Call seo.backlinks with a domain and a limit, over REST or from an agent, and get JSON back: the domain's rank, total backlinks, referring domains and IPs, and a list of links with the source URL, anchor text, dofollow flag, rank and first seen date. One RouterGrowth key, no SEO tool subscription.
Ask your agent
Pull 50 backlinks for our competitor's domain and list the referring sites that do not link to us.
Connect RouterGrowth once, then ask in plain words. New workspaces start with $1 of credit. Get a key or read the setup guide.
A real run
One call to seo.backlinks (backlinks & referring domains), run through RouterGrowth on October 19, 2026. These are the first rows it returned; fields that name a person are masked.
| domain_from | anchor | dofollow | first_seen |
|---|---|---|---|
| www.discourse.org | Plausible | True | 2023-12-27 |
| string.is | Analytics | True | 2022-03-24 |
| erlef.org | Site Analytics | True | 2021-07-24 |
Ten links for a privacy-first analytics domain, out of 637,391 backlinks from 16,674 referring domains in the summary; many sit on privacy policy pages and footers.
Step by step
Create a RouterGrowth API key. The same key covers SEO, enrichment and the other capabilities.
Send capability seo.backlinks with domain and limit, plus a max_cost.
rank, backlinks_total, referring_domains, referring_domains_nofollow and referring_ips describe the profile.
Each item in backlinks has url_from, domain_from, url_to, anchor, dofollow, rank, domain_rank and first_seen.
Price
List prices on this call, read from the catalog when this page was built. The exact figure is quoted before every run, and a monthly plan lowers it.
In practice
You describe the job; the agent picks the calls, shows the price and runs them.
Pull 50 backlinks for our competitor's domain and list the referring sites that do not link to us.
Compare the referring domain counts of these four domains and tell me which one grew its links this year.
Find our main SEO competitors, then get the top backlinks of each.
Connect
One MCP server for Claude, ChatGPT, Claude Code, Codex and Cursor, or the same call over the CLI and REST with the input above.
claude mcp add --transport http routergrowth https://api.routergrowth.com/mcp
npm install -g routergrowth && routergrowth setup
routergrowth run -c seo.backlinks -i '{"domain": "plausible.io", "limit": 10}'curl -X POST https://api.routergrowth.com/v1/run \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $ROUTERGROWTH_API_KEY" \
-d '{"capability": "seo.backlinks", "input": {"domain": "plausible.io", "limit": 10}}'Worth knowing
The totals cover the whole profile. The links list holds up to your limit, ordered by rank.
A call is one charge plus a small amount per link returned. The quote shows before the run.
Anchors tell you how other sites describe the domain, as in the example where most read Plausible or Analytics.
FAQ
The call runs on DataForSEO's backlink index through RouterGrowth.
Each link has a dofollow flag, so filter the list in your code or ask the agent to.
It returns the current links with first seen dates. Tracking losses means comparing two runs over time.
The call takes a domain.
More on SEO
Reading this as an agent? This page as markdown: /tools/seo/backlink-api.md
Connect your agent once. The first calls run on the $1 that comes with signup.