Using Google Search Console’s Links Report

Google Search Console includes a links report showing external and internal links to your site, as Google has actually found and recorded them. It isn’t complete and it isn’t as flexible as a commercial backlink index, but it’s free, it comes directly from the source that matters, and it’s useful for several jobs that other tools can’t quite replace.

Where to find it and what it shows

It lives under the “Links” section of the left-hand menu in Search Console, split into a few views:

• Top linked pages — your pages with the most external links pointing at them, sorted by number of linking sites.
• Top linking sites — the external domains linking to you most, which is a quick way to spot your strongest relationships and any unfamiliar domain worth investigating.
• Top linking text — the most common anchor text used across all your external links.
• Internal links — which of your own pages receive the most internal links from elsewhere on your site.

Each view can be exported to a spreadsheet, and clicking into any linked page shows the individual linking domains behind that count.

How it differs from third-party tools

Search Console isn’t a replacement for a dedicated backlink index, and it’s worth understanding the gap before you rely on it too heavily:

• It shows a sample of links Google knows about, not necessarily every link that exists — Google doesn’t publish how the sample is chosen.
• It doesn’t give authority scores, spam scores, discovery dates, or a clean “lost links” view the way commercial tools do.
• It can occasionally include links that third-party crawlers haven’t picked up yet, since it comes from Google’s own index rather than an independent crawl.

The practical approach is to use it alongside a commercial tool rather than instead of one (link building tools compared), since the two rarely agree exactly and each catches things the other misses.

Practical uses worth building into your routine

Anchor text sanity check

If your top linking text is dominated by exact-match commercial keywords rather than your brand name or natural phrases, that’s worth investigating — it can be a sign your profile looks more manipulated than it should (anchor text strategy for guest posts). Because this report reflects what Google itself sees, it’s arguably a more relevant signal than a third-party tool’s anchor breakdown.

Internal linking gaps

The internal links view often turns up important pages — a cornerstone guide, a key service page — that receive surprisingly few internal links from the rest of the site. These are usually easy wins once spotted (making backlinks work harder with internal linking).

Feeding a backlink audit

Pull this export alongside your third-party tool’s export whenever you run a full audit, since Search Console occasionally surfaces a linking domain the other tool hasn’t crawled yet (how to run a backlink audit).

Confirming a placement was actually counted

Over time, placements you’ve built through outreach or a marketplace order should start appearing in the top linking sites view. If a site never shows up after a reasonable stretch, it’s worth checking whether Google has indexed the linking page at all — a page that isn’t indexed can’t pass any value regardless of what the link itself looks like.

Other Search Console reports worth pairing with this one

The links report doesn’t operate in isolation. The Manual Actions report tells you immediately if Google has flagged unnatural links (manual actions for unnatural links); the Page Indexing report shows which of your pages are 404ing, which matters if any of them still carry external links (reclaiming links to your 404 pages); and the Performance report is where you connect link-building activity to actual traffic and ranking movement (measuring the ROI of link building).

A simple monthly habit

1. Export top linking sites and scan for anything new or unfamiliar.
2. Check the anchor text view for drift toward commercial terms.
3. Cross-reference against your list of recent placements to confirm they’ve been picked up.
4. Note anything odd for your next full audit rather than reacting immediately.

Common mistakes when reading this report

A few misreadings come up often enough to call out directly. First, don’t treat “top linked pages” as a ranking of your most important pages — it only reflects external link count, and a page can rank extremely well on relevance and internal links with almost no external links at all. Second, don’t panic over a drop in the top linking sites count without checking whether it reflects an actual lost link or just a change in how Google is sampling the data that period. Third, remember the anchor text view aggregates across your entire site’s history, so an old, now-irrelevant campaign can still dominate the numbers years later.

A short glossary for this report

Term	What it means here
Linking site	An external domain with at least one link to your site
Linked page	A page on your site that receives external links
Linking text	The anchor text used in a link pointing to you
Target page	The internal page an internal link points to

Where to go next

If this report raises questions about the health of your overall profile, run a full backlink audit and compare notes with monitoring lost backlinks. Read DR vs DA to understand why Search Console won’t show the authority scores your commercial tool reports. And when the data tells you it’s time to add stronger, verifiable links rather than just monitor existing ones, the marketplace lets you filter publishers by the metrics that actually matter.

Frequently asked questions