How to see your backlinks in Search Console

Updated 2026-08-07

Search Console has a free Links report covering external links, anchor text and internal linking. Here is where it is, what it shows, and the three ways it differs from a paid backlink tool.

Search Console includes a backlink report and most people never open it. It is called Links, it sits at the bottom of the left-hand navigation, and it is free data straight from Google's own index rather than a third party's crawl.

What the Links report contains

Four tables, split across external and internal:

• Top linked pages (externally). Your pages ranked by how many sites link to them. This is the useful one: it tells you which pages have authority to pass along internally.
• Top linking sites. Domains ranked by how many links they point at you.
• Top linking text. The anchor text used. Worth scanning for anchors that misdescribe you, and for branded-versus-descriptive balance.
• Top linked pages (internally). Your own internal link counts. Underrated — a page you consider important sitting near the bottom of this list is a fixable problem, and internal links are the one ranking factor entirely within your control.

Click through any table for a longer list, and export from there.

Three ways it differs from a paid tool

It is not exhaustive, and it is not sorted by value. Google shows a sample, ordered by link count rather than by anything resembling authority. Twenty links from one low-quality directory outrank one link from a national newspaper in this view.

There are no metrics. No domain rating, no traffic estimate, no follow/nofollow flag, no first-seen or last-seen date. You get counts and nothing else, so you cannot tell a valuable link from a worthless one without opening it.

You cannot see anyone else's. Search Console only ever reports on properties you have verified. Competitor link analysis is the single clearest reason paid tools exist.

What it is genuinely better at

It is Google's own data. A third-party crawler reports links it managed to find; Search Console reports links Google has actually seen, which is the set that can affect anything. If a link is in Search Console it counts, and if a link you know exists never appears, that is itself information.

The report is not in the API. The Search Console API exposes search analytics, sitemaps, URL inspection and property management — there is no links endpoint. Anything reading your backlinks programmatically is using its own crawl, not Google's. This is also why no third-party Search Console client, including this one, can show you the Links report.

The realistic workflow

• Open Links monthly. Look for new linking domains and for anchor text you did not expect.
• Use top linked pages externally to pick the pages worth linking from internally.
• Use top linked pages internally to find important pages you have orphaned.
• Ignore the totals as a KPI. The number moves for reasons unrelated to your link building.

And do not reach for the disavow tool unless you have an actual manual action. Google's position for years has been that it ignores most spam links without being asked, and a careless disavow file does real damage.