How to do a backlink audit
A backlink audit asks three questions: who links to us, is any of it doing anything, and is any of it a liability. Ahrefs does not sell a product called "Backlink Audit" — the work is split across their Backlink Checker and Site Explorer — and the free half of the job can be done from an open dataset, as long as you know which question that dataset can answer.
The three questions, and which tool answers which
Who links to us. A list of referring domains. This is the cheapest question and the one an open dataset answers well.
Is it doing anything. Whether those links carry authority, and whether the pages they point at are the ones you want ranking. This needs a link index with page-level detail and a metric attached to it.
Is any of it a liability. The disavow question — the one people reach for first and need least. Search engines discount obvious spam automatically; a disavow file submitted on a hunch can remove links that were helping you. Unless you have bought links or inherited a domain with a known history, the honest answer is usually "leave it".
What Ahrefs actually offers here
Backlink Checker — in their words, "check backlinks to any site", drawing on what they describe as the world's biggest index of live backlinks. There is a free tier. This is the page-level view: individual linking URLs and anchor text.
Site Explorer — their description is "analyze ANY website's organic traffic, AI visibility, backlink profile, and paid traffic". This is the paid, full version of the same data with the metrics and filtering attached.
If what you need is every linking URL with its anchor text, that is what a commercial backlink index is for and there is no free substitute for it. Docket does not have one and is not going to pretend otherwise.
What an open link graph can tell you
Common Crawl publishes a hyperlink graph of the web — 118.0 million domains in the
cc-main-2026-may-jun-jul release. docket backlinks example.com reads it directly:
docket backlinks example.com --referringIt streams the graph rather than downloading it, so nothing is written to disk, one pass serves every domain you pass on the command line, and there are no credits to spend. On a real site — screamingfrog.co.uk — the graph shows 12,411 referring domains.
The limit, stated plainly: this is a domain-level graph. It tells you that one domain links to another. It does not give you the linking page, the anchor text, the link's first-seen date, or whether it is nofollow. Those are page-level facts and they are not in this dataset at any price.
So it answers question one properly and question two partially — enough to compare your referring-domain count against a competitor's, which is the comparison most people actually want and the one they usually pay a subscription to make once. Domain authority without a subscription covers the metric side of that: what the ranking derived from this graph means, and what it deliberately cannot tell you.
The order to do it in
1. Count before you read. Get your referring-domain count and two competitors'. If you are within the same order of magnitude, links are probably not your constraint and the audit can stop here — which is a genuinely useful outcome and the one nobody sells you.
2. Check what the links point at. Referring domains pointing only at your homepage is a different problem from links spread across your content, and it is fixable by choosing what you promote rather than by acquiring more links.
3. Check the pages are still there. An earned link pointing at a URL you retired is authority arriving at a 404. This is the most common repairable finding in a backlink audit and it costs one redirect — Docket's crawl reports the broken internal targets, and your server log shows the external ones actually being requested.
4. Only then consider disavow. And usually decide against it.
What Docket does and does not do here
Docket reads the public graph for referring-domain counts and a comparative ranking, on your machine, with no subscription. It has no backlink index of its own, no anchor-text data, no disavow workflow, and no opinion about link quality. Those are the parts a commercial index exists for, and if they are what your week needs, buy one — the comparison against Ahrefs Site Audit is about the crawling half only, and says the same thing about their link data.
What Docket audits properly is what is on your own site: the technical audit across every check it runs, including the internal link structure that decides where authority goes once it arrives — see internal link equity. A link profile you cannot use because the pages it points at are thin or unreachable is a content and crawling problem wearing a backlink costume.
Common questions
Does Ahrefs have a backlink audit tool?
Not under that name. Checked across their pricing, Site Audit, Backlink Checker and Site Explorer pages, the phrase does not appear. The work people mean by “backlink audit” is done with Backlink Checker for individual links and Site Explorer for the full profile.
Can I audit backlinks for free?
Partly. Common Crawl's public hyperlink graph gives referring domains at the domain level, which answers “who links to us” and lets you compare your count against a competitor's. It does not give linking URLs, anchor text or nofollow status — those need a commercial backlink index.
Should I disavow bad backlinks?
Usually not. Search engines discount obvious spam on their own, and a disavow file submitted on a hunch can remove links that were helping. The case for it is narrow: links you or a predecessor bought, or a domain with a known history.
What is the difference between a domain-level and a page-level link graph?
A domain-level graph records that one domain links to another. A page-level index records which URL links to which URL, with the anchor text. The first is enough to count referring domains and compare sites; the second is what you need to look at an individual link.
What is the most common fixable finding in a backlink audit?
An earned link pointing at a URL that no longer exists. The authority arrives at a 404 and one redirect recovers it. It is worth checking before anything more ambitious, because it costs almost nothing and nobody is selling it to you.