analyze_backlinks

Analyze a domain's backlink profile — total backlinks, referring domains, dofollow-only share, spam score, plus the top referring domains and anchor…

Cost: 70 credits.

analyze_backlinks reports a domain's backlink profile — how many links point at it, which domains send them, and what anchor text those links use — powered by the DataForSEO Backlinks database. It works on any public domain, so it reads your own site or a competitor's the same way, and it needs no project setup. It is synchronous: the report comes back immediately, with no background job to poll.

What it does

Given a domain (a bare host or a full URL — it is canonicalized for you), it returns three sections:

Profile summary — total backlinks, referring domains (with the share that link exclusively with dofollow links), referring main domains, broken backlinks, the aggregate backlink spam score, and the domain's rank on DataForSEO's 0–1,000 scale.
Top referring domains — the domains linking to the target, most backlinks first, each with its own rank.
Top anchors — the anchor texts those links use, most backlinks first. Links that carry no anchor text (image links) are labelled as such rather than hidden.

Only live backlinks are counted — links that have since been lost are excluded. Each list header says how many rows you got and, when there are more than the limit you asked for, how many exist in total, so a truncated list never reads like the whole picture.

Availability during beta

Live DataForSEO data is off during the beta. While it is off, analyze_backlinks returns a clear "backlink lookups are not yet enabled on this deployment" message and charges you nothing — no credits are reserved or spent. SeoGrep never returns sample or placeholder figures dressed up as real data. Once live DataForSEO access is switched on, the same call starts returning real numbers.

Example

Ask your MCP client in plain language:

Analyze the backlink profile of competitor.com.

Or keep it short:

Show me the top 25 referring domains and anchors for example.com.

Input

Field	Type	Required	Description
`target`	string	Yes	The domain to look up, e.g. "example.com" or "https://example.com".
`limit`	integer	No	How many rows to return in EACH list — referring domains and anchors (1–1000, default 1000).

Returns

The profile summary, then the top referring domains (domain, backlink count, rank), then the top anchors (anchor text, backlink count) — each list headed by how many of the total are shown. A metric DataForSEO has no value for is shown as n/a rather than as a zero. An input that is not a public domain is rejected before anything is charged, and while live data is off you get the "not yet enabled" message instead — also free.

Billing

One lookup reads three DataForSEO endpoints (summary, referring domains, anchors) and is charged once, as a single tool call. If any of the three fails, the whole call fails and you are not charged — a partial profile is never billed.