Who we are
About The Anchor Net and its casework tools
We run a backlink API and a free explorer for people who read link graphs for a living or for self-defence. Here is what stands behind the numbers.
What we built
Backlink data as a JSON API over our own web link graph. It covers 181,132,097 domains and 2,774,625,913 domain-to-domain links, about 798.5 billion backlinks in all, from our own crawler and our own index.
Refresh is roughly monthly. That is a limit, and we say so before anything else. A link added last week may not appear yet.
Anyone can try the free actions without a key. They answer the first question about a domain before you spend a credit on the second.
- domains indexed
- 181,132,097
- domain-to-domain links
- 2,774,625,913
- price of one credit
- $0.0001
- credits free on sign-up
- 1,000,000
Who it is for
Analysts who compare link graphs: people who check a rival for networks, audit their own anchors, or reconcile two tools that disagree. We wrote the site for that reader, and the pages are casework, not marketing.
It is a poor fit if you need keyword research, rank tracking or a daily-fresh crawl. Use Ahrefs or Semrush there. Our price advantage is only on link data, billed per call with no subscription.
Rules we hold ourselves to
We state costs before features. A credit is $0.0001, a refdomains pull is 2 credits, and a bulk rating of up to 2,000 domains is 1. You can work out a month's bill on the back of an envelope, and you should.
We do not promise rankings. Nobody can, and a link graph says nothing about what Google will do tomorrow. Google's own updates, such as the December 2022 link spam update and the March 2024 spam policies, changed how much weight many links carry, and no vendor controls that.
We never invent evidence. Worked examples on this site are labelled hypothetical, and nothing here is a customer story. If a page cannot back a claim with a number we can state, it leaves the claim out.
What you can verify yourself
- The index size: call the free
statsaction and read it back - The DR formula: round(100 · log(ref_domains + 1) / log(2·10^7)), public and testable
- The price: each response on a keyed call includes
_creditswith the cost and balance - The limits: monthly refresh, link data only, no keyword or rank tracking
How to reach us
Contact goes through the account page. Sign-in is by Google account, and top-ups are USDT (TRC-20) from the account page. Read how we apply the data in link-graph casework or begin with the network method.
Why a forensic tone
Link analysis attracts certainty. Someone sees twenty similar domains and declares a network. We would rather you hold the finding loosely until a second kind of evidence agrees with the first.
That habit comes from the data itself. Our index is large, with 181 million domains, yet any index has holes. A missing link is a question, not a conclusion. Run the free stats action to see current totals, then use the glossary so that your notes use the same words as ours. Small steps.
Honest backlink data starts with admitting where it stops. Ours stops at a monthly refresh, at links rather than rankings, and at our own DR metric.
How we compare
Ahrefs sells API units inside subscriptions, from $129 a month for 200,000 units, with at least 50 units per request. That suits teams living in its suite. We suit the analyst who wants to ask a few thousand link questions a month, without a plan.
For keywords, rank tracking and a daily-fresh crawl, Ahrefs or Semrush are the fuller products. We do not pretend otherwise. Many of our readers use both.