TEARDOWN 58 · REVIEWED 2026-08-20
Linkody
Linkody tracks the backlinks you tell it to watch — your own site's and competitors' — checking daily whether each link is still live, nofollow, or gone, and alerting you to changes. It displays Ahrefs, Moz, and Majestic authority scores alongside its own data rather than computing its own.
Linkody's own crawler mainly re-checks and discovers links for the domains you tell it to track, while the Domain Rating, Domain Authority, and Trust Flow/Citation Flow scores it displays are licensed straight from Ahrefs, Moz, and Majestic — the same rentable data anyone can pay those vendors for directly.
What you lose building it yourself
- ✕24/7 automatic monitoring and email alerts across every tracked domain and competitor
- ✕One dashboard blending Ahrefs, Moz, and Majestic authority scores without separate subscriptions to each
- ✕Built-in competitor backlink-gap discovery (Link Intersect) already wired in
Why people still pay
Reproducing this yourself means running the daily fetch job forever and paying separately for Ahrefs, Moz, and Majestic API access to get the same authority scores Linkody bundles into one subscription and one dashboard.
A DIY BACKLINK MONITOR
An AI coding tool can build a script that stores a list of known backlink URLs, periodically re-fetches each source page to confirm the link is still there, and alerts on changes — a weekend build. Discovering brand-new backlinks you didn't already know about, and matching Ahrefs/Moz/Majestic-grade authority scores, means paying for the same third-party data those vendors sell, not building it from scratch.
StackPython + requests/BeautifulSoup for periodic re-fetch and link-presence checks · a scheduler (cron) · SQLite or a spreadsheet for status history · the Moz API or a bulk backlink-data API (e.g., DataForSEO) for authority scores and new-link discovery · a transactional email API for alerts.
Build a Python script that reads a CSV of (source_url, target_url, anchor_text) rows representing backlinks to monitor. Once a day via cron, fetch each source_url (respect robots.txt, 5-second timeout, retry once on failure), search the HTML for a link to target_url, and record whether it's present, its rel attribute (nofollow/sponsored/ugc/none), and whether the anchor text changed. Store results with timestamps in a SQLite database, and on any status change (link lost, rel changed, anchor changed) send an email alert via a transactional email API. Cap the run at 1,000 tracked links to stay within a reasonable daily runtime.
Similar tools
Free alternative: Google Search Console — shows which pages link to your own site for free, but only for sites you verify ownership of — it won't monitor competitor backlinks, alert you when a link goes nofollow or disappears, or show Ahrefs/Moz/Majestic authority scores the way Linkody does
QUESTIONS
Does Linkody run its own crawler, or license backlink data?
Both — Linkody's own crawler discovers and re-checks links for the specific domains you track (its blog cites 865,000 links monitored across all customers combined), while the Domain Rating, Domain Authority, and Trust Flow/Citation Flow scores shown alongside are licensed from Ahrefs, Moz, and Majestic rather than built in-house.
Is there a free trial?
Linkody's site advertises a 30-day free trial; the pricing page doesn't state whether a card is required to start one.
What counts toward a plan's link limit (500, 2,000, and so on)?
The number of individual backlinks being actively monitored, not the number of websites — the Webmaster plan covers 2 sites and up to 500 tracked links combined, scaling up through Agency XL's 100 sites and 50,000 links.