How to Access Backlink Audit Tool on Semrush

Finding the Tool Inside Semrush

When you log into Semrush, the dashboard can feel like a lot at first. There’s a left-hand navigation panel that organizes everything into categories: SEO, Advertising, Content, and so on.

Here’s the path you’re looking for:

Left sidebar → Link Building → Backlink Audit

If you don’t see “Link Building” immediately, scroll down slightly in the sidebar — it sits below the “On Page & Tech SEO” section. Once you click Backlink Audit, you’ll land on the tool’s main interface.

One thing worth noting: the Backlink Audit tool is project-based. That means it doesn’t just pull up data instantly like the Backlink Analytics tool does when you type in a domain. You need a project set up first.

Setting Up Your First Backlink Audit Project

This is the step most tutorials gloss over, and it’s actually where the setup can go sideways if you’re not careful.

Creating a New Project

If you haven’t set up a project for your domain yet, Semrush will prompt you to create one. Click “Create project”, enter your domain (root domain, not a specific page), and name the project something you’ll recognize.

Semrush will then ask you to configure three things during setup:

• Your domain’s categories — help the tool benchmark your backlink profile against relevant competitors
• Competitors to compare against — you can add up to 5 competitors whose link profiles you want to compare alongside yours
• Integration with Google Search Console — if connected, Semrush pulls in your GSC data to cross-reference which backlinks Google has already indexed

The GSC integration step is optional, but honestly, it’s worth doing. In my experience auditing sites for clients, connecting GSC often surfaces backlinks that Semrush’s own crawler hadn’t picked up yet — especially from newer or low-authority referring domains. It fills gaps.

Once you hit “Start Backlink Audit”, Semrush begins crawling. Depending on your backlink profile size, this can take anywhere from a few minutes to 15–20 minutes for larger sites.

Opening an Existing Project

If you’ve already set up projects in Semrush, navigate to My Projects (top navigation or the Projects section in the sidebar) and select your domain. From the project dashboard, you’ll see a Backlink Audit widget — click “Set up” or “Go to Backlink Audit” depending on whether it’s already configured.

What You’re Actually Looking At After Setup

Once the audit runs, you land on the Overview tab. Here’s what the main sections show you:

• Overall Toxicity Score — a 0–100 score that Semrush assigns to your entire backlink profile based on how many links carry toxic markers
• Toxic, Potentially Toxic, and Non-Toxic link counts — broken into three categories with individual toxicity scores per link
• Referring Domain Breakdown — total referring domains, follow vs. nofollow ratio, and top-level domain distribution

The Audit tab is where the real work happens. This is where Semrush lists every backlink it found, along with a toxicity score for each one. You can filter by toxic markers — things like low trust scores, money anchor text on unrelated sites, or link networks — and decide what to whitelist, move to the disavow file, or remove manually.

A practical observation from client work: don’t blindly disavow everything with a high toxicity score. Semrush flags aggressively by design. I’ve seen legitimate backlinks from niche blogs get flagged simply because the domain had a low Authority Score. Always sanity-check the flagged links before sending anything to Google.

Which Semrush Plans Include Backlink Audit

Backlink Audit is available across Semrush’s paid plans — both the SEO Classic lineup and the newer Semrush One plans. Here’s where each plan stands:

SEO Classic Plans

Pro is the entry point and includes Backlink Audit with access for up to 5 monitored websites and 500 keywords to track daily. Guru adds historical data, multi-location tracking, and bumps you to 15 websites. Business goes to 40 websites with API access and migration from third-party tools.

All three plans come with a 7-day free trial for Pro and Guru — start your free trial here.

Semrush One Plans

Semrush One is the newer unified offering that bundles traditional SEO tools with AI visibility tracking (GEO, AI search monitoring). It includes everything from the SEO Classic plans plus AI brand performance features.

Backlink Audit is included across all Semrush One plans as part of the SEO toolkit. The Starter and Pro+ plans also offer a free trial.

If you’re purely focused on backlink management and classic SEO workflows, the SEO Classic Pro plan gets you full access to Backlink Audit at the lowest entry price. Semrush One makes more sense if you also want to track how your brand appears in AI-generated answers (ChatGPT, Perplexity, etc.).

For a detailed breakdown, check out the Semrush plan and pricing comparison.

The Disavow Workflow — From Audit to Submission

Once you’ve reviewed your toxic links and decided what needs to go, Semrush makes the disavow process fairly straightforward.

In the Audit tab, select the links you want to disavow. You can mark individual URLs or entire domains. Move them to the Disavow tab, then export the disavow file directly from Semrush — it formats the file exactly the way Google’s Disavow Tool expects it.

From there, head to Google Search Console → Legacy Tools → Disavow Links, and upload the file.

One thing Semrush does well here that most standalone disavow tools miss: it maintains a history of your previous disavow actions, so you can track what you’ve already submitted and avoid duplicating entries across audits.

A Few Things Worth Knowing Before You Run Your First Audit

Semrush data vs. GSC data won’t always match. Semrush crawls the web independently, so its backlink count for your domain will often differ from what Google Search Console shows. Neither source is “wrong” — they just have different crawl depths and timelines. Using both together (via the GSC integration inside the tool) gives you the most complete picture.

The tool reaudits automatically. Once your project is set up, Semrush continues monitoring your backlink profile in the background. New toxic links that appear over time will show up in subsequent audit runs — you don’t need to recreate the project from scratch each time.

Backlink Audit ≠ Backlink Analytics. They’re separate tools with different purposes. Backlink Analytics is for researching competitor link profiles and finding link-building opportunities. Backlink Audit is specifically for health monitoring and cleanup of your own domain’s backlinks. Both are accessible from the same Link Building section, so it’s easy to confuse them initially.

If you want to dig deeper into what Semrush’s overall backlink data looks like before running a full audit, comparing Semrush vs Ahrefs for backlink coverage is a useful exercise — the two databases have meaningful differences in depth.