The right OpenLinkProfiler alternative depends on which OpenLinkProfiler you meant

Our index holds 11,206 backlinks to openlinkprofiler.org, and 4,908 of them use the anchor “OpenLinkProfiler”. Follow one to the homepage and you arrive at a title and a headline that say “Backlink Checker” and leave it there. The web keeps recommending a tool by name; on the homepage receiving the recommendation that name survives only in the logo, split into three words, while the login and register pages still carry it as their heading.

That is the first fork, because two different tools have answered at this address: one announced in 2014, and the one we read in October 2026.

The first was announced on 11 February 2014 by Axandra, the company from Staudt, Germany behind SEOprofiler. Its press release included this line:

Users can download 100,000 links per website for free.

A 2016 review described a Link Influence Score and links confirmed within the last 90 days, and at least one 2025 review still credits the name with features of that older tool.

The second is what answered on 2026-10-08: one input box, a “Get Backlinks” button, six summary tiles, five donut charts and a results table graded in letters from E to A+. The pages we read name no operator, mention neither Axandra nor SEOprofiler, and publish no price; the title calls it a free tool. Viewing domain metrics, a notice adds, requires signing up and verifying an email address.

If you came for the 2014 tool, every branch below leads away from the domain, because that tool is no longer there. If you came for the 2026 one, at least one branch leads straight back, and the tree has no preference.

You are already at a leaf, and it belongs to OpenLinkProfiler.

Today’s tool draws five donuts without being asked, among them “BackLink Platform Types” and “BackLink Semantic Locations”. It has tiles for “Broken Backlinks” and “Crawled Pages”. Its table labels each row anchor, redirect or canonical. And it files authority under a school grade, A+ down to E, which is easier to show a client than a number that needs the word “logarithmic” explained first.

apibacklinks has no broken-link count, no platform classification and no semantic-location breakdown, and the API returns JSON, not pictures. If those donuts are why you open OpenLinkProfiler, switching to us would be a downgrade that happens to be machine-readable. A site owner who checks one domain a month and has never wanted a cron job should keep the free account and close this tab.

Two footnotes on the way out. Without an account we saw only the first 10 rows of a report; tiles and charts wait behind the email-verified login. And the page’s script turns a numeric rank into the letter (above 500 becomes A+) without saying what the number measures, so a B means “more than a C, in this tool”. Neither is a reason to leave OpenLinkProfiler.

For a second opinion with no registration, our explorer report for openlinkprofiler.org opens in the browser. OpenLinkProfiler does not publish its data source, so expect the two to disagree; that is what second opinions are for.

This is the branch with the longest memory and the least tool at the end of it. The 100,000-link download belongs to the 2014 release, whose paid version went to 200,000. On the public page in October 2026 we found no export button and no CSV or PDF download, and a reviewer writing in August 2026 listed the tool as showing up to 100 links. We did not create an account, so what a logged-in user can take away is, strictly, not published.

If rows are what you miss, raw data is the honest replacement for that old download. Our backlinks action returns up to 1,000 rows per call, each with source URL, anchor, title, rel, nofollow flag, link type and last-seen date, and the list can be filtered by follow status, source TLD, anchor text, minimum donor DR or date range. OpenLinkProfiler’s table shows URL, type, three letter grades and anchor text. Each call costs 2 credits at $0.0001 a credit.

The arithmetic, with OpenLinkProfiler’s own domain as the specimen:

• 11,206 backlinks in our index at 1,000 rows per call: 12 calls.
• 12 calls at 2 credits each: 24 credits.
• 24 credits at $0.0001: $0.0024.

A quarter of a cent for the full list as we hold it. The small print: pagination stops at 50,000 rows, so the six-figure headline of 2014 is out of reach here as well, and our index is built from Common Crawl, a broad sample of the public web that is smaller and less fresh than what Ahrefs, Majestic or Semrush crawl for themselves. For a profile of 11,206 links the 50,000-row ceiling never comes into play; for a national newspaper it would, and so would the gap in coverage.

A hypothetical case: a developer is asked to put an authority figure next to every domain in the company CRM by Friday. She opens OpenLinkProfiler and finds a search form behind a Cloudflare Turnstile check, summary data that is served only to a logged-in session, and an /api address that returned 404 on 2026-10-08. No keys, no documentation, no units. The tool is made for a person with a browser and is entirely consistent about it.

So the only leaf on this branch is an API, which OpenLinkProfiler does not offer and we do: 19 actions on one endpoint, answering in JSON with CORS enabled. Two of them settle the Friday problem:

• domain returns DR, backlinks, referring domains, dofollow counts and first and last seen dates: a free, keyless counterpart to OpenLinkProfiler’s summary tiles.
• bulk_dr takes up to 2,000 domains in one request, where the OpenLinkProfiler form takes one, and returns DR and counts for each.

Asked about openlinkprofiler.org, the first call answers DR 43, 1,376 referring domains, 11,206 backlinks. One caution for whoever names the CRM column: this DR is our own metric, 0 to 100 and logarithmic, computed from referring-domain counts in our graph. It is not a translation of OpenLinkProfiler’s letter-graded Domain Rank, and it is not Ahrefs DR or Moz DA either; ahrefs.com itself scores 67 with us. Treat the three as comparable in spirit, never as interchangeable columns. The parameters behind the openlinkprofiler.org call are in the API docs.

Some readers do not want to leave the donuts; they want them on their own domain, under their own logo, fed by something with a key. Here is the current OpenLinkProfiler screen, piece by piece, with the call that fills each and the places where we come up empty.

The whole view is overview at no charge plus refdomains, anchors and one page of backlinks at 2 credits each: 6 credits, or $0.0006 per domain. The $100 starter credit that comes with a first Google sign-in is 1,000,000 credits, which is roughly 166,000 of these dashboards.

Building it yourself also buys two panels that are not among OpenLinkProfiler’s five donuts. overview includes a DR distribution of the referring domains, and intersect lists the referring domains shared by 2 to 10 targets. What you give up is the last two rows of the table, and nothing in our API replaces the broken-backlink tile.

OpenLinkProfiler’s form takes one domain per search, and its hint asks for the bare name without a protocol or www, which for a single prospect is all anyone needs. For the 400 donor sites a link seller sent over this morning (a hypothetical morning), it is 400 searches and 400 sets of letter grades to copy by hand.

The list-shaped version of that morning is two calls: bulk_dr scores up to 2,000 domains in one request; compare puts up to 20 side by side. Then refdomains on the survivors shows what a total cannot: for each of the top referring domains, the links, pages, dofollow count, donor DR and first and last seen dates.

OpenLinkProfiler’s own profile is a tidy demonstration of why the rows matter. The headline says 11,206 backlinks. The rows say five domains supply 5,938 of them:

• aruana.top: 2,652 links from 2,527 pages, all dofollow, donor DR 12, seen from 2026-02-15 to 2026-06-15.
• complex-berlin.de: 1,323 links, none dofollow, one anchor throughout.
• blogspot.com: 848 links across 457 pages.
• sitedomain.de: 807 links from 807 pages, none dofollow, first seen 2026-07-11.
• borjagiron.com: 308 links, 14 of them dofollow.

That is 53.0% of the profile from five names, the pattern that sitewide or templated links leave in crawl data. Meanwhile kinsta.com contributes 44 links, hubspot.com 14 and neilpatel.com 12. None of this is good or bad; it is what you would want to know about a placement before paying for it, and it does not fit inside a letter.

The 2014 release listed email notifications when new links were discovered and, in its paid version, a “Link Disinfection” feature and an automatically generated file for Google’s disavow tool. None of the three is visible on the public site today. None is on ours either: apibacklinks has no toxic-link score and no historical charts in the API. On this branch OpenLinkProfiler and apibacklinks point at each other and shrug.

One qualification in OpenLinkProfiler’s favour: a reviewer in August 2026 reports spam and toxicity indicators on up to 100 URLs inside the logged-in tool. We did not create an account to confirm it, but if a quick toxicity flag is all you need, register there first.

You could assemble a new-link digest from refdomains and its first-seen dates, but our index is refreshed roughly monthly and a brand-new link can take weeks to appear, so what arrives is a monthly digest where the 2014 OpenLinkProfiler promised an email.

The proper leaf here is a monitoring or audit product. Our backlink checkers hub is the place to keep walking, and our page on Linkody is filed in the same group.

For readers who skip to the end of trees, the OpenLinkProfiler one folds flat like this:

Landing on two leaves at once is allowed: nothing stops you keeping the free OpenLinkProfiler account for its donuts while a script with a key fetches the rows. One draws, the other counts, and the 4,908 links that still say “OpenLinkProfiler” will go on pointing at the first while showing up in the second.