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Quick answer: The ahrefs backlink checker reports links that the vendor’s own crawler has found and stored in its index, with proprietary metrics computed from that index. It is a third-party view rather than a view of Google’s data, so its counts and scores need reading in that light and reconciling against your own first-party reports.
This post is written for someone who already has access to the tool and wants to read its output correctly. It is not a review, not a recommendation and not a comparison, and we have no relationship with the vendor. Two deliberate omissions, which matter: we do not state what any plan costs, what any tier includes, or what row and query limits apply, because those change and a blog post is the worst possible source for them. Check the vendor’s own current documentation and the product interface for anything of that kind. What this post does cover is the mechanism, the meaning of the main reports, the honest limits that apply to any third-party link index, and a practical routine for a Singapore SME. If you want the strategic framing rather than the tooling, that sits on our SEO services page.
Ahrefs is an SEO toolset built around a large in-house web crawl. Its crawler is publicly identified as AhrefsBot, and the link data in every report ultimately comes from what that crawler has fetched and stored. The company is headquartered in Singapore, which is a pleasant coincidence for local readers and makes no difference at all to the data.
The important structural fact is the same one that applies to every product in this category. You are querying a third-party index, not Google’s. When a report shows a link, that means the vendor’s crawler fetched the source page, parsed a link out of its HTML and kept the record. When a report does not show a link, that means the crawler has not fetched that page recently enough, could not parse it, has expired it, or has chosen not to prioritise it. Neither outcome is evidence about what Google has counted.
The metrics sit one layer above the index. Domain Rating and URL Rating are the vendor’s own scores describing the link profile of a domain and of a single URL respectively. Both are expressed on a 0 to 100 scale which the vendor describes as logarithmic. We are deliberately not reproducing a formula, partly because the vendor is the only authoritative source for it and partly because the definitions have been refined over the years. Read their documentation for the current description rather than a third-party summary.
There is also a limited, ownership-verified view of the toolset, generally referred to as Ahrefs Webmaster Tools, which requires you to prove you control the domain. What it includes has changed over time, so verify the current scope in the product rather than trusting any article, including this one.
Exact report names, layouts and default filters change between releases, so treat the following as functions rather than menu instructions.
The domain overview. A summary panel: referring domains, total backlinks, Domain Rating, and usually organic keyword and traffic estimates alongside. Useful for orientation in fifteen seconds. Not useful as a report, because everything in it is a derived summary of a partial index.
Referring domains. The list that matters. One row per linking domain, sortable, with the vendor’s per-domain metric attached. This is the report to live in, because domain-level counting is the only link metric stable enough to act on.
Backlinks. One row per link, with anchor text, target URL, rel attributes, page context and first-seen data. Indispensable for verifying a specific placement, misleading as a total because sitewide templates inflate it.
Anchors. The distribution of anchor text across your profile. Read as proportions. A heavy concentration of the same commercial phrase is worth investigating; a long tail of brand and URL anchors is the normal shape.
New and lost links. Acquisition against attrition over time. In our experience this is the single most valuable view in any link tool, because attrition is otherwise invisible, and we have found lost placements here that clients had been reporting as live for the better part of a year.
Broken backlinks. Links pointing at URLs on your site that no longer resolve. This is genuinely free money: the link already exists, and a redirect recovers it. On any site that has been rebuilt or migrated, run this first.
Best by links. Which of your own pages have attracted the most links. Tells you what the web finds worth citing about you, which is usually not your service pages.
Link Intersect. Domains linking to several named competitors but not to you. Powerful in a small market for the reason given further down, and the one report where paying for depth clearly earns its keep.
This is where most of the damage gets done, and none of it is the tool’s fault.
Domain Rating describes a link profile, not a business, a brand or a likelihood of ranking. It is computed from the vendor’s index of links. It does not know your content quality, your relevance to a query, your technical health or your reputation. A site can have a modest score and outrank a higher-scoring one comprehensively, and in local service queries in Singapore that happens routinely.
The scale is not linear, so plans built on it are usually wrong by a large factor. Because the vendor describes the scale as logarithmic, the work implied by each additional point increases as you climb. A plan that promises to take a domain from the low twenties to the high forties inside a year is describing something very different from what the arithmetic of the scale suggests.
It is not a Google metric. No search engine publishes a per-domain authority figure. Most agencies quote a Domain Rating target in proposals because it is a single number that appears to go up and is easy to chart. We would not accept it as a KPI, and the reason is not that the metric is bad. It is that it measures an input, one input, as estimated by a third party, while the thing you are buying is enquiries or revenue. Name the commercial metric and treat the score as diagnostic colour.
URL Rating is more useful than most people realise. Because it is page-level, it tells you whether the specific page you want to rank has any link equity pointing at it, including internally. A service page with almost none, on a domain with a respectable score, is a very common and very fixable pattern, and the fix is internal linking rather than outreach. That is often the fastest movement available on a small site, and it is why link work and technical SEO belong in the same plan.
Spam and traffic estimates are estimates. Organic traffic figures for any domain are modelled from keyword rankings and click-curve assumptions. For Singapore-only sites with modest volumes, the model has little data to work from and the estimates can be well off. Treat them as a relative indicator between similar sites, never as a substitute for analytics.
Expected, not a defect, and worth understanding so you stop chasing it.
| Question you have | Where the tool helps | What you must confirm elsewhere |
|---|---|---|
| Does this placement exist? | Backlinks report, with anchor and rel data | View the page source directly if the row is missing |
| Has Google seen it? | Nowhere in any third-party tool | Google Search Console links report |
| How many domains link to me? | Referring domains, as one credible estimate | Search Console, plus your own placement list |
| Which competitor sources are reachable? | Referring domains and Link Intersect | Open each page and judge it as a human |
| Am I losing links? | New and lost links over time | Your own placement list, checked by hand |
| Is this link sending anyone? | Not at all | Referral data in your analytics |
| Is my profile risky? | Metrics can sort a list | Manual review, and Search Console manual actions |
Three divergences recur. Institutional pages get crawled infrequently, so association member lists, professional registers and .edu.sg pages can be live for months before appearing, or can sit in one index and not another. JavaScript-inserted links may not appear at all; check the raw HTML before concluding the link is not there. Redirected targets are attributed differently by different vendors, so any site with migration history will show gaps that are attribution artefacts rather than losses.
Monthly, roughly an hour, in this order.
Start with broken backlinks and fix them. Existing links pointing at dead URLs are recoverable with a redirect and no outreach at all. On rebuilt sites this is usually the largest single recovery available.
Reconcile referring domains against Search Console and your placement list. Three sources, one number written down with a date, and a note of anything present in one source and absent from the others.
Read new and lost, and act on lost. A removed link is often recoverable with a short, polite email, particularly when the removal was collateral damage from a site rebuild rather than a decision about you.
Check Best by links and ask what it is telling you. If the pages attracting citations are all guides and none are services, that is your content strategy telling you something about what this market actually wants to reference.
Run Link Intersect against two or three real competitors, not aspirational ones. Pick businesses of your size in your city, and judge each domain by opening it. In professional services the reachable sources cluster heavily around directories, professional bodies and local commentary, which is the pattern behind our law firm SEO work.
The same sectors also show the clearest gap between what a metric ranks highly and what a partner would actually be pleased to be cited in, which is the tension our law firm results write-up is built around.
Record one qualified prospect and stop. Sustained over a year in a small market, that is a meaningful share of what is actually available.
This is the part of the picture that global guidance misses entirely, and it changes the value of the tool rather than its accuracy.
The pool of realistic Singapore linking domains is small and countable. Active business and national press, a thin trade-publication layer, statutory boards and agencies, a few dozen tertiary institutions, professional and trade associations, genuinely curated local directories, and the commercial web of suppliers, partners, stockists and clients. That is close to the whole list.
Consequently, Link Intersect saturates fast. Run it against four local competitors in the same niche and the overlap is heavy: the same association, the same two publications, the same three directories. In a large market that report keeps producing names for months. Here, we have generally seen it exhausted within a few weeks of serious work, after which it returns diminishing value and the job changes shape entirely.
When it saturates, the work stops being a search problem. The question becomes what would make a local publication, an association or a partner want to mention you, which is editorial and relationship work that no index can generate. This is the point at which link programmes in Singapore either mature or quietly become busywork.
And the depth features matter less here. Index depth earns its money on long-tail forensics across thousands of domains. When the entire honest profile of a local SME is in the tens, you can open every referring domain by hand in an afternoon and form a better judgement than any score will give you. That is a real advantage of a small market and almost nobody uses it. Where a business has physical locations, the listing and review layer usually outweighs the link layer, which is the argument on our local SEO in Singapore page.
Hospitality is the extreme version, because the aggregators and booking platforms dominate the link graph and there is very little a property can do to change that ranking. How we scope around it is on our hotel SEO page.
Setting a Domain Rating target as the objective. It converts a diagnostic into a goal, and goals attract shortcuts. The shortcut in this case is buying links, which breaches Google’s link spam policies and is worth recognising in its common disguises: fixed monthly link quotas, marketplaces selling placements on unnamed sites, private blog networks presented as publisher relationships, and “guest posting” where the currency is a fee rather than an editorial contribution. A programme that reports a score climbing while enquiries stay flat is the pattern to watch for.
Using a spam score as a reason to disavow. The score is a classification computed by a vendor. Disavow is a blunt instrument that is easy to misapply, and outside a genuine manual action or a documented paid-link history, doing nothing is usually correct.
Reading traffic estimates as traffic. They are modelled. For a Singapore-only site with modest volumes there is not much data underneath the model.
Judging a prospect by its score rather than by reading it. A directory with an impressive number and no editorial standards is worth less than a small, genuinely read local publication with a modest one. Open the page. It takes twenty seconds and it is the most reliable qualification step available. That judgement is the substance of our small business SEO work far more than any tool output is.
Field notes: Our ecommerce case study is the clearest example we have of why the broken and redirected link reports deserve attention before any new acquisition. The WooCommerce home and lifestyle store had 200+ redirect chains created by two prior platform migrations that were silently leaking PageRank, alongside no robots.txt rules blocking the faceted navigation parameters that were generating thousands of duplicate pages. Resolving those chains, submitting a clean sitemap and blocking the faceted parameters in Months 1 to 2 moved product page indexation from 34% to 79%, before any content or authority work had matured. Over the full 9-month programme, which also covered product schema, 15 rewritten category pages and internal linking, Domain Authority went from 11 to 24 and organic monthly revenue from $8,400 to $28,600. A tool like this shows you where existing equity is pointing at dead or redirected URLs. Fixing your own side of that is usually the fastest recovery available, and it needs no outreach at all.
Read as an index query tool, the ahrefs backlink checker does a specific job well: it tells you what its crawler has seen, in detail, with useful filters and a genuinely valuable view of links gained and lost over time. Read as a verdict on your site or as a proxy for Google, it will mislead you, and that is true of every product in the category rather than anything particular to this one.
The trade-off to resolve rather than leave hanging: depth costs money and, in a market this size, buys less than it does elsewhere, because the profile you are studying is small enough to inspect by hand. Resolve it by asking what you need it for. Diagnosing an inherited profile with an unclear history justifies depth for a quarter. Monitoring a profile of forty domains does not, and the honest answer is that Search Console plus a placement list you actually maintain will cover you.
What we would hold to is the reporting line. Report referring domains and named sources, put enquiries next to them, and keep every proprietary score in the diagnostic column where it belongs. Widely repeated advice treats the score as the scoreboard. It is an input estimated by a third party, and the moment it becomes the target, the work bends towards moving a number rather than winning a customer. How that plays out varies sharply by sector, which is why we scope this per vertical across our industry SEO engagements.
It is also why the diagnostic is priced separately on our pricing page. Establishing what a profile actually contains is a finite piece of work with an end point, and it should not be bundled into an open-ended monthly line.
We use this tool daily across client accounts, and in our experience its Domain Rating figure gets over-read by business owners who treat it as a Google metric rather than a third-party index score. Our team always cross-references a flagged toxic link against Search Console before recommending a disavow, because in our experience Ahrefs’ own crawler sometimes surfaces a link Google never actually counted.
There is an ownership-verified view of parts of the toolset, generally called Ahrefs Webmaster Tools, which requires you to prove you control the domain you are checking. What it includes has changed over time and is a matter for the vendor’s current documentation rather than this article, so check there before planning around it. Separately, treat any third-party post that states specific limits or prices with caution, including older ones that were accurate when written.
The vendor is the authoritative source and publishes its own description, which has been refined over the years, so read that rather than a summary. What is useful to know from outside is the shape: it is a 0 to 100 score describing the link profile of a domain, computed from the vendor’s own index, and the vendor describes the scale as logarithmic, meaning each additional point represents more work than the last. It is not a Google metric and not comparable to any other vendor’s score.
Different sources with different jobs. Search Console reports a capped, deduplicated sample of what Google recorded for a domain you own. A third-party index reports what its own crawler fetched and retained. Institutional pages that are crawled infrequently, links inserted by JavaScript and links to redirected URLs are the three categories where the gap is widest. Neither source is wrong; they are answering different questions.
Usually deduplication and retention. A sitewide footer link across thousands of pages may be counted per page in one view and collapsed in another, and some indexes retain removed links for a period and flag them rather than dropping them. Compare referring domains rather than total backlinks and the two sources usually come much closer together.
Use it to generate candidates and to rank them within itself, then qualify by reading the pages. The ordering a metric produces and the ordering a human produces diverge most on directories with high scores and no editorial standards, and on small local publications with modest scores that are genuinely read by your market. In our experience the human ordering predicts commercial outcomes better, particularly in Singapore where a mention in a niche trade publication reaches a large share of the addressable buyers.
For an established site, broken backlinks, because it identifies links you already have that point at dead URLs, and a redirect recovers them without any outreach. For an ongoing programme, new and lost links, because attrition is otherwise invisible and a profile can shrink while a report shows activity. Neither is the report most people open first, which tends to be the overview panel, and the overview panel is the least actionable thing in the product.
It can show you patterns that are consistent with it: a cluster of links appearing in a narrow window, from unrelated domains, with commercially exact anchor text, on sites with no editorial presence and a history of similar outbound patterns. That is circumstantial and it is not your business to adjudicate. The practical use is defensive: recognise the pattern so you can tell the difference between a competitor who is genuinely well cited and one whose profile is manufactured, and do not try to copy the second.
Reasonably, with two caveats. Institutional and association pages, which make up a large share of the legitimate local pool, are crawled less frequently than commercial pages, so local profiles weighted towards them are understated. And traffic estimates for Singapore-only sites with modest volumes have limited data behind them. The link-level data is usable; the modelled figures should be treated as relative rather than absolute.
Not necessarily. Search Console covers your own profile and nothing else. If your questions are about competitors, about links gained and lost over time, or about diagnosing an inherited profile, a third-party index adds something Search Console cannot. If your questions are only about your own site and your profile is small, Search Console plus a maintained placement list is a defensible setup and the money is better spent on the work.
No, and assuming otherwise is one of the more expensive wrong beliefs in local SEO. Plenty of page-one results for local service queries sit on domains with modest scores, because relevance, local signals, clear page-level targeting and technical health are doing the work. The useful test is empirical: look at who currently ranks for your queries and note their scores. If they are unremarkable, the link profile is not what is standing between you and page one.
If you have the data in front of you and are not sure what it is telling you, we will run a free initial review, reconcile the third-party index against your Search Console data and your own placement list, and hand back a domain-level picture with the sources named in plain language. You keep the findings regardless. Get in touch with your domain and the competitors you want compared.
Natalie leads SEO strategy at Singapore SEO Agency, helping local and regional businesses build organic search programmes that drive qualified leads. She specialises in technical SEO and content-led authority building for Singapore SMEs.
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