Which of your backlinks has ever sent anybody?
Every backlink tool tells you what links to you. None of them tells you whether a single human has ever walked down one. Those are different facts, kept in different places — one in a crawler’s index, one in your own referrer log — and because nobody joins them, the whole industry optimises a number that is only loosely related to visitors. This joins them. It is free, there is no account, and we buy no crawl data.
1Name the domain
What it can and cannot tell you
It counts from the day you install the line, never before. There is no archive of your past traffic to mine, so a link that sent people last year and stopped will show as silent until it sends somebody again.
Referrer data undercounts and never overcounts. Browsers and referrer policies routinely strip the referring URL, and a visit we cannot attribute is a visit we credit to nobody. So “never has” means we have not seen one, not that none happened. Every number here errs downward, which is the direction we would rather be wrong in.
Matching is by site, not by page. Because referrers are so often trimmed to the origin, a link from a specific article usually arrives as just the domain. Matching full URLs would report almost every working link as dead.
We do not crawl the web. The list of links that exist comes from your own export, because a crawl index costs real money and we would rather charge nothing than pass that on.
Related reading
- Sponsored, nofollow and dofollow — what link a paid placement should actually give you.
- Vanity metrics vs real clicks — the same argument, applied to advertising numbers.
- The ad budget calculator — what a spend buys, and whether it buys enough to prove anything.