Quick answer: your own backlinks live in Google Search Console → Links — free, from Google itself, exportable. Anyone else's live in the free tiers of Ahrefs, Moz, or Semrush's backlink checkers. And clearing up the persistent mix-up: Google Analytics cannot show backlinks — it shows referral traffic (clicks through links), which is a different and smaller thing. Then act on the list: redirect linked 404s, replicate competitor sources, monitor monthly.

A surprising number of people search for backlinks inside Google Analytics, find nothing useful, and conclude their site has no links. The data was in the other Google product all along. Here is every free route, and what each one is actually for.

Your own backlinks: Search Console

Search Console → Links (bottom of the left sidebar) is Google's own answer, in four lists: external top linked pages, top linking sites, top linking text, plus internal links. Export any of them. How to read it:

  • Top linked pages is the action list — any URL here that now 404s is leaking equity into the void; reclamation recovers it with a 301.
  • Top linking sites is your reality check — recognize most of them? Good. A pile of domains you have never heard of in suspicious languages is worth a closer look, though Google devalues most spam without your help.
  • Top linking text shows the anchors — ideally a natural mix of brand, URL, and topic phrases.

Two honest limits: it is a sample (Google trims the long tail), and there are no quality metrics — every link looks equal. Free, authoritative, incomplete: the right first stop, not the last.

The Analytics mix-up, settled

Google Analytics → Acquisition → Referrals shows sessions that arrived through a link. It answers "which links send visitors" — genuinely useful for judging which placements have commercial value — but a backlink nobody clicks (most of them) is invisible there, and its SEO value exists anyway. Links: Search Console. Clicks through links: Analytics. Both free, different questions.

Anyone's backlinks: the free checkers

For competitor domains (or a deeper view of your own), the big three each offer a capped free lens: Ahrefs Free Backlink Checker (top ~100 links, DR of sources), Moz Link Explorer (monthly free queries, spam score), Semrush Backlink Analytics (limited rows, authority score). The caps rarely matter for the strategic question — a competitor's strongest referring domains are exactly what the free rows show, and those are the replicable targets the competitor-analysis method feeds into your outreach list. Counts will disagree across tools (same reason the authority scores do); pick one and watch trends.

What to do with what you find

  1. Recover — linked pages that 404 get redirects, unlinked mentions get a friendly ask (the reclamation process).
  2. Replicate — competitor links from directories, resource pages, suppliers, and roundups are pre-qualified targets (the building playbook).
  3. Monitor — a ten-minute monthly glance catches lost links (a linking page deleted your mention) and negative-SEO noise early. For Shopify stores, RankEngine tracks the backlink profile continuously and flags new and lost links, folding this whole routine into the same dashboard as the on-page work — because a link list only matters when something ships because of it.