How to Check Any Domain's Backlink Profile via API

Before you spend hours on outreach or panic about a competitor, you want one number: how much link authority does this domain actually have? Not a vibe. A count of backlinks, a count of referring domains, and an authority score you can compare across sites.

Doing that by hand means opening a link tool, typing in a domain, waiting on the crawl, and eyeballing a dashboard. Fine for one domain. Painful when you have a list of 40 link prospects to qualify or five competitors to size up.

Trackee turns it into one API call. You send a domain, and it returns the backlink profile: total backlinks, referring domains, an authority rank, and broken-link counts. This tutorial walks through the Backlinks API end to end.

What you need

Three things to make your first call:

• A free Trackee account. The free plan has enough credits to run every example here.
• An access key from your dashboard.
• The x-access-key header on every request.

No SDK, no OAuth, no waiting on approval.

If you just want to look at one domain before writing any code, the free backlink checker runs the same lookup in your browser. Paste a domain, see the numbers, then come back and automate it.

Step 1: Get your API key

Sign in to your dashboard and open the API keys section. Create a key and copy it somewhere safe, since the full value is only shown once.

Every request sends that key in the x-access-key header. Keep it on your server and out of client-side code.

Step 2: Check a domain's backlinks

Here is a full request. Swap YOUR_API_KEY for the key you just created.

curl -X POST https://api.trackee.dev/v1/backlinks \
  -H "x-access-key: YOUR_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{ "target": "stripe.com" }'

The response comes back like this:

{
  "success": true,
  "credits": { "charged": 8, "remaining": 4992 },
  "data": {
    "target": "stripe.com",
    "backlinks": 92020325,
    "referring_domains": 456971,
    "rank": 729,
    "broken_backlinks": 120433
  }
}

Each lookup costs 8 credits, and credits.remaining is your balance right after the call, so you always know what you spent.

Here is what the data fields mean.

target is the domain you asked about, echoed back. You can pass a domain, a subdomain, or a full URL.

backlinks is the total number of links pointing at the target. Stripe has about 92 million. That raw count is impressive but on its own it is not the number you should trust most.

referring_domains is how many UNIQUE sites those links come from. This is the field that matters. A million links from one spammy forum is worth less than 10,000 links from 10,000 different real sites. Stripe's 456,971 referring domains is what makes its profile strong.

rank is a domain authority score from 0 to 1000. Higher is stronger. It is your quick apples-to-apples number when comparing two domains, and 729 is very high.

broken_backlinks counts links pointing at pages that no longer resolve. High numbers can mean lost authority from dead pages, and they hint at reclamation opportunities you can go fix.

Qualifying a link prospect

Say someone offers you a guest post or a link swap. Before you say yes, run their domain.

curl -X POST https://api.trackee.dev/v1/backlinks \
  -H "x-access-key: YOUR_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{ "target": "prospect-blog.com" }'

Now look at two things. Is the rank in a range you respect, and does referring_domains back it up? A site claiming to be an authority with only a few hundred referring domains is not the win it looks like. A high backlink count with almost no referring domains usually means links from a handful of sites, which is a weak signal and sometimes a spam signal.

The nice part is you can script this. Loop over your prospect list, fire one request each, and sort by rank. A spreadsheet of maybe-links becomes a ranked shortlist in seconds.

Vetting competitors

Same call, different intent. Point it at the competitors ranking above you for the keywords you care about.

The gap between your referring_domains and theirs tells you roughly how much link building stands between you and their position. If a competitor sits at rank 480 with 20,000 referring domains and you are at 210 with 3,000, you are not going to out-rank them on content alone. That is a link-building project, and now you can size it.

Once you know who to chase, pair this with the SERP Competitors API to find which domains keep showing up for your keywords, then run each one through Backlinks to see how strong they really are.

The dashboard and managing many brands

Not everyone wants to write code for this. The same lookup runs in the Trackee dashboard with no code at all, and agencies use it to keep backlink profiles for every client brand in one place instead of juggling a login per tool. If you manage more than a couple of sites, that view is worth a look.

Let an AI agent pull it

If you work in an AI editor or an agent, you do not have to hand-write these calls. Trackee ships an MCP server and a coding skill, so an AI agent can run a backlink lookup from plain language and rank a whole list for you.

What's next

You can now pull a backlink profile for any domain, qualify prospects by rank and referring domains, and size up competitors by the gap between their profile and yours.

A few good next steps:

• Read the full Backlinks API page for every parameter and response field.
• Browse the API reference for the other endpoints, including domain overview and SEO audits.
• Start on the free plan and upgrade only when your volume grows.

Grab your five best link prospects, run them through the endpoint, and sort by rank. The one you were most excited about is not always the strongest.