Links

Links shows a client's link profile and joins it to what CrunchJunkie measures: which of the linking domains AI engines cited in the client's own answers. Open a client and choose Links. It has five views: an overview, referring domains, anchor texts, the client's own pages that links point to, and a link gap against competitors. We have no backlink index of our own. Every figure comes from DataForSEO Backlinks, is stored with the date of the lookup, and is as complete as DataForSEO's crawl, which is not the same as the index of Ahrefs or Semrush. Compare one tool with itself over time, not across tools. DataForSEO Rank and the spam score are DataForSEO's own measures; CrunchJunkie shows them as theirs and never turns them into an authority score of its own.

Choose a view and click Look up. Before you click, the cost preview shows the most the lookup can cost. Nothing is sent to DataForSEO until you click; no report and no page load ever buys a lookup. A report reads what is stored. Links has no free lookups. It runs on one of two accounts, and your own account always comes first. Your own DataForSEO account: DataForSEO bills it directly at its own price, USD 0.024 a request plus USD 0.000036 a row. A pull of 1,000 referring domains costs at most USD 0.06, and a list of 100 anchors or pages at most USD 0.0276 (the price list as read on 2026-10-28). A link gap is one request for each competitor, up to 5. CrunchJunkie adds nothing. A Rank Tracker budget (Billing): each lookup is charged to the budget at twice DataForSEO's price, rounded up to the cent, in your billing currency. Budgets are monthly: €25 (US$29), €50 (US$55), €100 (US$109), €250 (US$275), excluding VAT. The most a lookup can be charged is reserved before it is sent and settled at the real cost; if DataForSEO does not answer, the budget is not charged. A trial's budget can spend at most €5 / US$5. With neither, no lookup runs, and the page offers Connect DataForSEO and Choose a budget. An answer is stored for the workspace and reopening it is free. A new lookup of the same kind can be bought after 7 days, after 30 for a gap.

Referring domains: each domain with DataForSEO Rank (theirs, 0 to 100), backlinks, when DataForSEO first saw a link and when it lost it, the spam score and the follow state. Lost links are listed as lost and never counted as current. Beside each domain, "cited by AI" says whether AI engines cited a page of it in this client's own answers in the last 30 whole UTC days, as answers out of the total. It shows where engines read. It does not show that a link changes what they answer. Link gap: domains that link to up to 5 competitors and not to the client. They are ranked by use: domains AI engines cited come first, then those that link to more of the competitors, then DataForSEO Rank, each with the facts behind its place. Anchor texts: referring domains, backlinks, first seen and spam score for each anchor, with a plain class (brand, URL, generic, descriptive or empty). The class is CrunchJunkie's own heuristic, worked out from the client's name and domain, and is labelled as ours. Pages: the client's own pages with the status DataForSEO last read, title, referring domains and broken backlinks. A page that answers with an error while links point to it is a candidate to reclaim: redirect or restore it. A link list is evidence, not a verdict. Look at it before you act on it.

The weekly spam check is off until you switch it on for a client. It reads the recent link history once, then checks the new linking domains every Monday, under one monthly cap for all the workspace's clients. You choose the cap (1.00, 2.00, 5.00, 10.00 in DataForSEO's US dollars; a Rank Tracker budget is charged at twice DataForSEO's price). When something looks off it raises a Signal. It never disavows anything. Your assistant gets 8 MCP tools: get_link_overview, get_referring_domains, get_link_anchors, get_linked_pages, get_link_gap, get_link_monitor, run_link_lookup and set_link_monitor. The reads use the stored answers and cost nothing. run_link_lookup shows its cost in a preview first and, like switching the spam check on, needs write actions and "Allow actions that spend AI".

Link data is not available for this workspace: connect your own DataForSEO account, or choose a Rank Tracker budget under Billing. Without one of the two, no lookup runs. The budget does not cover the lookup: nothing is sent. Check the cost shown and the budget left, or raise the budget under Billing. The same lookup is already running: wait a moment and reload. DataForSEO did not answer: a budget is not charged for it; run it again in a few minutes. A lookup that came back partly can be retried for the failed part only. Read-only access: viewers can read stored answers but cannot run a lookup.