What is Link Graph?

A link graph is a complete map of a domain's backlink profile pulled from an external, independently-crawled index — covering not just the links that send traffic, but the, usually much larger, share of links that don't. Referral-traffic detection alone only ever sees the links people actually click; a link graph fills in the rest.

A typical link-graph refresh returns three things: a profile summary (total referring domains and inbound links, how many are dofollow, and overall domain authority), lost links (domains the index no longer sees linking to you, including ones that never sent a click), and a competitor gap — domains that link to at least one tracked competitor but not to you, ranked by how many competitors they link to and by their own authority, which is close to a ready-made outreach list.

Because it depends on a paid external index rather than data a product already collects, a link-graph refresh is usually the one part of a backlink toolset that costs money to run — typically refreshed on a schedule, like weekly, rather than continuously, with an option to force an on-demand refresh when needed.