Know the source
Every analysis is tied to a named Common Crawl web-graph release and comparison window.
Common Crawl backlink tool
Explore referring domains and link movement using the open Common Crawl web graph instead of a closed proprietary index.
The portfolio problem
Proprietary backlink indexes are powerful, but their collection methods and portfolio economics can be opaque. Common Crawl provides a transparent, independently available foundation for large-scale domain research.
Reproduce the method
The underlying dataset is public, so researchers can inspect the release rather than trusting an unexplained score.
Monitor at portfolio scale
Domain-level relationships make broad monitoring practical without pretending to replace page-level indexes.
A practical workflow
From raw movement to a useful decision
- 1
Common Crawl samples the web
Its crawlers fetch a large, changing portion of public pages and publish the resulting corpus.
- 2
The web graph aggregates links
Page links are reduced to relationships between registrable domains for each release.
- 3
Linkwake computes movement
Adjacent releases are compared to classify referring domains as new, lost, or persistent.
Worked example
What this looks like in practice
A relationship from publisher.example to client.example means at least one crawled page on the publisher linked to the client during that graph release; it does not mean every page or every known link was captured.
Coverage and limitations
Common Crawl is a sample, not a complete or real-time census. Coverage varies by release, robots rules, crawl priority, and site accessibility. Counts will differ from Google, Ahrefs, Majestic, Semrush, and Search Console.
Read the Common Crawl methodology or explore the underlying approach in our original research.
Questions, answered
Frequently asked questions
Is Common Crawl the same as Google's index?
No. It is an independent public crawl with different goals, coverage, scheduling, and processing.
Why can a known backlink be missing?
The source page may not have been crawled in that release, may block crawlers, may require JavaScript, or may fall outside the published graph.
What is the data good for?
It is especially useful for transparent research, broad domain-level comparisons, portfolio monitoring, and repeatable release-to-release analysis.
See Linkwake with real portfolio data
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