Runbook
A backlinks watcher routine for one small shop
You do not need a dashboard subscription to watch your links. You need a spreadsheet, a free lookup and a fixed day of the month.
Pick one day, such as the first Tuesday. Link counts change slowly and our index refreshes about once a month, so checking more often only measures noise.
The runbook, in order
- 1
Open last month's row
Your sheet has one row per month: date, your DR, your referring domains, and the same two numbers for three rivals. Add a blank row for today.
- 2
Look up your domain
Use the free box on the home page. Copy DR and referring domains into the new row. Do not touch anything else yet.
- 3
Look up the three rivals
Pick the three businesses AI tools or Google name most often for your town. The same lookup, the same two columns.
- 4
Do the arithmetic once
Subtract last month from this month, for each site. A change of a handful of domains means nothing. Dozens on one site means something happened.
- 5
Write one sentence
For example: rival B gained 40 referring domains, probably a directory feature. If you cannot explain a jump, flag it and move on.
- 6
Ask three AI tools one question
Use the question a customer would type. Log which domains each tool cites, with the date. Then close the sheet.
What a change usually means
| What you see | Likely story | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| Your referring domains fell by a few | Normal churn: sites close, pages move | Nothing |
| Your count fell by a quarter or more | A site that linked to you vanished, or our refresh caught a gap | Check again next month before acting |
| A rival jumped by 30 or more | A press mention, a directory listing, a sponsorship | Find out which; do not copy blindly |
| Everyone's DR drifts up by one | The log scale moves as the graph grows | Ignore; compare to rivals only |
| You rose but AI tools still skip you | Links were not the blocker | Open the troubleshooting table |
What goes in the sheet every month
- The date and the day of the month you always check
- Your DR and referring-domain count
- The same two numbers for three named rivals
- The question you asked the AI tools, word for word
- Which domains each tool cited, and which tool it was
- One sentence on anything odd, even if it turns out to be nothing
- A note of what you changed on your own site since last month
A few rules we follow
Never compare DR across tools. Ours is round(100 · log(ref_domains+1) / log(2·10^7)), our own metric, so a 34 here is not a 34 in Ahrefs or a Moz Domain Authority of 34.
Resist the urge to react. A bakery that gained six referring domains in October has not changed its position, and the owner who rewrites the homepage after every wobble will never learn which change did what.
Keep two tabs: one for numbers, one for notes. When Google rolls out a core update, such as the one in March 2025, add its date to the notes tab so you can tell later whether a wobble lines up with it.
Keep the sheet boring. The moment it grows twelve columns, you will stop opening it. Two numbers per site is enough.
If you manage more than a few sites, the API credit page shows how one bulk call can fill every row at once. Each call costs one credit, which is $0.0001.
Done in half an hour, in 2026 or any year after it.
