The free actions and the paid ones
| Action | Needs a key | Cost | What you get |
|---|
domain, overview, stats, suggest | No | Free | Rating and headline numbers |
|---|
bulk_dr, compare, top, dr_distribution, tld_breakdown | Yes | 1 credit | Ratings in bulk, comparisons, distributions |
|---|
refdomains, backlinks, anchors, toppages, anchor_cloud, intersect | Yes | 2 credits | The rows behind the profile |
|---|
search, keyword | Yes | 3 credits | Full-text and exact-anchor lookups |
|---|
What the free actions are good for
Triage. Five minutes with overview and stats tells you which of 30 prospects deserve a closer look.
Because suggest and domain need no key, you can wire the free calls into a Google Sheets script or a browser bookmarklet without storing a secret anywhere. CORS is open, so a front-end page can call them directly.
The limit is depth. These calls summarise a domain, and an anchor audit needs the rows themselves, which is exactly where the 2-credit actions start.
Where free tools fit in an anchor workflow
Free first, paid when the question needs rows. That order saves money.
Google Search Console already lists your own top linking sites and top linking text, at no charge, though only for properties you have verified. It cannot show a competitor, and that gap is where a paid call such as anchors earns its two credits.
Cost in context. One hundred competitor domains pulled once costs 200 credits, which is two cents, and the account starts with 1,000,000 credits. Ahrefs sells API units inside subscriptions from $129 a month for 200,000 units, so for occasional work the prepaid route is lighter. For keyword research or daily-fresh crawl data, Ahrefs or Semrush are fuller than this.
A realistic month for a freelancer auditing five clients, each with a four-rival peer set and a 5,000-row pull per site, comes to 25 sites times 10 credits: 250 credits, or $0.025. That is an estimate, not a quote, and your row counts will vary.
Run the same math for a rival audit. Cheap! Twenty rivals, one 1,000-row anchors pull each, makes 40 credits, a fraction of a cent, so the real limit is your time rather than your budget.
Two cautions apply. Free summaries can disagree with Ahrefs, Semrush or Majestic by a wide margin, since every index crawls on its own calendar, and a rating is only a log-scale count of referring domains that says nothing about topic relevance.
Our view
Start free, then pay per row set
Run the keyless actions on your target and two rivals. If the ratings and totals raise a question about anchors, spend two credits on the answer.
- No subscription
- No card for the free credit
- Index refreshed about monthly
Free-checker questions
Is there a truly free backlink checker with anchors?
Search Console gives anchors for your own verified site. For any other domain, the anchors action on our API costs 2 credits, and the $100 sign-up credit covers 500,000 such calls.
Does the free check show social backlinks?
It shows link data from our own index at domain level, with no split by social platform. If you track social signals specifically, a dedicated social tool will do that better.
Where do I read about the full method?
The seven-step runbook covers export, bucketing and diffing, and the myths page covers what to ignore.