Nine hours, two tabs: a working day with Majestic and with an API alternative

Load majestic.com and the first field on the page has already done your typing. Under the line Try it free, here's a complimentary search sits a box pre-filled with brightonseo.com, Majestic's demo domain on 8 October 2026. Around it: a green Register for Free button, a globe drawn in white dots and lines, and a headline that names one speciality: "Specialists in backlink analysis".

That box is the purest statement of what a checker is: one person, one domain, one click. To see how far that model carries, we built a working day around it and kept it like a case file. The analyst below (call her Marta) is invented, and so are her clients. What she runs into is not: Majestic's prices and limits are quoted from its public pages, and every link count comes from our own index.

Marta runs a one-person consultancy: she screens expired domains for two buyers and sends her retained clients a link report every Monday. She keeps two tabs open all day, Majestic's Site Explorer in one and a terminal pointed at our API in the other. The log records which tab each job ends up in, and why.

The morning opens with a drop list: ninety expired domains, most not worth a second look. Screening such names is a job Majestic is visibly used for, and the evidence sits in its own backlinks. The "(check)" anchor, the most common one pointing at majestic.com in our index, is one exhibit. There are others: expiredomains.net links 2,943 times with "Majestic Backlinks" as its main anchor, and the domain-trade sites dnforum.com and acorndomains.co.uk add 1,785 and 1,129 links.

Majestic's plan sheet matches the trail. Pro is described as "For agencies, domain traders, and SEO consultants." For Marta's triage the tool is the Bulk Backlink Checker, in every plan; the homepage promises an upload of "up to 1 million websites at once for a CSV full of key metrics".

The terminal tab does the same screen in one request: our bulk_dr action takes up to 2,000 domains and returns a Domain Rating and link counts for each. What it cannot return is the number those marketplace buyers are after. Trust Flow and Citation Flow are Majestic's trade marks and Majestic's arithmetic; our DR is a separate 0–100 score computed from referring-domain counts in our own graph.

Logged at 09:15: if the buyer's spreadsheet has a TF column, the triage stays in Majestic. If the only goal is to discard the empty names, either tab does it, one of them in a single call.

Four domains survive the cut. Now Marta has to read their links instead of counting them: who links, with which words, to which pages. In Site Explorer that is a walk across tabs (Ref Domains, Backlinks, Anchor Text, Pages) under a ceiling set by the plan: 5,000 Site Explorer data rows on Lite, 30,000 on Pro.

To show the same read as raw data, we ran it on a domain every reader can check: majestic.com. The toppages call produced the first surprise. The second most linked URL on majestic.com is not about Majestic. It is a Site Explorer report on a .de site, amidalla.de, with 17,271 links, none dofollow, and amidalla.de is itself a referring domain with exactly 17,271 links across 10,411 pages: a site pointing at its own Majestic report from page after page.

The anchors call shows the same mechanism from the other side. Among the brand terms sit phrases nobody at Majestic chose, such as "notícias atlético mineiro" on 1,819 links, the exact count washingtonsheet.com sends, and "slot gacor maxwin" on 838, matching the 838 links to a Site Explorer report on an .ac.id subdomain. The pairing is our inference from matching totals; the individual link rows were not pulled. The pattern holds, though: Majestic's public report pages about third-party sites collect links of their own and inherit whatever anchor the linking site uses. None of it is content Majestic wrote.

For Marta the lesson is procedural: an anchor list is a lead sheet, and "which page is that pointing at?" is one more call. Anyone can retrace this trail without signing in, on the explorer report for majestic.com.

Logged at 10:30: a draw. Tabs are quicker for the first domain; by the fourth, the same three pulls belong in a script.

Over lunch a client writes in: a placement went live six days ago, can Marta confirm it? Here the record is on Majestic's side.

Majestic keeps two indexes and prints their state in its site footer. On 8 October 2026:

• Fresh Index: date range 10 Jun 2026 to 08 Oct 2026, "Last updated 24 minutes ago".
• Historic Index: date range 06 Jun 2006 to 26 Mar 2024, "Last updated 03 May 2024".

The Fresh Index is built for Marta's question. It holds what Majestic's crawler, MJ12Bot, has found in the past 120 days, including links deleted or lost in that window, and Site Explorer lists New and Lost among its tabs. The Historic figures get a footnote, not a theory: Majestic's FAQ says that, at the time it was written, the company was able to update that index "once every month"; the footer shows a last update in May 2024, and the site does not explain the difference. We print both as displayed.

The terminal tab has nothing to say about last Tuesday. Our index is rebuilt as Common Crawl releases are processed, roughly monthly, so a new link can take weeks to appear, and none of our actions is a New or Lost report. For majestic.com itself our records currently stop at 9 September 2026.

Logged at 12:10: Majestic, no contest. Marta answers the client from the Fresh Index.

The afternoon job is the one Marta resents. Every Monday she assembles the same link summary for 40 client and competitor domains (top referring domains, top anchors, a sample of backlinks) and pastes it into a sheet. She wants a script.

Majestic has a publicly documented API answering in XML or JSON. Whether Marta can use it takes one line of the pricing page: Lite and Pro both read "API access No". Those plans can use third-party Open Apps and the Google Sheets add-on, but a script of her own means the API plan, described as "for developers who want to grab data directly from Majestic": $399.99 a month before VAT, five users, 100 million analysis units.

How much would the Monday report consume? Majestic's command table prices GetBackLinkData at 5,000 to 20,000 analysis units per call, and GetRefDomains and GetAnchorText at 1,000 each. At the minimum rates:

Rows returned also draw on a separate allowance of 20 million retrieval units; 480 calls would have to average more than 41,000 rows each to exhaust it. So unit arithmetic is not the story: Marta would use about one percent of a plan sized for agencies pulling at volume. The story is the entry fee. Our side has none: a credit is $0.0001, a list call costs two, and the first Google sign-in adds $100 of credit, a million credits, with no card and no monthly minimum.

Logged at 14:00: the script goes in the terminal tab. The API reference lists the 19 actions it can call.

With the script running, Marta gets ambitious: how much of the Site Explorer screen can she reassemble from raw responses? We matched names from Majestic's navigation to the nearest action on our endpoint.

Six rows map. The five tabs in the last row do not, and they are not obscure extras: by Majestic's own timeline, Link Context shipped in September 2019 and Link Graph in December 2020. The mapped rows carry ceilings too: a top 100, two top 50s, at most 1,000 rows per call, and pagination that ends at 50,000.

What the home-made view gains is shape: only the four columns Marta's two buyers ask about, sorted her way, for forty domains in one sheet. Majestic's homepage sells its checker as providing "data with no programming required". That states its strength accurately, and names the trade Marta makes by scripting anyway.

Logged at 15:30: split. The API rebuilds the tables. It does not rebuild the tool.

By late afternoon the log shows a pattern, and half of it favours Majestic. Four kinds of work never moved.

• Anything priced in Trust Flow. Marta's buyers quote TF. Topical Trust Flow goes further, across "over 800 categories". We publish one score and no topical layer.
• Anything recent. A 120-day Fresh Index that Majestic aims to update daily.
• Anything old. Records going back to 2006, on the Pro plan and above. Our API has no historical charts.
• Anything where coverage is the question. Majestic runs its own crawler, MJ12Bot; we work from the Common Crawl sample.

On that last point there is evidence on Majestic's own homepage: a sample API response, from an index built on 15 October 2017, reports 5,409,178 backlinks to majestic.com. Our index sees 210,892. The dates are years apart and the counting rules differ, so this is an illustration, not a measurement. It illustrates the right thing: Common Crawl is a broad sample of the public web, and a proprietary crawl with records starting in 2006 sees more.

Nor should anyone switch over which score is "real". Majestic's Trust Flow page is candid about scores of this kind, and the same holds for ours:

It's important to note that Google doesn't use DR, DA or Trust Flow to rank pages.

Who should simply stay? A consultant who works a few domains a day by hand, at $49.99 a month for Lite with a 7-day money-back guarantee for first-time customers. A domain trader whose listings and buyers speak Trust Flow. Anyone who has to say when a link appeared or vanished.

At six Marta closes the laptop and we close the file. Six entries:

Majestic was not replaced; it was relieved of the repetitive half of the day. Marta keeps the $49.99 or $99.99 subscription, built for a person at a screen. What she moved is the work a $399.99 API plan would have been bought for and used at one percent.

Majestic is not the only checker in the link graph around it: seoptimer.com links to majestic.com 204 times in our index, with "Majestic Backlink Analyzer" as its main anchor, and that tool gets its own comparison on the SEOptimer alternative page. The rest of the category is filed under backlink checkers.