Bulk Domain Authority Checker: Backlinks & Referring Domains

Check a whole list of domains in one run. Every row carries the domain authority score, total backlinks, referring domains, the dofollow/nofollow split and the gov/edu count. No subscription, no seat licence, no API key to obtain. Pay only for the rows you get back.

What it is for

This Actor is built for breadth: many domains, one row each, no per-link detail. That is the shape you want when the question is comparative rather than forensic.

• score a prospect list or an outreach list before you spend time on it
• rank the domains already linking to a competitor by how much authority they carry
• watch a set of competitors' authority drift over months on a schedule
• vet a marketplace of guest-post or directory offers in one pass
• add an authority column to any spreadsheet of companies you already have

If you need the actual links for one domain, with anchor text and the linking page, use the Backlinks Checker Actor instead. It reads a different index and returns one row per backlink. The two answer different questions, and the per-link list on this Actor's source is gated behind a crawl task that anonymous callers cannot reach, so this Actor does not pretend to offer it.

What every row carries

Field	What it means
domain	Normalized host, no scheme, no www.
domain_authority	Authority score, 0-100
backlinks	Total backlinks in the index
referring_domains	Distinct domains linking in
dofollow_backlinks / nofollow_backlinks	The follow split
dofollow_percent	Dofollow share of all backlinks
referring_domains_gov_edu	Referring domains on .gov or .edu
has_link_profile	False when the source found no links at all
found	False when the source did not answer

Optional: referring-domain authority spread adds referring_domain_authority_distribution, ten buckets from 0-10 to 90-100. New and lost referring domains adds a daily series plus referring_domains_gained and referring_domains_lost.

Read this before you trust a number

referring_domains is the number that matters, not backlinks. One site linking to you 10,000 times is still one relationship. Sitewide footer links inflate backlinks enormously and change referring_domains by exactly one.

The authority score is logarithmic. Moving from 40 to 50 is a far bigger jump than 10 to 20. Treat it as a ranking device for comparing domains against each other, not as a linear quantity you can average.

Two backlink totals are reported and they will disagree, sometimes wildly. backlinks comes from the source's authority endpoint; counts_backlinks comes from its bulk endpoint. On bol.com those read 56,823,549 and 188,552 on the same day. They are two different aggregations over the same index, not a second opinion, and this Actor reports both rather than quietly picking one. Use backlinks as the headline, because it is the figure the authority score is computed against, and treat a large gap as a sign to look closer rather than as an error.

This is not an independent third opinion. Its referring-domain counts track the second index used by the Backlinks Checker Actor closely, within a couple of percent on the same domain the same day. If you want genuinely independent corroboration, run a different source, not this one twice.

What a zero means, and what it does not

The source never reports an unknown domain. A host that does not exist comes back with domain_authority: 1 and every count at 0, which is exactly how it answers a real domain that nobody links to. Because those two are indistinguishable upstream, this Actor sets has_link_profile: false on both and says so rather than implying a verdict it cannot support. If the difference matters to you, check whether the domain resolves separately.

found: false is a different thing: it means the source did not answer for that domain at all. Every metric is then null, never 0.

If the source does not answer at all, the run still succeeds but writes zero rows and sets upstreamReachable: false in the run's OUTPUT record. Nothing is billed.

Speed

Link counts are fetched ten domains per request. The authority score comes from a per-domain call, which is the pace-setter: 100 domains is roughly 110 requests and finishes in well under a minute at the default concurrency. Each optional extra costs one further request per domain.

Input

{
  "domains": ["apify.com", "zapier.com", "make.com"],
  "include_da_distribution": false,
  "include_new_lost": false
}

Full URLs are accepted and reduced to the host. A leading www. is stripped, because the source treats www. as a separate and near-empty profile and leaving it on would hand back an empty result for a domain that has one.

Free plan

On the Apify free plan a run returns at most 10 rows and stops there, and the run's OUTPUT record says so. The Actor stops fetching once it has enough for that limit rather than working through your whole list and discarding most of it. Any paid Apify plan removes the cap.