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.
DEV.to (Top) files mainly under programming. We currently carry 4,924 of its stories.
Story provenance
Source · retrieval · rights · ranking — open for full record
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Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | DEV.to (Top) |
| Canonical URL | https://dev.to/petteri_pucilowski_7ec755/how-i-built-a-free-backlink-intelligence-tool-on-common-crawl-duckdb-367h |
| Publication time | Fri, 29 May 2026 09:32:31 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-29T09:50:00.154Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-29T09:50:00.154Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | TSZCOzJtldWr |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
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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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at DEV.to (Top).
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