I’ve been wondering about how companies like Hubspot and similar marketing tools can track which websites are linking back to your site. Are they basically scraping search engines like Google without permission? I’ve been looking into this and it seems like there aren’t many official ways to get this backlink data for business purposes. I checked out some APIs but they have restrictions for commercial use. For example, some search APIs don’t allow automated requests or are limited to personal projects only. Does anyone know what the legitimate methods are for collecting this kind of link data? I’m curious if there are proper APIs or services that allow this, or if these companies have special agreements with search engines. Would love to hear from anyone who has experience with this.
Most marketing platforms build their own web crawlers that systematically index websites - think search engines but smaller scale. From my experience with enterprise SEO tools, companies like HubSpot invest heavily in maintaining these crawler infrastructures instead of relying on third-party data sources. They also buy bulk data feeds from specialized link intelligence companies that’ve already done the heavy lifting of web crawling and link discovery. Many platforms combine multiple data sources too - domain registrar info, social media mentions, and user-submitted data - to create comprehensive backlink profiles. The key difference from scraping search engines? They’re crawling the source websites directly to find links, which is perfectly legal and doesn’t violate any terms of service.
yeah, ur right. they don’t scrape Google directly since that can lead to bans. instead, they rely on services like Ahrefs or SEMrush. these tools crawl the web and gather link data, so platforms like HubSpot can aggregate it all for users. pretty clever system!