How I Built a Free Backlink Intelligence Tool on Common Crawl + DuckDB
Petteri Pucilowski developed a free backlink intelligence tool utilizing Common Crawl and DuckDB. The tool leverages publicly available hyperlink data to provide insights comparable to expensive SaaS alternatives. It features a caching mechanism to optimize performance and a user-friendly frontend built with Next.js.
- ▪Backlink data is a $1.5B/year SaaS category, with tools like Ahrefs and SEMrush charging high monthly fees.
- ▪Common Crawl publishes a hyperlink graph every three months, containing billions of links across millions of domains.
- ▪DuckDB allows querying Parquet files directly from S3, making the tool efficient and cost-effective.
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try { if(localStorage) { let currentUser = localStorage.getItem('current_user'); if (currentUser) { currentUser = JSON.parse(currentUser); if (currentUser.id === 3958159) { document.getElementById('article-show-container').classList.add('current-user-is-article-author'); } } } } catch (e) { console.error(e); } Petteri Pucilowski Posted on May 29 How I Built a Free Backlink Intelligence Tool on Common Crawl + DuckDB #webdev #seo #duckdb #opensource The problem Backlink data is a $1.5B/year SaaS category. Ahrefs is $129/month, SEMrush is $140/month, Moz is $99/month. As an indie I needed competitor backlinks for outreach — the prospecting half of what these tools do — but I wasn't going to pay $1,548/year just for a quarterly list of domains. Turns out the data is already public.
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