Backlink index checker
You paid for links. The seller says they are live. What you want to know is simpler and harder: does Google see the page the link sits on. Nothing on this site can answer that for you, because no public service can. What this page does is build the only two checks that tell the truth about a page you do not own.
The honest limit, stated first. No public endpoint reports whether Google holds a specific URL in its index. Anyone claiming otherwise is showing you a third-party crawl, not Google's. A site: query tells you what is in the index. URL inspection tells the truth about one page, and it only answers for pages you own. Both are capped at the pages you actually control, so plan around that instead of fighting it.
Paste the backlinks you bought
One line per backlink. A bare URL is fine. If you know the anchor text, put it first with a pipe between them, like the example below. Up to 25 lines per run.
One per line. Use anchor text | url when you know the anchor. Everything stays in your browser and nothing is submitted anywhere.
The only two honest checks
Third-party index checkers sell certainty they cannot have. They look at their own crawl, which is a different crawl from Google's, on a different schedule, with different rules. A green tick from a tool that never talks to Google tells you that tool's crawler found the page. That is all.
Reading the site query results
Run site:domain.com in Google and it returns the pages Google holds for that domain. It is coarse, it samples rather than enumerates, and the count at the top is an estimate. It still answers the question you care about for a domain you do not control: is this site in the index at all, and roughly how much of it. For a freshly bought link, a domain that returns nothing at all is the loudest possible signal that something is wrong.
URL inspection tells the truth about one page
Leave the search bar and open Search Console. URL inspection reports the indexed state Google has on record for a specific URL, along with when it was last crawled. It is the only place Google tells you directly. There is a catch worth repeating: it works for properties you have verified. You cannot inspect a publisher's article, so for bought links you are left with site: plus whatever your rank tracker reports.
The cap, and how to work inside it
You own one domain, and everything you own is inspectable. Everything you bought is not. That split shapes the whole job. Inspect your own pages properly through Search Console. For the links you bought, run the site: query on each new domain and watch that domain over the following weeks. Then stop treating the result as a verdict and use your own rank tracking as the second opinion, since a link that moved a keyword is a link Google processed. The pages below cover each route in more detail: how to check whether backlinks are indexed, what to do when backlinks are not getting indexed, and the shape of a backlink indexing workflow.
What discovered but not indexed means
This is the status you will meet most often with bought links, and it is worth understanding properly. Google knows the URL exists because it followed a link to it or read it in a sitemap. It has not crawled and stored the page. The URL sits in a queue.
Three things follow from that.
- The link is not harmful. A queued URL is a normal state, and pages sit there for days or weeks before Google gets to them.
- The link is not working yet either. An uncrawled page passes no equity, because Google has not read the markup that contains the link.
- Time is not the fix by itself. What moves a URL out of the queue is crawl budget pointed at it: internal links from pages already in the index, a sitemap entry, and a site that Google is already crawling regularly.
On a domain you own you can act on that. Request indexing in URL inspection, add the URL to an internal link path, and recheck in a week. On a domain you do not own, the only lever you have is patience plus a note in your own tracker, because you cannot request anything for a property that is not yours.
Questions
Can any tool tell me for certain that a backlink is indexed?
No. Google exposes no public endpoint reporting whether a specific URL sits in its index. A site: query tells you what is in the index. URL inspection tells the truth about a single page, and it only answers for pages you own. Everything else is a third-party guess wearing a green tick.
Why does the page show a search link instead of a result?
A site: query is a search, not an API. Google answers it when a person runs it in a browser, and the answer depends on the country and the exact query. So the tool builds the query and encodes it, then hands it to your browser. Anything else would be the tool inventing an answer.
What does discovered but not indexed mean?
Google knows the URL exists because it found a link to it or read it in a sitemap, but it has not crawled and stored the page. The URL sits in a queue. Nothing is passed and nothing is harmed until the page is crawled and indexed.
Should I check the home page with site: or the exact URL?
Check the exact URL first, because that is the page your link sits on and the one you paid for. site: points at a whole domain, so it removes any doubt about which URL to look up and is the faster sweep when you are working through a list. It is a signal about the domain, not proof about a single page.