An SEOwl alternative, told as a ten-day migration diary

Below the headline in the SEOwl homepage screenshot sits a demo project called Decathlon SG. Its tabs run Dashboard, Keywords, Backlinks, Pages, Checks, Alerts, Reports, Settings, and its two red tiles read Dead or missing backlinks: 132 and Failing health checks: 1. That tile is the whole pitch. A link builder wants to know which of last spring's placements quietly vanished, and the tool answers in one number.

A raw API cannot say that sentence, and this diary exists to find out how close it can get. The team in it is hypothetical: a four-person link-building shop we will call the Tuesday crew, invented so the facts have somewhere to stand. Everything about SEOwl below comes from its own pages as read on 2026-10-09. Everything about the index comes from apibacklinks.

The first entry in the diary is not about migration at all. A new hire needs her own login, so the crew's hypothetical account manager clicks Get Started Free on the homepage. The button leads to the register page, which shows one sentence and nothing else:

Currently, we are not accepting new customers.

The pricing page links for Solo 250, Pro 1000 and Agency 3000 land on the same notice, and a support line asks people not to open tickets about it. The Internet Archive shows a normal sign-up form on 18 August 2022 and the notice in every capture we sampled from 1 December 2022 through 12 August 2026. The marketing pages still advertise a 7-day free trial.

What we cannot tell you is why. The site gives no reason, no date and no word on whether existing customers are still served and billed. We will not guess. The practical reading for the crew is simple: whatever they decide about SEOwl, they cannot plan on adding to it. A team that already holds an account has a decision to make; a team that does not has none, and can skip to the API entries below.

The crew sits down and lists, honestly, which SEOwl features they open every week. SEOwl's own backlink pages promise four things: daily crawling of monitored backlinks to confirm they are live, present, dofollow and indexed; automatic discovery of new links; tags and filters that replace the old link-building spreadsheet; and a backlink explorer for any site. Around that sit rank tracking for desktop and mobile, hourly page checks, alerts to the app, email or Slack, and a drag-and-drop white-label report designer.

The crew sorts the list into two piles.

• Needs a clock. Daily live-link verification, nofollow flips, deindex alerts, hourly page checks, rank positions. These are things that happen to your pages this morning.
• Needs a database. Who links to a competitor, which donors are worth pursuing, what an anchor profile looks like, how a prospect's DR compares to the rest of the shortlist. These are questions about the web's shape, and they do not care what happened an hour ago.

Only the second pile can move. An API with a roughly monthly refresh is a database, not a clock, and the diary will keep returning to that distinction.

The first experiment is to rebuild the research half of the dashboard. Each call below goes to the same endpoint, api.php?action=...&q=domain, documented at the API reference. The crew tries them on seowl.co itself, since the free explorer page shows the same data in a browser.

1. overview for the summary tiles: DR, backlinks, referring domains, dofollow share. Free, no key.
2. refdomains for the top 100 referring domains with links, pages, dofollow counts, donor DR and first and last seen.
3. backlinks for the rows, filtered by follow type, source TLD, minimum donor DR, anchor text or date range, up to 1,000 rows per call.
4. anchors for the top 50 anchors, which stands in for SEOwl's anchor-balance view.
5. bulk_dr to score up to 2,000 prospect domains in one request.

The crew notes the gaps without drama. SEOwl lists per-link fields such as outbound link count, IP, geolocation and language; our backlink rows give source URL, anchor, title, rel, link type and last seen, and that is all we claim. SEOwl pulls Moz and Majestic metrics through the customer's own DomDetailer key; we return one metric, our own DR, which is comparable in spirit to those but never the same number.

The clever idea of the diary arrives on day six. If the API will not tell you what was lost, store what it says every week and diff it yourself. Pull refdomains for each client domain on a schedule, save the result, and compare this month with last month. A referring domain that disappears from the list becomes a candidate for the red tile.

It works, with limits the crew writes on the whiteboard in capital letters.

• Our index is built from our web link data and refreshed about monthly. A new link can take weeks to appear, and a removed one can take as long to vanish.
• our web index is a broad sample, not a crawl aimed at your placements. A link missing from one release may simply not have been fetched.
• There is no nofollow-flip alert and no deindex check. The rel and nofollow fields tell you what the crawl saw on the day it saw it.
• We do not send alerts or email reports; your own cron job would do that.

So the snapshot diff gives the crew a slow, probabilistic version of the tile: good for a monthly review, useless for the morning after an editor edits a page. Nobody writes the word replacement in the diary.

On day eight the crew writes the entry they expected to be awkward: the list of things SEOwl simply does better. It is long.

• Live verification. Checking your own backlinks every day, and flagging a removal or nofollow flip, is a monitoring job. SEOwl does it; we do not. For a shop that sells delivered links to clients, this alone is a reason to stay.
• The whole workflow. Rank tracking, keyword counting by URL, search engine and location, hourly page checks, a SERP diff and a report designer share one project. Our API has none of them.
• Alerts and reports. In-app, email and Slack alerts, scheduled reports and read-only shareable project links are built in. We have no dashboards, no scheduled exports and nothing to hand a client.
• Plain people tooling. Tags per backlink, per-person responsibility and co-worker accounts are features a non-developer can use on Monday morning. An API needs someone who writes code.
• Price predictability. A flat monthly figure is easier to approve than a metered one, for teams that dislike metered bills.

The honest summary for the diary: if your daily job is verifying placements you already built, and you already have an account, stay with SEOwl. Our API earns its place when the job is research across many domains, and for those questions SEOwl's public API docs list no endpoint that reads backlinks.

SEOwl's marketing page lists Solo 250 at $25 per month, Pro 1000 at $65 and Agency 3000 at $139, with a custom tier from $139. A second, older pricing page in the app shows slightly different numbers, including a $69 tier and a free plan, and the site does not say which is authoritative. Because new sign-ups are closed, none of these prices can be bought today.

Our side is metered. A lookup costs 1 credit, a list call costs 2, and one credit is $0.0001. The crew's research workload, still hypothetical, is 40 client and prospect domains. Each week they run one refdomains call and one backlinks call per domain, 4 credits in all:

The starter credit of $100 is 1,000,000 credits, enough for roughly 1,560 months of that workload. The comparison is lopsided because the two products do different jobs: the $0.064 buys data about other people's links, while SEOwl's price buys a clock and a workflow.

The crew's final decision is a split, and it is the one we would recommend to a real team in the same spot. Link verification stays where it is for as long as the existing account works. Prospect vetting, competitor intersects and DR screening move to the API, where a single intersect call can name the referring domains shared by up to ten rivals.

For anyone shopping among checkers rather than leaving one, the backlink checkers hub lays out the others side by side. One last note for the diary: the owl's best link source is not its product pages but a free tool built for the September 2021 wave of Google title rewrites. A free thing that solves one narrow problem is still the best advertisement in this business, and the crew agrees it would have been worth copying.