A SERPninja alternative, if you need one: which branch are you on?

SERPninja's homepage opens with a ninja mascot beside a two-tone logo, a video thumbnail of a man in a grey sweatshirt making two peace signs at a monitor, and the line “#1 White Label Link Building Agency”. It also answers the first question of this tree before you ask it: SERPninja sells finished links to agencies. It does not sell data about links.

That matters because “alternative” can mean two things here. If you want a different vendor who places links, the hub at link building tools and the sibling pages for Guestpostlinks cover that ground. If you want the work around the purchase (choosing donors, checking delivery, reporting to a client), that is a data problem, and a data problem is what an API is for.

One more fact sets the stage. SERPninja's niche edits page says its client dashboard is powered by the Ahrefs API and shows “live Ahrefs link data”. So the agency consumes a link-data API. We found no public API, developer docs or programmatic ordering on its site, so there is nothing to compare endpoint for endpoint.

The trunk question, then: do you need links placed, or do you need to know what placed links look like? Placed: go to branch 1. Know: go to branch 2, 3 or 4, depending on the moment in the purchase you are stuck at.

You run an agency. Your client wants backlinks and a report with your logo on it. SERPninja's pitch is built for that seat: white-label reports, a 6–10 day turnaround on niche edits, free replacements, and a money-back line repeated on its service pages. It also publishes prices on each service page.

apibacklinks places nothing. We do not build, sell or index links. If your problem is “I need forty links delivered by the end of the month”, an API call will not help, and pretending otherwise would be a poor way to start a page.

Leaf 1: stay with the agency. Use the free explorer on serpninja.io's own report to see what a campaign looks like from the outside, then decide whether you want the same shape for your client.

The price list climbs in DR bands: $69 a link for DR20-35, $109 for DR35-50, $199 for DR50-75. The band names suggest an Ahrefs-style rating, since the dashboard uses Ahrefs data, but the service pages do not say which vendor's metric each package means. Ask before you pay. A DR 38 on one scale is not a DR 38 on another.

Here is a small piece of arithmetic. Stepping from the DR20-35 pack to the DR35-50 pack costs $200 more for the same five links, or $40 per link. Is a donor in the higher band worth $40? That depends on the donor, not the band. Once you have a candidate list, bulk_dr returns DR and counts for up to 2,000 domains in one request, on our own scale, at from $0.10 per 1,000 calls. Our DR is comparable in spirit to the familiar ones and is not the same number. For one donor it is a sanity check, not a verdict.

A useful calibration comes from SERPninja's own profile. Of the 100 top referrers we examined for serpninja.io, 55 sit in our DR 30–49 band, which is roughly the “DR35-50” tier the agency sells. Only 2 land in 70–100. The donors pointing at the agency's own site are mostly in that mid band, which is a useful reference point when you weigh tiers.

Leaf 2: send the agency your candidate donors or ask for the list, run it through bulk_dr, and pay for the tier whose donors actually look the part.

The guest post page promises “at least 90 days of placement”. That is a date you can put in a calendar. A hypothetical schedule: order on day 0, delivery in 1–4 weeks, then a check at day 100 on whether the link is still there. We are inventing the calendar, not the guarantee; the guarantee is quoted from their page.

The check itself is two calls. backlinks filters by source domain and target URL and returns source URL, anchor, rel, nofollow flag and last seen. refdomains shows whether the donor appears among the top referrers of the page you promoted. If the link is there with the right anchor and no nofollow, tick the box. If it is not, read the next paragraph before opening a ticket.

Our crawl-based index is refreshed roughly monthly, not in real time, and our web index is a broad sample, not the whole web. A link missing from our data may exist. A link present in our data was seen by a crawler, which is useful for proving it is visible to the outside world. Treat absence as “check again next refresh”, not as evidence of a broken delivery.

One more trick for the same branch: intersect returns referring domains shared by 2–10 targets. Feed it your three closest competitors and you get a ready-made prospect list to hand to whoever places the links. The API docs list every parameter.

Leaf 3: buy the links from the agency, verify them with the API at day 100, and keep the output for the client file.

This branch has a fork, and the fork is where honesty earns its keep.

• You want a branded PDF with live link data. SERPninja's dashboard runs on live Ahrefs link data and ships white-label reports. We have no dashboards, no shareable client views, no new or lost links report, no alerts and no scheduled exports. Use theirs.
• You want numbers in your own spreadsheet or internal tool. A JSON endpoint with CORS enabled is exactly this. compare puts up to 20 domains side by side, overview gives counts, DR and the top five referring domains, anchors and pages. Both overview and domain are free and need no key.

Notice the difference in what gets reported. A white-label report tells the client what you bought. A pull from the API tells you what the crawl saw, including the awkward bits: a donor that went nofollow, an anchor that came out differently than ordered. Taggbox.com is the cautionary example in SERPninja's own profile. It is its 7th biggest referrer with 28 links, and only 1 of them is dofollow. A report that counted links would have given it full marks.

Leaf 4: deliver the client report from the agency's panel, and run a quarterly API pull on the side for yourself.

You are not reselling anything, you want to understand how a link campaign looks before spending on one, and the invoice cannot have a comma in it. The tree is short here.

1. Open the free explorer and type in any domain. No sign-in.
2. Look at referring domains, top anchors and top linked pages. Compare the shape of three sites you admire with the shape of one you manage.
3. If you want to script it, sign in with Google. The first $100 of credit (1,000,000 credits) is free, no card, no subscription, no monthly minimum.

At a list price of 2 credits per list call, that credit is room for about 500,000 list calls, each of which can return up to 1,000 rows. You will not run out of curiosity before you run out of credit.

The same lens works on SERPninja's own site, which makes a decent exercise. Compare what the home page collects (377 links) with the niche edits page (291) and the local citations page (107). Then decide whether you would rather buy a pack or learn the pattern first.

Leaf 5: explore first, buy second. The agency will still be there.

A tree that always ends at our product is a brochure. Here is the honest list of where SERPninja is better, or where a data API does not substitute for it.

• You need links placed. We place none. SERPninja publishes a service, a turnaround (6–10 days for niche edits, 1–4 weeks for guest posts) and a refund promise. We publish JSON.
• You need to hand a client a branded report. White-label reporting is the product's centre of gravity. Our API is for builders and has no front end for your customer.
• You want live link data in a dashboard. Theirs sits on the Ahrefs API. Ours is a sample of the public web with roughly monthly refreshes, so it trails commercial crawlers in coverage and freshness.
• You want one vendor to run the whole programme monthly. Their managed plan starts at $500/mo with no contracts. We have no managed anything.
• You need citations, PBN setups or social signals. Listed on their site; none of it exists on ours.

For reputation context, the badge on its own homepage reads “Excellent 4.5 out of 5”, while a SmartCustomer listing, as captured in a search snippet in July 2026, showed 3.6/5 from 17 reviews. Neither number is a verdict, and we have not tested the service ourselves. Read both and form your own view.

The people who should stay put are agencies that already resell and are happy with what they receive. Add a data layer if you want one. Do not rip anything out.

Every branch above, compressed into something you can screenshot and stick on a wall.

Branches can also be combined: a placement from one vendor, an inspection from another. That is a normal arrangement and does not require anyone's blessing.