For most small sites, three free tools find every internal link gap worth fixing: the Links report in Google Search Console, a site: search on Google, and the free version of Screaming Frog’s SEO Spider, which crawls up to 500 URLs. Paid tools earn their price when you need orphan page detection from analytics data, link suggestions inside WordPress, or a site too big for the free crawl.
This guide covers what each tool actually finds, where its numbers stop being reliable, and the order to use them in. Every feature and price below was checked against the vendor’s own pages in November 2026.
What an internal linking tool should find
Google is plain about why this matters: “Every page you care about should have a link from at least one other page on your site,” says its guide to crawlable links. Links help readers and Google find pages and understand how they relate. So a useful tool answers four questions, and most tools only answer one or two.
The last job matters most, because it’s the one that turns a report into a fix. Knowing a page has two internal links is only useful once you know which three pages should link to it, and with what words.
Internal linking tools compared
| Tool | Cost | Weak pages | Orphans | Deep pages | Opportunities | Main limit |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Search Console Links report | Free | Yes | No | No | No | A sample, 1,000 rows per table |
Google site: search |
Free | No | No | No | Yes, by hand | Results aren’t complete |
| Screaming Frog, free | Free | Yes | Partly | Yes | No | 500 URLs, no crawl configuration |
| Screaming Frog, licence | $279 a year | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes, with custom search | Desktop app, learning curve |
| Ahrefs Site Audit | Free for verified sites (Ahrefs Free), more in paid plans | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | 5,000 crawl credits a month on the free tier |
| Link Whisper (WordPress) | Free plugin, paid premium | Yes | Yes | No | Yes, while writing | WordPress only |
| Yoast SEO Premium (WordPress) | $118.80 a year | Counts only | No | No | Yes, while writing | WordPress only |
Prices and limits come from Screaming Frog’s pricing page, the Ahrefs Free page, Link Whisper’s WordPress.org listing and Yoast’s internal linking page. Link Whisper’s premium prices load in the browser and weren’t readable when I checked, so look them up on its site before you buy.
Free tool 1: the Search Console Links report
If your site is verified in Search Console, you already have a list of your most linked pages. It’s the fastest first look, and it comes from Google’s own view of your site.
- Open Search Console and pick your property.
- Click Links in the left menu.
- Under Internal links, find Top linked pages and click More.
- Sort by the link count and scroll to the bottom of the list. Those are your least linked pages.
- Click any URL to see which of your pages link to it.
- Export the table to a Google Sheet so you can mark which pages matter.
The step that matters most is the last one. A sheet with your key pages (service pages, best guides, pages that bring leads) next to their link counts shows you in one glance which money pages are starved of links.
Know the limits before you trust the numbers. Google’s help page for the Links report says the report “isn’t a comprehensive list of every link on your site”, tables are cut at 1,000 rows, it doesn’t say whether a link is nofollow, and it can include links that Google found in the past that you’ve since removed. It also leaves out pages Google hasn’t indexed, which means a true orphan page often won’t appear at all. Use it to spot weak pages, not to prove a page has no links.
Free tool 2: a site: search for link opportunities
Google’s site: operator finds pages on your own site that mention a topic. That’s the manual version of what paid “link opportunity” reports do.
Say you’ve just published a page on water heater repair. Search Google for:
site:yourdomain.com "water heater"
Every result is a page that already talks about water heaters and could link to the new page. Open each one, find the sentence that mentions the topic, and turn it into a link if it reads naturally.
Two cautions. Google’s site: operator docs say it “doesn’t necessarily return all the URLs that are indexed”, so treat it as a quick shortlist rather than a full list. And it searches text, not links, so you’ll also see pages that already link to the target. Skip those.
If you already know the keywords each page targets (our guide to competitive keyword research covers how to find them), run one site: search per keyword and you have a link plan for the whole site in an afternoon.
Free tool 3: Screaming Frog SEO Spider, free version
Screaming Frog’s SEO Spider is a desktop crawler. It follows every link on your site the way a search engine does, so it sees your real link structure rather than a sample. The free version crawls up to 500 URLs, which covers most small business sites. Screaming Frog says the free version doesn’t include crawl configuration, saving crawls, or advanced features such as JavaScript rendering.
After a crawl, three columns in the Internal tab do most of the work. Screaming Frog’s user guide defines them:
- Unique Inlinks counts how many different pages link to a URL. If page A links to page B three times, that’s three inlinks but one unique inlink. Sort low to high to find weak pages.
- Crawl Depth is how many clicks a page sits from the start page. Redirects count as a level. Sort high to low to find buried pages.
- A blank crawl depth means the crawler found the URL but not through an internal link path, which is a quick sign of an orphan.
Click any URL and open the Inlinks tab in the lower window to see the pages that link to it and the anchor text each one uses. Reading those anchors is the fastest way to spot “click here” and “read more” links. Google’s advice is that “good anchor text is descriptive, reasonably concise, and relevant to the page that it’s on.”
That pattern in fig 3 is common on small sites: the homepage menu and blog posts link to each other, while the service pages that bring calls sit two or three levels down with almost nothing pointing at them. If you only fix one thing, fix that.
The crawl also records the response code of every URL it finds, so internal links to 404 pages show up too. They’re the one kind of 404 always worth fixing. Our guide to fixing 404 errors in Search Console covers what to do with them.
What paid tools add
Screaming Frog with a licence ($279 a year)
The licence removes the 500 URL cap and unlocks the crawl configuration, which adds three things for internal linking:
- Real orphan detection. Screaming Frog’s orphan pages tutorial says a licence is required to connect your XML sitemap, Google Analytics and Search Console. After the crawl you run Crawl Analysis > Start, then check the Orphan URLs filter in the Sitemaps, Analytics and Search Console tabs. These are pages that get traffic or sit in your sitemap but that no internal link reaches.
- Link opportunities with custom search. The internal linking audit tutorial shows how to search page text for a keyword while skipping existing links (the Page Text No Anchors setting) and exclude pages that already link to the target. It’s the
site:search method, run across your whole site and exported in one file. - Link Score and crawl analysis filters. Link Score is a 0 to 100 measure of a page’s relative value from its internal links. Crawl analysis also fills filters such as Pages with high crawl depth and Non-Descriptive Anchor Text In Internal Outlinks.
Ahrefs Site Audit
Ahrefs Free (the product formerly called Ahrefs Webmaster Tools) gives verified site owners Site Audit with 5,000 crawl credits per project each month. Site Audit has an Internal link opportunities report. Ahrefs’ own lesson explains how it works: it takes the top 10 keywords by traffic for each crawled page, looks for mentions of those keywords on your other pages, and lists the source page, the keyword and the target page. Check that the report shows in your plan before you rely on it.
The useful part is that the suggestions come from keywords each page actually ranks for, not from guesses. The weak part is the same: a new page that doesn’t rank for anything yet gets no suggestions, which is exactly when it needs links most. Use a site: search for new pages.
WordPress plugins: Link Whisper and Yoast Premium
Plugins work at the other end. Instead of auditing the site, they suggest links while you write.
The free Link Whisper plugin adds link suggestions in the editor and a link report that flags orphan pages. The premium version adds auto-linking of chosen keywords, bulk link changes and a broken link checker. Yoast SEO Premium ($118.80 a year) suggests related posts while you write and shows how many internal links each post has and receives.
Be careful with auto-linking. A rule that links every mention of “water heater” to one page creates dozens of identical anchors, often in sentences where a link doesn’t help the reader. Suggestions you approve one by one are slower, but every link ends up where a person would want it.
A 30-minute monthly routine
Whatever tools you use, the work is the same. This routine fits a small site with free tools only.
- List your key pages. Ten to twenty URLs that matter to the business. Everything else can wait.
- Crawl the site with Screaming Frog and note the unique inlinks and crawl depth for each key page. Check the Search Console Links report for the same pages as a second opinion.
- Pick the three weakest key pages. Low inlinks, deep in the site, or both.
- Find source pages with a
site:search on each page’s main topic. Prefer pages that already get traffic, since a link from a page nobody visits does little for readers. - Add the links inside the body text, with anchor text that says what the target page is about. Ahrefs’ internal linking guide suggests 3 to 5 contextual links per article as a good starting point.
- Recrawl next month and check the counts went up and nothing broke.
Step 4 is where the judgment is. A link should sit in a sentence where a reader would want to click it. If you have to bend a sentence to fit the anchor, pick a different source page.
Internal links also help pages that Google has found but not indexed. Our technical SEO checklist covers the Page indexing report statuses where adding internal links is the first fix to try.
FAQ
What is the best free internal link checker?
For a site under 500 pages, Screaming Frog’s free SEO Spider, because it crawls your real link structure and shows unique inlinks, crawl depth and anchor text for every page. Pair it with the Search Console Links report, which shows the links Google itself has found.
How do I find orphan pages for free?
Crawl the site with Screaming Frog’s free version and look for URLs with a blank crawl depth, then compare the crawl against your XML sitemap in a spreadsheet. Any sitemap URL the crawl didn’t reach has no internal link path. The automatic orphan filters that pull in Analytics and Search Console need the paid licence.
How many internal links should a page have?
Google doesn’t give a number. It says every page you care about should have a link from at least one other page on your site. Ahrefs suggests 3 to 5 contextual links per article as a starting point, and more matters less than whether each link helps the reader.
Are automatic internal linking plugins safe to use?
They can be, if you stay in control. Keyword-based auto-linking tends to repeat the same exact anchor across many pages and drop links where they don’t help. Use the suggestion mode and approve each link, or keep auto-link rules to a handful of terms.
The short version
Start free: the Search Console Links report to see your weakest pages, a site: search to find pages that could link to them, and Screaming Frog’s free crawl for inlinks and crawl depth. Pay for a Screaming Frog licence or an Ahrefs plan when the site passes 500 URLs or you need orphan detection from analytics data. Then spend the time where it counts: three to five well-placed links to each key page that’s short of them.
