Backlink Monitoring
What it is, what you pay, and what you actually get.
What it refuses to do
It will not find you a paid placement
“This reply asks for payment in exchange for a link. I will not write that response.”
It will not say a page is unlinked when it could not read it
“Unchecked: this page returned 403 and was not read.”
It will not send from a domain of ours
“No mailbox connected. Three drafts are ready and none of them has been sent.”
On this page5 sections
What backlink monitoring actually is
A backlink monitor has two jobs. It finds new links pointing to your domain. It also tells you when an existing link disappears. The value is in the change. A new link is a potential source of traffic or a ranking signal. A lost link might mean a page was taken down, a site changed hands, or a link was deliberately removed.
Every tool promises this. The difference is in how they do the finding. Most rely on a proprietary web crawl, a database of links they have discovered across the internet. When you use these tools, you are querying their snapshot of the web, which can be days or weeks old. They report what their crawler saw, not what is live now.
A smaller set of tools, including Mentionry, performs a live check. It loads the page in a real browser at the moment you ask. This means you see the link exactly as a visitor would, on the exact page it exists, with the exact anchor text. A live check cannot be fooled by a cached copy.
What the market provides and what it costs
The established players are Ahrefs, Semrush, Moz, and Majestic. Their pricing is public. Ahrefs charges $99 a month for its standard plan. Semrush starts at $129.95 a month. Moz Pro is $99 a month. These are suite tools. You pay for a bundle of features: keyword research, rank tracking, site audits, and the link database.
There are also cheaper, dedicated monitors. Monitor Backlinks costs $29.99 a month. Linkody is $14.99 a month. These focus purely on the link-tracking function. They typically rely on their own, smaller crawls or purchased data.
Every one of these tools sells access to its database. You are not buying live data for every link. You are buying a report generated from their last scan. This is a crucial distinction. It means a link reported as 'lost' might still be there, but their crawler did not see it this time. It also means a 'new' link might have been placed months ago and only just indexed in their system.
The risks and trade-offs in a database model
When your monitor is a database, you inherit its blind spots. If the tool does not crawl a particular forum, news site, or directory, links there will never appear in your report. The tool is not lying. It is showing you its world, which is not the whole web.
A more serious risk is false loss alerts. Database tools compare one crawl to the next. If a page was temporarily down, if the crawler was blocked, or if the link is embedded in JavaScript that the crawler does not execute, the tool may log that link as lost. You then waste time investigating a problem that does not exist.
The trade-off is volume for precision. Database tools can show you thousands of links quickly because they are pulling from a pre-computed index. A live check is slower and more resource-intensive. It gives you perfect information for each link you check, but you cannot feasibly check a million links that way. Therefore, no serious tool uses only live checks for massive historical datasets. They use them for verification.
How to judge a monitoring provider
First, ask how they find the links. Do they rely solely on their own crawl? Do they buy data from other crawls? Do they offer a live verification step? The honest ones will tell you.
Second, check what they report. A good monitor shows you the specific URL of the page containing the link, the anchor text used, and whether the link carries a 'nofollow' attribute. It should also show the domain authority or a similar metric of the linking site, so you can gauge its likely impact.
Third, test the loss alerts. Find a stable, old link to your site in the tool. Note it. Then, ask the tool to check it again right now. Does it perform a fresh, live check, or does it simply re-report the cached data? A true monitor should be able to verify the current state on demand.
Finally, understand the update frequency. If the tool's database updates every 30 days, you will be the last to know about a new link. Some tools update weekly or daily for higher-tier plans. The update schedule is often in the pricing table.
What Mentionry does differently
Mentionry is not a database tool. It does not maintain a proprietary index of the web's links. When you give it a domain, it finds that domain's current backlinks by querying a mix of public and commercial indexes. Then, for every link it finds, it performs a live check from your browser.
This live check does three things. It confirms the link is truly there. It captures the exact page it is on, which can differ from the page the index reported. It reads the anchor text and 'rel' attributes directly from the live HTML. This is the report you see: a verified link, on a verified page, with verified attributes.
The second difference is in tracking change. Mentionry does not just alert you to a lost link. It shows you the history. You can see when the link was first verified, and every subsequent check. If a link is one day changed from 'dofollow' to 'nofollow', that is reported as a change, not a loss. If it is removed, you see the date of removal. This turns a simple alert into an audit trail.
The third difference is integration with outreach. Mentionry's primary function is finding new link opportunities. Its monitoring exists to serve that. When you pursue a link and it is placed, Mentionry adds it to your monitored set. You then watch it to see if it sticks. The tool connects the act of earning a link to the act of preserving it.
Questions people actually ask
Why would I need a separate tool to monitor backlinks?
Google Search Console shows some links, but its data is limited and can be months behind. A dedicated monitor checks more sources, updates more frequently, and is designed specifically to alert you to changes. If your business depends on referral traffic or search rankings, a dedicated tool gives you a clearer and faster picture of your link profile.
Can I just use a free backlink checker?
You can, for a one-time snapshot. Free tools like the ones from Ahrefs or Semrush give you a sample of data. They are useful for a quick look. They are not useful for monitoring because they do not track changes over time or send you alerts. Monitoring implies continuous observation, which is the paid product.
How often should my backlinks be checked?
For stable, established sites, a weekly check is often sufficient. New sites or sites actively building links might benefit from daily checks. The important factor is not just frequency, but reliability. A daily check that uses stale data is less useful than a weekly check that verifies each link live. Choose a tool whose checking method you trust.
What is the biggest mistake people make with backlink monitoring?
The biggest mistake is focusing only on quantity. Watching the total number of links go up or down is less important than understanding which specific links changed. Losing one link from a major industry site can be more significant than gaining ten links from low-quality directories. A good monitor helps you focus on the important changes by showing you the authority of each linking domain.
Run this against your own domain
Give it a domain and it works out who you compete with, mines the pages that link to them and not to you, judges every opening one at a time, and writes the email, the form or the reply. It sends them from your own mailbox, so the replies come to you.
Find out what your domain is missing
Qualifying a domain is free and it is the honest first question: some sites have a pool worth mining and some have nothing to mine and everything to earn. Run that first.
One plan. There is no cheaper rung with things taken out of it.
- Both engines, all fourteen channels
- Every opening judged one at a time, with the reason kept
- The email, the form or the reply drafted for each one
- Sent from your own mailbox, so the replies come to you
- Nine connectors that need no key and no account of yours
- Marketplaces and paid placements filtered out, twice