Google Search Console backlinks: how to see them, export them and read the Links report

Google's Search Console Help describes Search Console as "a free service offered by Google," and one of the things it lists the product doing is to "Show you which sites link to your website." Google calls a backlink "a link on a page from another site that links to a page on your site."

You can only see links for a site you have added and verified. Google's help page on adding a property says you "must first prove that you own the site," so there is no way to look up another site's backlinks in Search Console.

1. Add and verify your site, if you have not already. A Domain property (example.com) covers "all subdomains and protocols (http/https)" and must be verified with a DNS record, unless the site is on a Google product such as Blogger or Google Sites. A URL-prefix property (https://example.com/) covers only URLs that start with that exact prefix, and offers several verification methods, including an HTML file upload, an HTML tag, Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager and your domain name provider.
2. Pick the property. Use the property selector dropdown on any Search Console page.
3. Open the Links report. Google's help page for the report links straight to it at search.google.com/search-console/links.
4. Read the External links tables. Top linked pages, Top linking sites and Top linking text are the three backlink views. The next section explains each one.
5. Click MORE under a table for the full list. Google says to click the MORE link at the bottom of a table "for the full list," and that tables "are limited to 1,000 rows."
6. Drill down. Select a page in Top linked pages to see the sites linking to it, then select a site to see the exact pages on that site that link to you. You can also start from Top linking sites and work the other way.

Anyone with access to the property can read the report: Google's permissions table marks the Links report as available to owners, full users and restricted users. If you need a colleague or an agency to check your links, add them as a restricted user rather than sharing your login.

If you are setting Search Console up for a new site, our website launch checklist covers verification and sitemap submission in order.

The Links report has an External links side (your backlinks) and an Internal links side (links between your own pages). The navigation paths below are the ones Google gives on its help page.

View	Where to find it	What it shows	What Google suggests using it for
Top linked pages	Links report > External links > Top linked pages	Your pages with the most backlinks from other sites	"Confirm that your most linked pages are the ones that you expect"
Top linking sites	Links report > External links > Top linking sites	The root domains with the most links to you, sorted by count of links	Spot "unknown and possibly spammy sites," and check whether sites that matter to you link to you
Top linking text	Links report > External links > Top linking text	The link text other sites use, grouped by exact match	"Confirm that the link text is what you expect, and not spammy text"
Top linking sites for a given page	Top linked pages > MORE > a page	Which sites link to one page, and how many links each sends	See which pages a good linking site is helping
Backlinks from a given site to a given page	Top linked pages > MORE > page > site, or Top linking sites > MORE > site > page	The exact linking pages	"Track down how users get from a given site to a given page"
Internal links	Links report > Top internally-linked pages	Your pages linked most from within your own site	Confirm core pages are "properly linked within your site"

A few details in these tables trip people up:

• Sites are shown by root domain. Google says a link from www.example.com or m.example.com is shown as example.com. If you see your own domain in Top linking sites, Google explains that "it represents a subdomain that is omitted in the table."
• Your pages are grouped by canonical URL. Anchors and possibly some parameters are dropped before grouping.
• Duplicates are combined. A duplicate is "a link from the same source URL to the same target URL" after normalization. In the link text table, duplicates are a case-insensitive exact match, so "Hello world" and "HELLO WORLD" count together.
• Image links show as "(empty)". Links with no text appear as "(empty)" in the Link Text column and as empty rows in an export.
• "Target URL (if different)" means a redirect or a canonical. In the linking pages table, a value in this column means the link points at a different URL than the page it is counted against. Google gives two reasons: your site redirects the link URL to the target, or Google decided the target is the canonical URL for the one that was linked.

You can export link data as a CSV file or a Google Sheet. There are two kinds of export.

From the Links report landing page, the Export button gives you up to 100,000 rows in one of two slices:

• Latest links: "The most recently discovered links to your site (up to 100,000 rows), sorted by discovery date."
• More sample links: "A sample of links to your site (up to 100,000 rows), extracted from the full set of links known to Google." Google says this helps when you have many more than 100,000 linking pages, because it includes links the Latest links export cuts off.

From a single table page (for example Top linking sites after you click MORE), the download button exports that whole table, up to 1,000 rows. Google notes that "The table sorting on the page does not affect the exported data," and that values shown as ~ or - in the report become zeros in the download.

For a cleanup, Google's own instructions for the "Unnatural links to your site" manual action suggest the same two routes: download links "arranged either by hostname (Top linking sites > Export) or in chronological order (Links report > Export external links > Latest links)."

There is no API route for this data. Google's Search Console API reference says the API "provides access to Search Analytics, Sitemaps, Sites, and URL Inspection services," with no service for links, so the Export button is the way to get your backlinks out of Search Console.

The report is useful, but Google is direct about its limits. In its own words, the report "isn't a comprehensive list of every link on your site. It shows a sample of internal and external links to help you understand your site's overall link profile."

• It is a sample. "Some URLs might be omitted for various reasons, such as non-indexed pages or deduped URLs."
• Some links may be gone. "The report includes links that Google has found over time. These links may have since been removed, or a page may no longer exist."
• It does not show nofollow. "The report doesn't specify if a link is marked as nofollow." A link that appears in the report may carry rel="nofollow", rel="sponsored" or rel="ugc". Our post on backlinks from directories explains why the attribute matters and how to read it in a page's source.
• It covers only your own sites. You see links for properties you have verified.
• It has no quality or authority score. Google's help page describes link counts, linking pages, target URLs and link text. It does not describe any score for a linking site, so metrics such as Domain Rating come from third-party tools, not from Google.
• Disavowed links stay in it. Google's disavow documentation says "Disavowed links will continue to be shown in the Links report," so the report cannot confirm that a disavow worked.

The table further down this post sums up which common questions the report can and cannot answer.

This is the most common complaint about the report. Google does not say how quickly a new link appears, but its help page explains most of the other reasons a link you know about may be missing or look different:

1. It was left out of the sample. The report omits some URLs, "such as non-indexed pages or deduped URLs." If Google has not indexed the page that links to you, the link may not be shown.
2. It is counted under a different name. Linking sites are listed by root domain, so a link from blog.example.com appears as example.com.
3. It was merged with another link. Repeat links from the same source URL to the same target URL are combined into one.
4. It points at a redirected or non-canonical URL. The link is counted against the final or canonical page, with the original shown under "Target URL (if different)."
5. You are looking at the wrong property. A URL-prefix property for https://www.example.com/ does not include http:// URLs or other subdomains. Google's example: the property http://example.com/ does not match https://example.com/dresses/1234 because "https does not match." A Domain property covers every protocol and subdomain.
6. The link is not a link Google can read. Google says it can generally only crawl a link if it is an anchor element with an href attribute, and that "Most links in other formats won't be parsed and extracted by Google's crawlers." A button that opens your site through a script may never be counted. Open the linking page in a private window, view the source and search for your domain.

If the link is in the page source and the page is indexed, the honest answer is that it may simply not be in the sample yet. Google does not offer a way to submit a backlink to the report.

Unknown sites in Top linking sites are normal, and most of them need no action. Google's help page says: "For known spam sites, Google typically will ignore the links, but you might want to remove or disavow these links." Its disavow documentation goes further: "In most cases, Google can assess which links to trust without additional guidance, so most sites will not need to use this tool."

A sensible order, following Google's own pages:

1. Check for a manual action first. Open the Manual Actions report. Google says that "If your site has no manual actions, you'll see a green check mark and an appropriate message."
2. Decide whether disavowing applies at all. Google says to disavow only if "You have a considerable number of spammy, artificial, or low-quality links pointing to your site" and "The links have caused a manual action, or likely will cause a manual action, on your site." It calls the tool "an advanced feature" that "should only be used with caution."
3. Try removal first. For links that break the policy, Google's instruction is to "contact the owner of that site and ask that they either remove the links or prevent them from passing PageRank, such as by adding a rel="nofollow" or a more specific attribute."
4. Build the disavow file from your export. Google suggests downloading the data from the Links report and removing "any URLs from the downloaded file that you don't want to disavow." The file is a .txt file in UTF-8 or 7-bit ASCII, with one URL or one "domain:example.com" entry per line, and lines starting with # are ignored. The limits are 100,000 lines and 2MB.
5. Upload it to the right property. "The disavow links tool does not support Domain properties," so it needs a URL-prefix property. Each property has one list, and "Uploading a new list for a property will replace any existing list." The disavow page says "You must be a property owner to upload a disavow list." After a successful upload, "it can take a few weeks for Google to incorporate your list."

If you have a manual action, Google warns that "Blindly adding all backlinks to the disavow file is not considered a good-faith effort." If the links came from a paid package, our post on buying backlinks covers Google's paid link policy and the reconsideration steps in more detail.

For a new product, the Links report is a slow but free way to see which launch posts, directory listings and mentions Google has found. Google says it "uses links as a signal when determining the relevancy of pages and to find new pages to crawl," so the links it has found are the ones that can help a new site get discovered.

• Check that launch links were found. Look in Top linking sites for the directories and communities you posted to. Because the report is a sample, absence does not prove the link is missing; check the listing page itself.
• Check your top linked pages. For most new products this should be the homepage or the main product page. If a stray URL is collecting links, a redirect may be worth adding.
• Read the link text. Google suggests confirming "that other sites are describing your site accurately." Odd or spammy anchor text from sites you never contacted is worth a closer look.
• Do not judge links by count. The report counts links, not their value, and does not show which are nofollow. Google's spam policies list "Low-quality directory or bookmark site links" as link spam, so a long tail of junk directories is not a win.

Search Console vs Google Analytics. Google Analytics does not list backlinks. Its Referral channel counts visits "via non-ad links on other sites/apps (e.g., blogs, news sites)," so it shows links people clicked, while Search Console shows links Google found. A listing that sends visitors can appear in Analytics before it shows up in the Links report, and a link nobody clicks will only ever appear in Search Console.

VibeLaunch, which publishes this post, handles the listing check from the other side: according to its homepage, after a directory submission it "fetches the published listing page, confirms it exists, and confirms the backlink to your site is really there." The Links report then shows which of those links Google has picked up.

What we don't know. Google does not publish how long a new backlink takes to appear in the Links report, how the sample is chosen, or how often the report is refreshed. Its permissions table marks "Disavow links" as available to full users as well as owners, while the disavow help page says you "must be a property owner to upload a disavow list"; we have followed the disavow page. In May 2026 some SEO news sites reported large drops in Links report counts, and later posts said the report had been fixed; Google's Data anomalies page, read on October 19, 2026, lists no Links report issue, so we could not confirm the cause or scale from Google. Menu labels in Search Console can change; the paths here are the ones on Google's help page that day.

How this post was put together. We did not run experiments for this post. On October 19, 2026 we read the Search Console Help pages and Google Search Central documentation in the source list below, and checked the top Google results for "google search console backlinks" to see which questions they answer. Every quote comes from one of the listed pages.