The Links report is a section of Google Search Console that shows a sample of the links Google has found pointing to and within your website: which external sites link to you, which of your pages attract the most links and what anchor text is used. It is the only view of your links that comes from Google itself, and it costs nothing.
How the Links report works
You open it from Links in the Search Console menu. At the time of writing (October 2026) it is split into two halves:
- External links: top linked pages on your site, top linking sites and top linking text. The linking sites are grouped by domain, so the list is effectively your referring domains.
- Internal links: your pages ranked by how many links they receive from elsewhere on your own site.
The export button offers the latest links, with the date Google first crawled each one, or a larger sample. The data is refreshed periodically rather than live, so a link you earned this week may take some time to appear.
Three limits shape how you read it. It shows a sample, not every link Google knows about. It does not say which links Google values, ignores or treats as spam. And it only covers the property you are looking at: a URL-prefix property for https://www misses links to other versions of your address, while a domain property covers them all.
Why it matters
For most UK small businesses, the external half answers a practical question: have the links you worked for actually been found? A write-up in the local paper, a listing from your trade association or a supplier’s stockist page can all appear here in time. Because the report is a sample, a missing link is not proof of a problem, but if an important one is still absent after a couple of months, check that the page is live, crawlable and not linking with a nofollow or redirect you did not expect.
The internal half is often more useful than people expect. If your most important service page sits near the bottom of the internal list, your own site is telling Google it matters less than pages such as your privacy policy. That is a problem good internal linking fixes quickly and for free.
The anchor text list is a quick sense check, too. Natural links mostly use your brand name or plain descriptions. A long run of identical keyword-rich anchors is worth investigating, because it often points to links that were bought or built artificially at some point.
Common mistakes
- Treating the totals as a complete count of your backlinks.
- Comparing the figures directly with Ahrefs or Semrush, which use their own crawlers and count differently.
- Panicking over odd links from scraper sites and rushing to build a disavow file. Google ignores most of these without your help.
- Using a single URL-prefix property and missing links to the other versions of the site.
- Ignoring the internal links section entirely.
How to act on it
Once a month, export the latest external links and sort by first crawled date to see what is new. Check the top linked pages: if links point to pages that now redirect or return a 404, redirect or restore them so the value is not wasted. Look at which pages earn links naturally, because that tells you what kind of content people in your sector are willing to cite.
Then list your main service pages and check where they sit in the internal links table. Add contextual links from relevant posts and guides to any that are undersupplied. Use a third-party tool alongside Search Console when you need a fuller picture of competitors.
If the report shows few relevant sites linking to you, that gap is what link building is meant to close.