Your backlinks in Google Search Console are in the Links report: open your property, select Links in the left-hand menu, and read the External links column, which lists your top linked pages, top linking sites and top linking text. It’s free and it comes from Google’s own crawl, but it’s a sample, not a full list, so treat it as a view of your strongest links rather than a census.
This guide walks through reading and exporting the report, what the numbers actually count, and what to do about the spammy domains you’ll almost certainly find. Every rule below comes from Google’s help page for the Links report and its disavow help page, both checked in November 2026.
Before you start
- A verified Search Console property. Any role works for reading the report: owners, full users and restricted users all see Links, according to Google’s permissions table. If someone else runs the account, ask them to add you as a user.
- A list of the pages that make you money. Ten or so URLs: your service pages, location pages and best guides. You’ll check these first.
- Ten minutes. The report itself is quick. The time goes into the export.
How to find and read your backlinks
- Open the Links report. Pick your property, then select Links in the left-hand menu. You’ll see an External links section and an Internal links section.
- Check Top linked pages. These are the pages on your site with the most links from other sites. Select one to see which sites link to it.
- Check Top linking sites. These are the domains that link to you most. Select a domain to see which of your pages it links to, then select a page to see the exact linking URLs.
- Check Top linking text. This is the anchor text other sites use for you. Image links with no text show as “(empty)”.
- Look at the “Target URL (if different)” column in the linking pages tables. When it’s filled in, the link points to a URL that redirects, or to a duplicate that Google folded into another canonical page. Those links are counted against the final page, not the one in the link.
- Compare against your money pages. If a service page you care about has links from two sites and your old blog post about a trade show has forty, you know where your link building should point.
The step that matters most is the third one. The site list is where you see who actually vouches for you: a county business association, a supplier, a local news story. It’s also where the junk shows up, and knowing which is which saves you from panicking later.
How to export your backlinks
The on-screen tables stop at 1,000 rows. The export goes much further.
- Select the Export button on the main Links report page (not the download button on a single table).
- Choose Latest links for up to 100,000 linking URLs sorted by the date Google discovered them, or More sample links for up to 100,000 rows from a broader sample.
- Save it as a CSV or straight into Google Sheets.
- In the sheet, sort Latest links by date to see what’s new since your last check, and add a column with the linking domain so you can count domains instead of pages.
The download button on any single table (Top linking sites, for example) only exports that table’s 1,000 rows. That’s enough for a small business, but take Latest links if you want the history. One detail that trips up spreadsheets: values the report shows as “~” or “-” export as zeros.
What the numbers actually count
The Links report doesn’t count links the way a paid backlink tool does, so the totals won’t match Ahrefs or Semrush. Google’s help page explains why:
- It’s a sample. Google says the report “isn’t a comprehensive list of every link on your site.” Big sites can see tables cut off.
- Linking sites are grouped by root domain. Protocol, subdomain and folder are stripped, so
www.example.com,m.example.comandhttps://example.comall count as one site. Country domains stay separate, soexample.comandexample.com.deare two. - Your pages are grouped by canonical URL. Anchors and some parameters are removed first, and duplicate links from the same source to the same target are counted once.
- No nofollow flag. The report “doesn’t specify if a link is marked as nofollow”, so a sponsored or nofollowed link looks the same as an editorial one.
- Old links can linger. The report includes links Google found over time, so a link that’s been removed, or a page that no longer exists, can still appear.
- Some pages are missing. Pages Google hasn’t indexed may not show up at all.
There’s also no date telling you when the data was last refreshed. That mattered in 2026: Search Engine Roundtable reported the report broke in mid-March and only showed fresh data again on June 12, then went about a month without an update after August 8. Google didn’t comment on either. So if your link count falls off a cliff overnight, check the SEO news before you assume you lost links.
What to do about spammy backlinks
Almost every site that’s been online a year has links from scraper sites, stats pages and odd foreign domains. In most cases, do nothing.
Google’s disavow page says “in most cases, Google can assess which links to trust without additional guidance.” In October 2026, Google’s John Mueller told someone worried about daily spam links that “I wouldn’t anchor on whether Search Console shows them” and “if these are random spammy links on the web, I’d just ignore them,” as reported by Search Engine Roundtable.
Google says you should disavow only when both of these are true: you have a considerable number of spammy, artificial or low-quality links pointing to your site, and they have caused, or likely will cause, a manual action. A manual action shows up in Search Console’s Manual actions report, and the one for links is called “Unnatural links to your site”. If you’re there, for example because a past SEO vendor bought links for you, the disavow rules are:
- Try to get the links removed from the web first.
- Upload a plain
.txtfile (UTF-8 or 7-bit ASCII) with one URL ordomain:example.comper line. Lines starting with#are comments. The file can have up to 100,000 lines and must be 2MB or smaller. - The disavow tool doesn’t support Domain properties, so you need a URL-prefix property. Each property gets one list, and the http and https versions need separate lists.
- Google’s disavow page says you must be an owner to upload a list, while its permissions table also gives full users access. If you’re a full user and the upload won’t go through, ask an owner.
- It takes a few weeks to take effect, and disavowed links still show in the Links report afterward, so don’t use the report to check it worked.
Google calls the tool “an advanced feature” that “can potentially harm your site’s performance” if used wrongly. Disavowing a real local link, like a chamber of commerce listing, throws away a vote you earned.
What the Links report leaves out, and the free tools that fill the gaps
The biggest gap is that Search Console only shows your own verified sites. You can’t look at a competitor’s links, and you can’t see link quality scores or which links are nofollow. Two free tools cover most of that:
| Need | Search Console Links | Bing Webmaster Tools | Ahrefs Free |
|---|---|---|---|
| Your own backlinks | Sample, up to 100,000 rows in export | Yes | Up to 1,000 backlinks at once |
| Competitor backlinks | No | Yes, for any website | No, verified sites only |
| Nofollow, UGC, sponsored flags | No | Not checked | Yes |
| Disavow | Yes, URL-prefix properties | Removed in October 2023 | No |
| Cost | Free | Free | Free, Starter plan $29 a month |
Bing’s announcement on retiring its disavow tool says its backlink report still “displays inbound links data not only for your site, but also for any website”, which makes it the only free way on this list to look at a rival’s links. Ahrefs’ figures come from its Ahrefs Free page. I didn’t check whether Bing marks nofollow links, so that cell says so.
Google Search itself won’t help here. Its list of search operators covers site:, filetype:, imagesize: and src:, and none of them finds backlinks.
If you’re after the other half of the report, the internal links column, our guide to internal linking tools covers how to use it alongside a crawler. And if you report links to a client, the SEO reporting template shows where linking domains fit in a monthly report.
FAQ
Why does Search Console show fewer backlinks than Ahrefs or Semrush?
Search Console shows a sample, groups linking sites by root domain and counts duplicate links once. Paid tools run their own crawlers and count differently, so the totals will never match. Compare trends within one tool, not totals across tools.
How long does a new backlink take to show in Search Console?
Google doesn’t say, and the report has no “last updated” date. Search Engine Roundtable noted the report is generally refreshed every couple of weeks, but in 2026 there were gaps of a month or more.
Should I disavow the spammy links I found?
Usually not. Google says to disavow only if you have many artificial links and they caused or are likely to cause a manual action. Random spam links on their own are something Google says it can already ignore.
Export once a quarter, ignore the junk
Open the Links report, check your money pages first, then export Latest links once a quarter and count new linking domains, not links. Skip the scrapers, check the Manual actions report before you ever touch the disavow tool, and use Bing Webmaster Tools when you want to see who links to a competitor.
