1. Google Analytics Referral Traffic
If you are getting referral traffic from other sites then those are sites that have linked to you.
You can find the sites that are referring visitors to you by logging into Google Analytics and clicking on the “Referrals” link under the “Acquisition” tab in the menu.
Change the date range to a month or longer to see a longer list of referring websites.
Also, select the drop down menu “secondary dimension” and select “Acquisition” and “Referral Path”. This will show the exact page URL that is linking to your site.
You can then view the referring URLs in Google Analytics or export the file to Excel or Google Sheets.
I like to export to Google sheets and then run a vLookup against a list of domains that I already know link to my site to discover new links that I didn’t know about yet.
2. Ahrefs.com
Ahrefs is my favorite backlink checker tool. It is very intuitive and has a great index of links.
Simply enter your domain and it will display a report of the backlinks to your website.
You can also click on “New” in the left menu to find the latest links to your site that Ahrefs has found. This is not always accurate (as it often shows old links) but I have found a lot of new links to my site with this method.
3. Google Search Console
If you click on “Search Traffic” and “Links to Your Site” on the left menu you can view the links that Google knows about and is willing to show you.
If you click on “More>>” it will display a button to “Download Latest Links”.
You can export either a CSV or Google Sheets and then run vLookup if you want to compare the exported list of “latest” links to a list of known linking domains.
The “latest” links are not always new links as there are a lot of false positives but I still find this feature very helpful. Google updates the “latest” links every few days.
If you have any questions or can suggest additional methods, leave a comment below.