A site crawler starts with pages you choose. A backlink index starts with pages discovered across other sites. A hyperlink graph stores connections between pages, hosts, or domains. These tools share crawling technology, but they answer different questions.

If you are building an SEO workflow, choosing the wrong input can produce a perfectly valid computation that answers the wrong question.

Disclosure: I maintain crawlgraph, which queries Common Crawl hyperlink graphs. This article adapts our backlink crawling tool guide . The examples below are illustrative, not measurements of a customer's site.

Choose the evidence before the tool

Your question Evidence you need Useful starting point

Which internal pages link to a broken URL? Links extracted from your site's pages A site crawler

Which hosts were observed linking to a competitor? Incoming edges in a dated index or graph A backlink index or hyperlink graph

Does this particular article still link to my site?…