How Site Explorer Works# Link to this article

Site Explorer answers "what is this domain doing?" for any host, without needing to own or verify it.

What you get# Link to this section

• Backlinks and referring domains — who links to the domain, with anchor text and first-seen dates.
• Organic keywords — terms the domain appears for, with position and estimated demand.
• Top pages — which URLs attract the links and the rankings.
• Content gap — terms competitors rank for that you do not.
• Outgoing links — who the domain links out to.

Where the data comes from# Link to this section

The default backlink surface is built from Rankato's own ingestion of the Common Crawl web corpus. It is shown first because it is broad, open, and free of per-lookup cost.

Links you act on are then verified by Rankato's own crawler in the background — it fetches the linking page and confirms the link is still there, still followed, and still pointing where the corpus said it did.

A freshness top-up from an external discovery provider is available only when you explicitly request it on a specific domain. It is never the default, never runs in the background, and its rows stay labelled as provider data rather than being relabelled as a Rankato metric.

Reading the numbers honestly# Link to this section

No backlink index is complete — not ours, not anyone's. Every figure carries its source and the date it was last confirmed. Use referring domains rather than raw link counts when comparing sites; link counts are inflated by site-wide footer and template links.