Link building tool: count, judge and plan your links

Count, judge, plan: what a tool does with the links from other sites. Illustration by Zéro Corvée.

This page is part of our SemChat tutorial: it groups the assistant’s two link skills. First, what a link building tool can do for you, based on the tools’ own pages and on Google’s rules, read October 30, 2026. Then what SemChat actually returned on my site, plugkit-avis.com, right and wrong. The SemChat buttons on this page are affiliate links.

What a link building tool does: count, judge, plan

Start with the word. Google’s Links report help puts it simply: “A backlink is a link on a page from another site that links to a page on your site” (read October 30, 2026). Link building is the work of earning more of them.

A tool doesn’t create those links. It shows you the ones you have, flags the doubtful ones and helps you plan the next ones. The rest is human work: writing something worth citing, then asking someone to cite it.

Why use one, even for a small site

A small site often has a handful of links, sometimes just one. On October 29, 2026, my test site had exactly one (DataForSEO Backlinks). With so few, each link counts, and one bad source can be most of your profile.

1. 1 Count How many links, from which sites, with what link text.
2. 2 Judge A real site on your topic, or a link farm?
3. 3 Plan Which sites to approach, which link text, what pace.

Each tool has a strong suit. And a tool can count right and judge wrong: that’s what I saw with SemChat, below.

Count the links pointing to your site

Start with the free option: the Links report in Google Search Console. Google says it isn’t complete: “It shows a sample of internal and external links to help you understand your site’s overall link profile” (read October 30, 2026). It also keeps old links: “These links may have since been removed, or a page may no longer exist.”

A third-party tool adds its own list, from its own index. Ask for three columns: the linking site, the exact linking page, and the link text.

Ahrefs, Semrush, SE Ranking: three backlink checkers, per their fiches

I haven’t tested any of them. Here is what their pages and our dated fiches say.

• Ahrefs: its free Backlink Checker needs no account. Its FAQ says it shows the first 20 backlinks (fiche, October 29, 2026); its French page says the first 100 (October 30, 2026). It rates sites with its “proprietary Domain Rating (DR) metric” (page read October 30, 2026).
• Semrush: its free tools without sign-up include a Backlink Checker. Its llms.txt describes its paid backlink tools as able to “audit backlink profiles, identify toxic links, discover outreach prospects” (fiche, October 29, 2026).
• SE Ranking: a Backlink Checker with referring domains, anchors and toxic links, plus Backlink Monitoring that can import links from Google Search Console (FAQ, fiche of October 29, 2026). No permanent free plan, but a 14-day trial with no card.

Free backlink checkers: a first look at no cost

Ahrefs calls its free checker “a glimpse into the power of our premium tool” (read October 30, 2026). Seobility’s Backlink Checker has a Basic plan with 5 checks a day at “Cost: Free forever” (read October 30, 2026). A free checker gives you a first count, not your whole profile: Ahrefs’ free version lists only the first backlinks.

Judge link quality, not just the count

A right count says nothing about the page that links to you. Open it and ask four questions:

• Is the topic close to yours?
• Does the site have real readers: recent posts, named authors?
• Is the page written for people, or is it a bare list of links?
• How many outgoing links does it hold? A page that links to thousands of sites recommends no one.

Majestic, a link specialist, computes two scores of its own: Trust Flow for quality and Citation Flow for quantity, each from 0 to 100 (fiche of October 30, 2026, from its Trust Flow page). Its home page pitches building campaigns “using Trust Flow and Citation Flow” (read October 30, 2026).

Those are its scores, on its own scale, not Google’s. Never compare one tool’s score with another’s. I haven’t tested Majestic. To review every link in order (referring domains, anchors, linked pages, risky links), follow our link audit guide.

Find sites that could link to you

Looking at who links to your competitors gives you sites to approach. Majestic’s Pro plan has Clique Hunter, which finds your competitors’ links that don’t point to you (fiche of October 30, 2026). Ahrefs’ Site Explorer shows competitors’ backlinks, though its FAQ says the free account can’t study competitor sites (fiche of October 29, 2026). Neither is tested here.

Outreach tools that find contacts and send emails

Once you have a list of sites, you need a contact and a message. The LLMrefs list (read October 30, 2026) sorts the tools this way: “Ahrefs and Semrush are strong research layers. BuzzStream, Pitchbox, and Respona are built for campaign execution. Hunter and Snov.io fill contact data gaps.”

That’s their view. We have no dated fiche for these outreach tools, so no feature, price or quota is given here, and I haven’t tested them.

Plan a link campaign without buying links

The third job takes the longest: deciding which sites to approach, with which link text, at what pace. That’s where SemChat helped me most.

Paid links have a rule. Google asks you to “Mark links that are advertisements or paid placements (commonly called paid links) with the sponsored value” (read October 30, 2026). A link bought to climb in Google is something else: Google’s first example of link spam is “Buying or selling links for ranking purposes” (spam policies, read October 30, 2026).

Black-hat tools and link sellers to avoid

Be wary of any tool that promises links on autopilot. The same list includes “Using automated programs or services to create links to your site.” This site recommends no link seller.

Link building with AI: drafting help, not automatic links

An AI assistant can draft the plan: which sites, which link text, what pace. SemChat did that for one of my pages: 12 free links over 3 months, with a single exact-match link text. It can’t get the links: each site still has to say yes. Its own document says so: “Aucun chiffre de position ou de trafic n’est promis” (No ranking or traffic figure is promised).

What link tools cost: free checkers, paid suites

Entry prices below come from each tool’s pricing page as read from France, in the currency shown there. I’ve only used SemChat; the others are untested.

A price tells you nothing about link quality. For a first count on a small site, the Search Console and a free checker are a fair start.

SemChat’s two link skills, started with one sentence

In SemChat, you pick a skill from the Skills menu of the chat, then start it with one sentence. Two of them deal with links.

	Backlink audit	Link campaign
Status	tested on plugkit-avis.com, October 30, 2026	tested on plugkit-avis.com, October 29, 2026
Sentence	one free-form sentence about the site's links	template sentence plus page and time frame
Seen in the test	right count, profile wrongly called risk-free	right count, profile wrongly called clean

Backlink audit and link campaign, both tested: where things stand

The link campaign skill ran on October 29, 2026, on one page of plugkit-avis.com. I typed the request in French, on a French site, in the French interface. Its first tool, a backlink profile, counted right: 1 link, 1 domain, anchor “plugkit-avis.com,” as DataForSEO Backlinks found the same day. It even admitted “le nom exact du domaine référent n’est pas renvoyé par mes données” (the exact name of the referring domain isn’t returned by my data). Then it called the profile “Profil propre” (Clean profile).

That verdict was false. The only link came from hub.rankvance.com, a link agency page with 2,341 outgoing links and a spam score of 20 on DataForSEO’s own scale (DataForSEO Backlinks, October 29, 2026). A tool that can’t see the source can’t judge the link.

The backlink audit skill ran the next day, October 30, 2026, on the Starter plan, with one sentence typed in French (analyze the links pointing to plugkit-avis.com and tell me how to get more). It pulled the backlink profile of the site and of 4 competitors, then returned a document and a 6-month plan. Same right count, same mistake: it doesn’t name the linking site and calls it risk-free. That link is the hub.rankvance.com agency page found the day before, so the verdict is false. Cost: 5.6 points of the Starter plan’s quota (60.7%, then 66.3%).

Toxic backlink checker: judge your links before you trust a verdict

SemChat’s backlink audit skill is Audit netlinking in its menu. We tested it on October 30, 2026, with this sentence, in French: “Analyse les liens qui pointent vers plugkit-avis.com et dis-moi comment en avoir plus.” (Analyze the links pointing to plugkit-avis.com and tell me how to get more.) The dedicated page covers that test and also explains what a checker’s toxicity and authority scores mean, why Google says most sites will never need its disavow tool, and how to check each link yourself. It’s all on our toxic backlink checker page.

In about 3 and a half minutes, SemChat ran the site analysis and the backlink profiles of plugkit-avis.com and 4 competitors, then returned an “Audit Backlink” document, a chart against competitors and 3 actions for the week. What it got right: its count (1 domain, 1 link) matches DataForSEO Backlinks on October 30, 2026, and its goal stays realistic (15 to 30 domains in 6 months, no exact-match anchor at first). What it got wrong: it calls a link from a link agency page clean without knowing its source, and its targets stay generic. Cost: 5.6 points of the Starter plan’s quota.

Link building outreach tools: the link plan SemChat built, checked

The template sentence translates as “Plan a link campaign for my page”; I added the page address, three months and “Pas de lien acheté” (No bought links). SemChat returned a healthy plan: 12 free links over 3 months, a single exact-match link text, exclusion rules and monthly tracking. It got three things wrong, each one checked: the clean profile, internal links it described as already in place, and “0 position top 50” (no ranking in the top 50) when Search Console showed an average position of 37. The cost of this request alone is a data gap: my Starter plan usage went from 49.4% to 55.7% across two lessons, this one included. The full test is on our link building outreach tools page.

What no link tool does for you

A tool counts and suggests. It doesn’t write the article other sites will want to cite, and it doesn’t always know where a link comes from. SemChat proved it: a right count, a wrong verdict.

SemChat’s other skill families work the same way. Its automated SEO audit skills look for what holds your site back, its SEO content tool skills prepare your pages, and the automated SEO family covers strategy, competitors, local SEO and indexing. Same rule everywhere: the tool suggests, you check.

For everything else SemChat does well or badly, read our SemChat review; for its plans, see SemChat pricing.

The short version: a good link building tool saves you hours counting your links and planning new ones, but the judgment stays yours. Open every page that links to you, buy no links, and check every verdict before you act on it.