How to Check Your Backlinks in Google Search Console (Free)
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Google Search Console shows you every site that links to yours — and it's completely free. No account, no subscription, no export limit. If you already have GSC set up for your site, your backlink data is sitting there waiting.
Here's how to get it out.
Step 1: Open Google Search Console
Go to search.google.com/search-console and select your property.
Step 2: Navigate to Links
In the left-hand menu, scroll down to Links. This section is split into two parts: External links (sites linking to you) and Internal links (your own site's link structure).
You want External links.
Step 3: Find Top linking sites
Under External links, you'll see Top linking sites. This table shows the domains linking to you, ordered by how many pages they link from.
Step 4: Export the data
Click More underneath the Top linking sites table to open the full report. In the top right corner of that report, click the export icon (a downward arrow).
You'll see two options:
- Download latest links — a full list of individual linking pages with the date they were last crawled. This is the most useful export for analysis.
- Download more sample links — an extended sample if you want more depth.
Choose Download latest links. Google will download a CSV file to your computer.
Step 5: Paste into the analyser
Open the downloaded CSV in a text editor or spreadsheet app, select all the content, and paste it into the free backlink analyser. Select GSC Latest Links as the format before clicking Analyse.
The tool will extract the linking domains, classify each one, and give you an instant breakdown of your profile.
Limitations of GSC backlink data
GSC shows you the links Google has seen and chosen to report. It doesn't show every link on the web — Google filters the list, so it tends to surface the links it considers worth showing. This means the GSC export typically under-reports low-quality and spam links compared to a crawler like Ahrefs, which makes it a clean but conservative view of your profile.
For a broader picture, combine the GSC export with an Ahrefs free export or a SEMrush free export.