Formula disclosed · free · no account

Backlink analysis

Backlink analysis shows which sites vouch for yours, a signal search engines weigh when deciding who to trust. Most tools hand you a proprietary score with no formula. We compute your authority from the public web graph built by Common Crawl, which "maintains a free, open repository of web crawl data that can be used by anyone": 121 million domains, 3.9 billion links, and the formula printed next to the number.

It is a link-graph prominence measure, not a ranking prediction, and we say so on the report itself. No black-box number you have to take on faith.

Free Visibility Scan: whole site, up to 150 pages, no email. Full Report is a one-time $10.

What link authority actually means

A trust signal, with the formula on the table.

A backlink is any page on another site that links to yours. Search engines use the volume, quality and topic relevance of those links as a trust signal. A site with many relevant links from authoritative sources tends to rank higher than a site with none, all else equal.

The industry commonly describes this as "Domain Authority", but most tools compute it differently and do not tell you how. We use our own web-graph index built from the public Common Crawl dataset and show you the formula: authority = 100 * (1 - ln(harmonic_pos) / ln(N)). It is a prominence measure, not a ranking prediction.

If your authority is low, the fix is earning citations and links from relevant sites, not tweaking a number. Fixing low external citations covers the honest playbook.

What we check

What we measure, and what we do not.

Link-graph authority score

Your domain's position in a 121-million-domain, 3.9-billion-link graph built from the Common Crawl public web archive. The formula is disclosed. This is a link-graph prominence measure, not a claim about ranking.

Referring-domain count

The number of distinct domains pointing to yours in the web graph. One referring domain with 100 links counts once. What matters is how many different sites vouch for you, not whether one site links to you many times.

Top referring domains

When the deep index is available, we list the most prominent sites linking to yours so you can see where your authority comes from.

What we do not do

We are not a full backlink database. We do not store every individual link to every page on the web. Tools like Ahrefs and Semrush maintain crawled link inventories at a scale we do not match. Our data is domain-level, derived from the public Common Crawl graph, and good for understanding your general authority position, not for per-page link prospecting or anchor-text analysis at depth. Your complete inbound-link list is free in Google Search Console under Links.

The authority number appears inside the full 164-check audit next to the on-page findings that you can actually fix this week. The umbrella view is the AI search optimization hub.

Questions

Straight answers.

How is this different from Ahrefs or Semrush?

Those tools maintain their own crawled link indexes that go far deeper than our dataset. They show per-page backlinks, anchor text, link velocity and toxic link signals. We show domain-level authority from the public Common Crawl graph with a disclosed formula. If you need deep per-page backlink analysis, they are the right tools. If you want your general link-graph position as part of a full site audit, we cover that.

What is Common Crawl?

A free, public web archive that has been crawling the web since 2008 and releases the raw crawl data publicly. We build our own domain link graph from this data. It is not real-time; releases come out roughly monthly.

Why does my authority score differ from my Moz DA or Ahrefs DR?

Every tool uses its own formula and its own crawl data. They are all approximations. Ours is disclosed; others are not. The right question is not which score is correct but whether your site is gaining or losing link prominence over time.

Can you tell me which links to build?

Not in the current version. We show you where you stand. Link prospecting and per-link inventories are what the big backlink databases are for; we do not pretend to replace them.

Does a higher score guarantee better rankings?

No. Link authority is one factor among many. We surface it alongside the rest of our 164 graded checks so you see the full picture, not just one metric. The $10 Full Report puts it all in one PDF.

See where you stand in the public link graph.

Free scan, no email. Disclosed formula. We do not invent link counts.

164 graded checks · our own index · formula disclosed