Best backlink checking tools. Moz, Semrush, Ahrefs, Majestic and others tested. 2024 data.

We tested backlink checkers of 14 SEO tools on the market.

And after months of testing, we are ready to introduce the winner.

Based on firm data.

Six months of experiments aimed to measure backlink discovery volumes, speed, accuracy, and quality, as measured by backlinks-related domain authority metrics.

If you are here to find the winner, click here to scroll down to the end of the article.

Meet The Competitors – 14 SEO Tools

We started with 14 SEO tools with backlink checkers.

Some are popular, some you might be familiar with, and some you might be seeing for the first time.

• Ahrefs
• BACKLINKTOOL.org
• LinkResearch
• Majestic
• Mangools
• Moz
• SE Ranking
• Semrush
• SEO Review Tools
• SEO SpyGlass
• Seobility
• Serpstat 
• SmallSEOTools
• The HOTH
• Ubersuggest 

We purchased several thousands of backlinks for a few test domains. Then we tested these SEO tools on how they discovered backlinks to our test domains.

One of the most exciting findings during our 2023 experiments was that only a few original backlinks data providers exist.

Others may advertise backlink-checking features but seemingly rely on third-party data.

Look at this table! The results show the pattern. The number of backlinks and the referring domains match precisely the same between many of these tools.

I marked the assumed data source in green.

So, despite tens of “SEO tools” and “backlink checkers” on the market, six companies source all the data. Semrush, Ahrefs, Moz, Majestic, SERanking, and Serpstat.

We conducted a few more experiments to confirm our findings and narrow the list further.

After checking data for hundreds of domains, we realized that only four tools discovered a high number of backlinks. SERanking and Serpstat discovered significantly fewer backlinks and referring domains than others.

This shortlists our list of 14 SEO tools down to – only four key players – Semrush, Ahrefs, Moz, and Majestic. With the first two being way ahead of all competitors.

Getting to the shortlist – Speed Test

Our next goal was to narrow down the list.

We decided to stress-test all the tools to understand how good they are in a new backlinks discovery.

So, we purchased several new domains and acquired tons of backlinks in a few days.

The goal was to measure how fast every SEO tool discovers new backlinks.

Below is a graph for one of the experimental domains.

In total, we created eight domains and purchased tens to thousands of backlinks per domain.

Semrush won most cases. Ahrefs won some. Moz won one. Majestic and others won none.

Sometimes, Majestic was better than Moz, especially in finding better-quality backlinks.

Determining the leaders

After conducting all experiments, we concluded that comparing only Semrush and Ahrefs makes sense.

Here’s why.

Moz’s performance wasn’t stable—despite winning one of the cases, it often did not update the backlinks data for extended periods. Here is how it looked on our radars:

Majestic won no cases and was too often lagging in discovery.

For example, no “Majestic” line is visible on the graph above because the tool found only 9 backlinks from 9 referring domains after 30 days in the experiment.

As you can see, the gap between Ahref’s and Semrush’s discovery with their competitors’ was quite significant, especially for the domain (first case) with a high number of backlinks:

Safe to say, Ahrefs and Semrush are the clear leaders regarding backlinks discovery. 

Determining the winner

In February 2024, we partnered with Empire Flippers, the largest US-based marketplace for selling online businesses, including websites.

They ran an experiment comparing the number of referring domains and backlinks from Semrush and Ahrefs for 107 websites listed for sale on their platform.

Here are the findings:

• In total, Semrush discovered 6.93M links and Ahrefs discovered 2.43M links.

• On the website level, Semrush found more backlinks for 93 out of 107 websites (87%). Whereas Ahrefs discovered more links for the remaining 14 sites (13%).

• For a large number of sites (65%), Semrush discovered more than 3X the number of backlinks Ahrefs discovered.

As you can see, Semrush wins when it comes to backlinks discovery.

You can read more details about Semrush vs Ahrefs comparison on my blog.

Wrapping Up

For years, Ahrefs was a leader in everything backlinks-related in the SEO market.

Based on our current research, it’s not the case anymore.

As of now, they are clear #2 after Semrush.

Semrush has the best backlink checker.

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