How are Backlinks Updated?

Backlinks on Semrush can be analyzed in two main areas: Backlink Analytics (for studying competitors) and Backlink Audit (for auditing your own links).

Backlink Analytics

We constantly crawl the web to find new backlinks and add them to our database within an hour of being published. On average it takes around 40 minutes for the Backlink Analytics tool to report a recently appeared link. We update the backlinks data in the interface every 15 minutes. This way, you can monitor your competitor’s new and lost links in a matter of minutes from being created or removed.

Our Backlinks Analytics database is updated to show you the backlinks that our bot saw in the last 6 months of crawling the Internet. We call this “Fresh index.”

All the backlinks data that we have gathered was from our own sources and not through third parties, making our database as accurate as possible. Daily, our bot crawls around 10 billion links, and the database itself is updated every hour. According to this study, Semrush is the fastest at backlink discovery, compared to other tools on the market.

For benchmarking against competitors, you can use Authority Score – our compound metric that measures the impact of a webpage or domain’s links. It is based on actual traffic data and provides clear indications and assessments, which are hard to manipulate.

Backlink Audit

If you run a Backlink Audit campaign, we will gather your initial set of links from our Backlink Analytics reports, going back 3 months from the start of your campaign.

You can re-run your campaign at any moment (1) or schedule an automatic recrawl from the settings menu of the tool (2, 3) to get up-to-date information about your backlink profile.

If you’re analyzing a large domain, Backlink Audit commonly will show a lower number of backlinks than Backlinks Analytics does. You can read more about it in this article: Why does the Backlink Analytics report show more backlinks than Backlink Audit?