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. It is synchronous: the report comes back immediately, with no background job to poll.

What it does

Name the site in one of two ways — pass a target domain (a bare host or a full URL — it is canonicalized for you), or pass the project_id of one of your own projects and the domain is taken from it. Exactly one of the two: passing both is rejected rather than resolved by precedence, because the two can name different sites and guessing would bill you for a lookup of the one you did not mean. Either way you get 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.

Who can run it

analyze_backlinks needs a paid credit balance. It reads live data from a paid third-party provider, so it is not available on trial credits — buy any credit pack and it unlocks straight away. Your trial credits are untouched and keep working for crawls, audits, reports and Search Console tools.

If live DataForSEO access is unavailable on this deployment, the tool 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.

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	No	The domain to look up, e.g. "example.com" or "https://example.com" — any public domain, including a competitor's. Pass this OR project_id, not both.
`project_id`	string (uuid)	No	One of your projects (from setup_project / list_projects) — the domain is taken from it. Pass this OR target, not both.
`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. When you looked the site up by project_id, the heading names that project.

An input that is not a public domain, a call naming neither target nor project_id (or both), and a project_id that is not yours are all rejected before anything is charged; 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.