How to Check Backlinks in Google Analytics (GA4) in 2025
Backlink analysis helps determine the effectiveness and quality of external promotion. If links from external resources are clicked and bring visitors to your site, this process doesn’t go unnoticed by search engines — they give more value to your backlinks and more authority to your website.
The whole point behind link-building (the process of placing backlinks) is to get link equity and as many user clicks as possible. Checking backlinks helps determine the presence of traffic through links, evaluate the effectiveness of your backlink profile, and, if necessary, change the entire off-page SEO strategy.
But how do you check backlinks? A free tool from Google called Google Analytics will help with this.
Check Backlinks in Google Analytics (TOC):
Checking Backlinks in Google Analytics — An Illustrated 5-Step Guide
Google Analytics 4 (GA4) is the latest analytics platform developed by Google. It is a powerful all-in-one solution for tracking and analyzing user interactions and behavior on a website or a mobile app.
The GA4 version is free, while there is also a GA360, which is paid and has many more functions. However, for the purpose of checking backlinks and their traffic, GA4 does the job just fine.
So, back to the business — let’s see how you can effectively check backlinks in Google Analytics version four in five simple steps.
- Start creating a report by opening and logging into your Google Analytics account.
A dedicated report, “Traffic Acquisition,” under the “Acquisition” tab in Google Analytics, tracks the most effective sources. In essence, it allows you to create a number of detailed sub-reports that help analyze your website’s traffic, including sorting by backlinks.
While you are in the “Acquisition” menu, select the “Traffic acquisition” section:
- To get a summary of external transitions, click “All traffic” and then “Transitions.”
The summary of traffic sources can track and systematize data on sources and their channels. The resulting report is built from a graphical overview and a table:
Pro tip: Explore advanced options around how to create reports and graphs with backlinks in Google Analytics. With proper data visualization tools, crafting a stunning report on your own will not be a problem.
To avoid separation by search engines, networks, and other sources, all inbound transitions are grouped based on the total number of visitors to the site.
Traffic sources are made up of each user’s transition to the site. Such sources can vary significantly and may include:
- Search engines
- Address of the original website
- Newsletters
- Direct access
- Others
- Use the search bar above the table to input ‘referral’ and narrow down your backlinks’ traffic sources.
Note that your transition channels can also vary. These may include:
- Regular organic search (organic)
- Paid advertising (PPC)
- Transition or referral
- The name of the user channel created by you
- Direct traffic
There is also an option to create a summary by configuring it through the menu under the graph. The settings in the summary allow you to create reports on sources, campaigns, keywords, ad content, and entry pages.
- To view traffic sources specifically by links, select the “Session Source” section, which displays where the traffic came from, including UTM tags.
You can also set the period for which you analyze traffic. There are special buttons in the upper right corner of the graph for this. Select a concrete date or a range starting with the year.
- Analyze the resulting table.
High bounce rates for your backlink and the absence of further clicks should alert you.
Separately analyze backlinks that don’t yield further clicks and try to find out the reason for this behavior. It is possible that the donor website’s topic does not match yours, the wrong anchor text was used, or there is any other problem.
In addition, pay attention to the following key aspects in your table with data:
- Whether there is traffic at all, and if there is, what is the quality of the available traffic?
- Mind the links from which visitors came and the results of clicking on them.
- The bounce rate, the number of visited pages, and the duration of the session indicate the quality of the traffic received.
- Backlinks that lead to conversions are of the greatest value to your website, and ideally, you should always strive to have backlinks that convert.
If you conducted internal control when publishing backlinks to the website, in which donors and placement pages were recorded, you must already know which resources have active links.
To analyze traffic for a specific link, use the search option:
Based on your analysis, find out which links bring the best traffic. Follow them and establish the probable reason for such success.
Aim to understand why users move from the donor site to yours and why they choose to stay on it. With detailed data at hand, you can focus on publishing the most effective backlinks, which will significantly affect the quality of your SEO promotion.
Pro tip: If you find it difficult to evaluate the effectiveness and find opportunities to develop your backlink mass, consider analyzing your direct competitor’s backlinks first. Those can give you plenty of insights and ideas on how to move on with your backlinks.
Why Some Links Fail to Drive Quality Traffic (And How to Fix It)
Finding backlinks in Google Analytics that bring you traffic but with an inflated bounce rate for your topic requires special attention.
What can you do to improve the traffic quality and reduce bounce rate? Well, actually, several things.
Topic Synchronization
First and foremost, make sure that the donor website’s content matches yours and the backlink looks harmonious in the text. It doesn’t make much sense to place backlinks on a website about gardening and yard work when your website is focused on economics or healthcare.
Search engines tend to give more credit to the traffic that goes from sources with similar topics and themes to the “hosting” site.
Backlink Placement in the Text
The importance of the location of the link inside the target text is hard to overestimate. The user must clearly see the backlink to click and not accidentally stumble upon it while reading.
Therefore, it is advisable to place links in the first part of the page, especially when it comes to reviews.
The golden rule is to place backlinks in the first third/first half of the article but not in the introduction or the conclusion. If you need to place several backlinks inside a text, make sure you separate those in the text’s space, e.g., one link per paragraph or one link per section/chapter.
Analyzing Backlinks For Failures to Bring Traffic
Not all links lead to a transition to the site, so you also need to conduct an online analysis of external links that do not bring traffic. In doing so, follow these guidelines:
- First, you should go through such links and make sure that they still contain a functional hyperlink to your site.
- Find out the causes of malfunctioning backlinks. Some hyperlinks may be broken due to a variety of reasons (e.g., internal restructuring of the website’s architecture). It’s in your best interest to locate broken links and suggest perfectly functional links instead.
- Once you’ve established that your link is functional, analyze how convenient it is for the user to find it. Is the surrounding content suitable for the topic of the backlink/anchor text?
These actions do not guarantee you clicks (on your backlinks), but they surely increase such a probability.
Pro tip: Monitor competitors for broken backlinks and offer your functional links as replacements to capture lost traffic and boost your Domain Authority (DA).
Unfortunately, GA4 doesn’t have the functionality for autonomously detecting broken links. Instead, you should rely on specialized tools like SEMrush or Ahrefs.
Are All Backlinks That Bring Traffic Good?
This is more of a rhetorical question. Of course, not all backlinks with stable traffic are good. Some may come from unrelated domains, and the traffic they bring along is not the one you need.
Moreover, in leveraging Google Analytics for backlinks analysis, you may discover unwanted or even harmful traffic to your website:
- Referral spam — sending irrelevant traffic to your website with the sole goal of creating backlinks, not bringing real users.
- Click fraud — this one is even more dangerous, as it is associated with malicious actors or bots clicking on your paid ads (if you run PPC campaigns) to deplete your advertising budget.
- Low-quality traffic — the sort of traffic that doesn’t bring visitors that convert, as they simply have no or little interest in your services or products.
- Bot traffic — unfortunately, bots generate more online traffic than humans these days, and they will not increase the authority of your website in the eyes of search engines.
- Fake social media traffic — last but not least, fake social media traffic doesn’t bring much value, artificially boosting your traffic values for no real benefit.
Among rising data privacy concerns in SEO and link building, you should be vigilant about spammy directories, link farms, paid link schemes, hacked and scraper websites, and other pest domains. Those can generate harmful backlink “juice” to your website.
How can you get rid of such malicious and low-value traffic? By filtering out unwanted domains that generate such traffic in the first place.
Filtering Out Unwanted Domains
The first thing that needs to be mentioned here is that there are no automated ways to detect unwanted domains. Upon finding backlinks in Google Analytics, you must rely on your experience and a keen eye when performing backlink checks for traffic quality.
Pro Tip: To quickly and efficiently identify the referring domains to exclude, you can sort all domains by metrics like Engagement rate, Bounce rate, or Conversions. This will enable you to identify suspicious or low-quality traffic sources. In any case, you cannot avoid the manual process of exclusion.
Once you decide on the domains you want to exclude, do the following:
- Go to the Admin menu at the bottom left corner of the GA4 platform.
- Select the Data Streams tab.
- Scroll down to the “Google tag” section.
- Select “Configure tag settings,” located under the “Google Tag section.”
- Finally, click on “Show more” and then on “List unwanted referrals.”
In this final step, you’ll need to add all the unwanted domains that generate low-quality or unwanted backlink traffic to your website. The process is manual and can take some time.
Pro Tip: You can copy-paste the domain names from the list to avoid typing domain names and making accidental mistakes/typos.
The above procedure will ensure the domains you exclude will not bring unwanted traffic to your website. This process resembles the one when users need to add unwanted domain names to the antivirus software.
Backlinks in Google Analytics (FAQ)
1. Can GA4 tell me which backlinks drive conversions?
Yes, GA4 tracks referral traffic from backlinks. While it cannot give you a comprehensive overview of your backlink profile, it can still analyze individual backlinks very effectively. GA4 allows you to set up conversion tracking and determine which links contribute to revenue or other goals.
2. How do I filter out low-quality backlinks in GA4?
GA4 doesn’t offer a direct low-quality backlink filter, but you can exclude spammy referral domains using data filters in the Admin settings. For example, you can exclude external spammy domains and internal unwanted links/relative URLs.
3. What’s the difference between GA4 and Google Search Console for backlink analysis?
Both tools are used for backlink analysis. However, there are some minor but essential differences. For example, GA4 tracks visitors coming from backlinks and their interactions, while Google Search Console provides a database of backlinks influencing SEO. Remember, GA4 is best for traffic analysis, and Search Console is more powerful at link monitoring.
4. What’s the best way to compare backlink performance over time in GA4?
Use the “Traffic Acquisition” report in GA4, select “Session source/medium” as the primary dimension, and compare backlink performance using different date ranges. This method allows you to gauge whether various metrics (conversions, engagement, and traffic) improve or degrade over time.
Google Analytics for Backlinks Checks: Final Thoughts
In 2025, Google Analytics continues to be a powerful tool that collects all information about your website, including referral sources via backlinks. To analyze the presence of traffic from backlinks, go to the main GA4 toolbar and select the “Traffic source” section.
Next, click on “All traffic” and then “Referrals.” Adjust the resulting report by variables and configure the indicators for the final report.
A thorough analysis of external backlinks and internal links will help to create a table that classifies your existing traffic into several segments or channels. Your task is to analyze the resulting table to find unwanted or suspicious domains.
When you check backlinks in Google Analytics, pay attention to:
- If there is traffic, find out what its root causes are (what drives this traffic) so that you can use it as an example for future effective link-building.
- If there is traffic, but the bounce rate and conversion quality (impressions, engagement, dwell time, etc.) are not justified, then again, try to find out why. Perhaps you can fix this by reaching out to the source domain and adjusting the backlink itself or the context.
- If you do not find the backlinks that should drive traffic (according to your expectations), then check whether these backlinks are published at all, where exactly they are published, and among what content.
The truth is, even without bringing traffic, backlinks pass link weight (equity or juice) from the donor domains. However, a link that receives clicks and brings real traffic is more valuable for search engine optimization.
Therefore, it is worth focusing your efforts on finding effective backlinks, analyzing what makes them effective, and multiplying your success into your link-building strategy.
