving in the right direction? The usual route to those answers is an SEO suite, which costs real money every month and shows you dashboards full of numbers you then have to interpret yourself.
That interpretation is where the work is. A backlink total on its own says very little. You need to know how many different websites the links come from, which of those links are worth anything, how the numbers changed over time, and how they compare with the sites you're competing against. Then you need to decide what to do. That's a good job for an AI agent, because it's mostly gathering data for several domains, comparing it, and reasoning about what the differences mean.
Kite is an AI marketer. It researches your business, builds a growth strategy, and ships the work that brings you new customers. It has backlink data built in, so it can check any website's links as soon as you ask. Here's how it works.
How Kite checks backlinks for any website
Kite starts with what it already knows. When your team signed up, Kite researched your business, including your competitors and your website's search presence, and it recorded your site's backlink totals as part of that research. So when you ask about backlinks, Kite already knows which domains are worth comparing you with.
From there, Kite works in a clear order. It reads the current backlink totals for your site and each competitor, then pulls the month-by-month history for each one to show who is gaining links and who is losing them. Next, it looks underneath the numbers: which pages earn the links, which sites send them, and which links point at pages on your site that no longer exist. Finally, it decides what to do about the gap and proposes the work, whether that's a page to publish, a redirect to add, or a list of sites to pitch.
You can work with Kite in your browser or in Slack. In the Kite web app, Kite can show the comparison as a chart or a table right in the conversation.
- How many backlinks does your website have?
- How do you see a competitor's backlink history?
- Is your backlink count growing or shrinking?
- Find out why competitors have more links than you
- Recover links you've already earned
- Turn the gap into work
How many backlinks does your website have?
Kite answers this with three numbers for any domain: the total number of live backlinks, the number of distinct websites that link to it, and a domain rank score. It reads them from its built-in backlink data, which comes from DataForSEO, and it counts links to every part of the site, including subdomains such as a blog or a help center.
The second number is the one Kite leads with. Say your site has 4,200 backlinks from 180 websites, and a competitor has 2,900 backlinks from 640 websites. You have more links, but the competitor has more than three times as many sites vouching for it. Your total might be inflated by a partner that links to you from every page of its site. Kite points that out, because the number of different websites that link to you is a far better measure of how widely you're referenced.
The domain rank score is DataForSEO's own measure of a site's link strength, on a scale from 0 to 1,000. Like Ahrefs' Domain Rating or Moz's Domain Authority, it's a third-party estimate rather than something Google publishes. Kite uses it as a consistent way to compare sites with each other, and it tells you that's what it is.
How do you see a competitor's backlink history?
Kite reads the backlink history of any domain month by month, as far back as January 2019, whether or not you own it. For each month, it gets the number of backlinks and linking websites, the domain rank, and, from May 2021 onward, how many linking websites the domain gained and lost that month.
That history turns a single snapshot into a story. Say a competitor's linking websites held steady at about 400 for two years and then climbed to 650 over the last six months. That kind of jump usually has a cause: a funding announcement that got press coverage, a free tool other sites started linking to, or a link-building campaign. Kite looks at which of the competitor's pages gained links during that stretch and tells you what most likely drove the growth.
Kite can pull the same history for several competitors at once and plot them on one chart, so you can see who is pulling ahead and when it started.
Is your backlink count growing or shrinking?
Kite tells you whether your backlink count is growing by comparing the linking websites you gained each month with the ones you lost. That's more reliable than watching the total, because every site gains and loses links all the time. A flat total can hide a site that's winning forty new linking websites a month and losing forty old ones.
When the losses outpace the gains, Kite looks for the reason. Lost links often come from pages on other sites being deleted or redesigned, from a directory that shut down, or from a change on your own site that broke the pages people were linking to. Kite checks which sites dropped off so you can tell a normal month from a real problem.
If you want to keep an eye on this, ask Kite to run the check every month. Each run compares the new numbers with the previous month and with your competitors, then reports what changed.
Find out why competitors have more links than you
Kite explains a backlink gap by looking at what earns the other site its links. It reads which of a competitor's pages attract the most links, which websites send them, and the anchor text those sites use, meaning the clickable words in each link.
The answer usually points at a specific kind of content. If most of a rival's links go to an annual salary report or a free calculator, that's what your market likes to cite, and Kite proposes your own version. If the links come from a handful of industry publications that cover your category, Kite compares the lists of sites linking to each of you and picks out the ones that link to two or more of your competitors but not to you. Those sites already write about products like yours, so they're the most promising places to pitch.
Kite can also connect this to AI answers. When you track which brands ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Claude recommend for your buyers' questions, Kite can compare the link profiles of the brands that get named with yours. That shows whether a gap in links helps explain why you're missing from those answers or whether better content on your own site would close it.
Playbooks for this step
- How to compare backlinks for brands cited in AI answers with AhrefsCompare the websites linking to the brands AI answers recommend with the ones linking to you, using your Ahrefs account.
- How to compare domain authority for brands cited in AI answers with MozCompare the Moz scores of the sites AI answers cite with your own, and decide which sources are realistic targets.
Recover links you've already earned
Some of your easiest links to win back are ones you already have. When another site links to a page on your website that no longer exists, the link still counts as a backlink, but it sends visitors to an error page and passes nothing useful to the rest of your site. Kite's backlink data shows how many of these broken backlinks a domain has and which of your missing pages they point to.
Kite fixes them by sending each dead address to the page that replaced it. On a website Kite hosts, it adds the redirects itself and shows you the change before it goes live. If your old pricing page moved and fifteen sites still link to its old address, one redirect puts all fifteen links back to work.
Turn the gap into work
A backlink check is only useful if something happens next, so Kite ends every check with a short plan. The plan names the pages worth publishing to earn links, the broken links worth recovering, and the sites worth pitching, in the order Kite thinks will make the most difference.
Kite then does the work. It writes the pages and publishes them on a site it hosts or through your connected content system once you approve them. It drafts the outreach to each site on the pitch list for you to send. When the next monthly check runs, Kite looks at which new websites now link to you, so you can see what the work earned.
What you get
A backlink snapshot for any domain
Total backlinks, the number of websites linking in, and a domain rank score for your site and each competitor, side by side.
A month-by-month history
Backlinks, linking websites, and the websites gained and lost each month, as far back as January 2019, shown as a chart you can compare across competitors.
An explanation of the gap
The pages that earn each competitor its links, the sites that send them, and the sites that link to your competitors but not to you.
A list of broken links to recover
Links from other sites that point at pages you've removed or moved, with the redirect that would fix each one.
A plan and the work behind it
Pages to publish, redirects to add, and outreach to send, with Kite drafting or publishing each piece once you approve it.
A monthly check, if you want one
A recurring report that shows what changed since last month for you and your competitors.
How to get started
Get started for free and ask Kite in plain language. You might say, "How many sites link to us compared with our two main competitors?" or "Show me the backlink history for acme.com over the last two years."
Kite already knows your competitors from its research on your business, so it proposes which domains to compare and checks them with its built-in backlink data. You don't need to connect anything for the first check. If your team already works from Ahrefs, Semrush, or Moz, connect that account and Kite can use its data and metrics too, so its findings match the numbers your team already reports on.
When Kite proposes work that changes your website, such as a new page or a redirect, it shows you the change and asks before publishing. Outreach is drafted for you to review and send. Once you're happy with the first check, ask Kite to repeat it every month. If your team uses Slack, the results can arrive in a channel. Otherwise, Kite emails them to you and keeps each run as its own conversation in the Kite web app.
Integrations used to check backlinks
Kite's backlink data is built in, so you can check any website without an account of your own. If your team already pays for an SEO tool, connecting it lets Kite add that tool's index and scores to the comparison.
Check backlinks with built-in data
Use the SEO tool your team already has
Kite reads the websites and individual backlinks pointing at any domain, folder, or page in Ahrefs, along with the anchor text each link uses.
Kite reads Semrush's backlinks overview, referring domains, anchor text, and Authority Score for your site and your competitors.
Kite reads Domain Authority, Page Authority, Spam Score, and a domain's most-linked pages, and checks whether a site you pitched now links to you.
Common questions
What's a free way to check backlinks for any domain?
For your own site, Google Search Console's Links report is free and shows the sites Google has found linking to you, but it only works for sites you've verified you own. For any other domain, most SEO suites offer a limited free lookup that shows a total and a short sample of links. Kite's free plan includes usage, and its backlink data is built in, so you can check your site and a competitor's, including their history, without buying an SEO subscription. For a closer look at the paid tools and their cheaper alternatives, see Ahrefs Alternatives for Checking Backlinks on a Small Budget Coming soon .
Why do backlink checkers show different numbers for the same site?
Each backlink tool runs its own crawler and keeps its own index of the web, and none of them finds every link. They also count differently: some include links that have recently disappeared, and some count subdomains separately. So Ahrefs, Semrush, Moz, and DataForSEO can report quite different totals for the same domain. The fix is to compare sites using the same source every time. Kite uses one source for a whole comparison and keeps using it for the monthly check, so the changes you see come from the sites themselves rather than from switching tools.
Are backlinks still relevant in 2026?
Yes. Links from other websites are still one of the clearest signs that a page is worth recommending, both to search engines and to the AI answer engines that draw on search results. What has changed is that quality matters far more than volume. A few links from respected sites in your industry are worth more than hundreds from directories and link farms, which is why Kite focuses on the number and quality of the sites linking to you rather than the raw total.
Can Kite check backlinks for a site I don't own?
Yes. Kite can check the backlinks and backlink history of any public domain, including competitors, partners, and sites you're thinking of pitching. You don't need access to the site or its analytics, because the data comes from a crawl of the public web.
Does Kite build backlinks, or does it only check them?
Kite does both. After a check, it proposes the work most likely to earn you links: pages other sites would want to cite, redirects that recover broken links, and pitches to sites that already link to your competitors. It publishes the pages and redirects once you approve them and drafts the pitches for you to send. Then it checks which new sites link to you the following month.