Losing a good backlink is silent. Nobody emails you when a partner redesigns their site and drops your link, or when a competitor gets a mention in a big publication. The large SEO suites will alert you, but they're priced as monthly subscriptions, and often you only need the alert for a handful of domains.

This post covers:

where backlink data comes from (and why scraping an SEO tool's pages is a bad idea),

how to turn "all backlinks" into " what changed since last time ",

what it costs, with numbers from a real run.

Where backlink data comes from

You can't check backlinks by visiting your own site. A backlink lives on someone else's page, so you need a crawler that has seen a large part of the web and kept the link graph. Building that yourself isn't realistic, and scraping a vendor's web UI breaks often and goes against their terms. What's left is to license an index through an API .

We use DataForSEO's Backlinks API .…