Entry points, not totals
Backlink crawler data for tracing link equity flow
Your own crawler maps the links inside your site. Ours maps the ones arriving from outside, 2,774,625,913 domain-to-domain links, as JSON you can join to your crawl.
- Free: domain, overview, stats, suggest
- toppages shows the pages that receive links
- $100 free credit, no card
$ curl "https://linkisflow.com/api.php?action=toppages&q=example.com&key=sk_live_..."
Who it is for
Why a backlink crawler belongs in an internal-linking audit
Link equity is a flow problem. Water enters a system at a few inlets, runs through pipes, and either reaches the rooms that need it or pools somewhere useless.
Your site works the same way. External links are the inlets, internal links are the pipes, and a crawl of your own pages only shows you the pipes. It cannot tell you where the water comes in.
That is the gap a backlink crawler fills. Our own crawler and our own index record who links to whom across 181,132,097 domains, and the toppages action lists which of your URLs receive those links, so you can lay the inlets over your internal graph, as shown on the entry-page guide.
Mind the limit. The index is refreshed roughly once a month, so a link from last week may not be there yet. Treat the output as a monthly survey, not a live feed. The cost table shows what each survey costs.
Compare
Where equity enters, moves and leaks
| Stage | Who controls it | Question to ask | Where to look |
|---|---|---|---|
| Entry | Other sites | Which of my URLs receive links, and from how many domains? | toppages, refdomains |
| Distribution | You | How many clicks from an entry page to the pages that earn money? | Your own crawl (Screaming Frog, Sitebulb) |
| Leak | You, by accident | Does an entry page redirect, 404 or carry a parameter variant? | Search Console, server logs |
| Signal | Other sites | What anchor text arrives with the link? | anchors, anchor_cloud |
Checklist
Before you touch a single internal link
- Pull the list of your URLs that receive external links, and sort it by referring domains.
- Mark every entry page that returns anything other than a 200.
- Count clicks from each entry page to your five most important pages.
- Note which entry pages have no outgoing internal links at all.
- Write down the date of the snapshot, because the index moves about monthly.
- Change one cluster, then wait for the next refresh before judging it.
What it is for
What the link graph answers that a site crawl cannot
Four questions, each one a single call.
Which pages take the links
toppages costs 2 credits and returns a page-level view, so entry points stop being a guess.
How many domains stand behind them
refdomains lists the sources. Fifty links from one domain and fifty domains are very different inlets.
What the anchors say
anchors shows the words attached to incoming links, which tells you what the inlet is already about.
Where a rival's inlets overlap yours
intersect takes 2 to 10 domains and is the starting point for a gap study.
One call, one entry-point list
Free actions need no key. Paid ones take key= or a Bearer header.
curl "https://linkisflow.com/api.php?action=toppages&q=example.com&per=100&key=sk_live_..."
# free, no key
curl "https://linkisflow.com/api.php?action=overview&q=example.com"How it works
From inlets to a fixed internal path
- 1
Export your entry pages
Run
toppagesfor your domain and save the JSON with today's date in the filename. - 2
Join it to your crawl
Match URLs against the export from your site crawler and add a click-depth column.
- 3
Find the stranded inlets
Entry pages deeper than three clicks from your key pages, or with no outlinks, come first.
- 4
Edit, then wait
Add contextual links from entry pages, and compare with the next monthly snapshot.
FAQ
Questions people ask before they try it
What is a backlink crawler, and how is it different from my site crawler?
A backlink crawler follows links between sites and records who points at whom. A site crawler walks the pages of one domain. You need both: one shows inlets, the other shows the pipes between your own pages.
Can I run a bulk backlink checker over a few thousand domains?
Yes. The bulk_dr action takes up to 2,000 domains per call and costs 1 credit, which is $0.0001. For 10,000 domains that is five calls, or half a cent.
How do I check backlink quality without eyeballing every link?
Score each referring domain with a 0 to 100 DR and read the anchors next to it. DR is our own metric, comparable in spirit to Ahrefs DR but not the same number, so use it for ranking, not for reporting.
Does the crawl show my internal links?
No. It records links between domains and the pages that receive them. For internal linking you still need your own crawler. The two datasets meet at the URL of each entry page.
How fresh is the data?
The index refreshes roughly once a month. A link added last week may be missing, and a removed one may linger. For daily-fresh crawling, Ahrefs or Semrush are the fuller products.
What does it cost to try?
Signing in with Google gives $100 of free credit, which is 1,000,000 credits and needs no card. The free actions, domain, overview, stats and suggest, never use credit.
Can I find backlinks to a competitor and compare them with mine?
Yes. Run refdomains for each site, or intersect with 2 to 10 domains. The write-up on gap studies shows how to read the overlap without copying a rival's whole profile.