Great question — you're right, Google deprecated the link: operator years ago because it was unreliable and incomplete even back then.
Tools like Ahrefs, Semrush, and Majestic don’t rely on Google’s data. Instead, they run their own crawlers (similar to how Google crawls the web). Ahrefs, for example, claims to crawl over 8 billion pages a day, building an independent backlink index.
That’s why different tools sometimes show different backlink counts — it depends on their crawl depth, speed, and how well they handle redirects, canonicals, etc.
So while it’s not Google’s view of your backlinks, it’s the best proxy we’ve got publicly. And in practice, it’s good enough for most strategy decisions.
You can use the free version of Ahrefs to monitor your own site's backlinks
