Backlinks

No tool can create backlinks for you — they're earned on other people's sites. What Kitbase does is find the ones that matter and tell you where to earn more, using data you're already collecting. It works in three parts:

• Sources — referring domains detected from your real traffic, so you learn about a new backlink the moment it starts sending visitors.
• Reclamation — existing backlinks pointing at pages that now return an error, recoverable with a redirect.
• AI opportunities — the third-party domains AI engines cite when answering questions about your category, ranked by where you're absent — a prioritized list of sites worth a link.

Built from data you already have

Sources and Reclamation read your existing web analytics referrers; AI opportunities reads your AI Visibility citations. There's nothing new to install.

Sources

Every visit your SDK records carries the page that sent it (the referrer). When a domain sends its first visit, that's almost always a new link that just went live. Kitbase watches for those and lists each referring domain with the traffic it actually drives — something a backlink index alone can't tell you.

Search engines, social networks, AI assistants, and your own domain are excluded automatically, so the list is genuine third-party links, not noise. A domain you don't care about can be dismissed with Ignore; restore it any time.

A new-backlink notification is sent (in-app, and to any webhook subscribed to backlink_detected) the first time a recent backlink is detected. When the feature first runs for a project with existing history, all of that history is loaded silently — you're only notified about links that appear from then on, not flooded with old ones.

What referrer detection can and can't see

This finds backlinks that send traffic — the ones worth knowing about. A link that exists but nobody clicks won't appear, and browsers often trim the referrer to just the domain (so the exact linking URL isn't always available). It complements a full backlink index; it doesn't replace one.

Fields

Field	Meaning
Domain	The referring host, normalized (lowercased, www. stripped). Subdomains are kept distinct — news.example.com ≠ blog.example.com.
Sessions	Visits this domain referred within the selected window.
First seen	The earliest visit ever referred by this domain (historical — not when Kitbase noticed it).
Top landing page	The page most of its referred visitors arrive on.
Source URL	A captured referring URL — the actual linking page, when the browser sent the full referrer.

Reclamation

The highest-ROI backlink work is often a link you already have: when an external site links to a page of yours that now returns an error, that link's value is leaking. Reclamation finds those pages — externally referred visitors landing on URLs your site crawler recorded as broken (any non-2xx status) — so you can add a redirect and recover the link without any outreach.

Each row shows the dead path, its HTTP status, the referring domains still sending traffic to it, and how many sessions are affected. Fix it by pointing the old URL at the right page (a 301 redirect).

Requires site indexing

Reclamation matches referred traffic against your crawled page inventory, so the project needs a completed site content index first. If it hasn't run, the page tells you — start one and reclamation lights up. Pages that were never in your sitemap can't be checked this way.

AI opportunities

When someone asks an AI engine "what's the best tool for X?", the engine cites its sources. The sources it cites for your category — where you're not mentioned — are exactly the sites worth earning a link or listing from: getting cited there improves both traditional SEO and your AI Visibility.

Kitbase aggregates the third-party (non-you, non-competitor) domains cited across your AI Visibility prompts and ranks them by how often they appear in answers where your brand is absent — the biggest gaps first.

Field	Meaning
Domain	A third-party site AI engines cite for your prompts.
Type	What kind of source it is (review site, community, news, docs, …).
Citations	How often it was cited across the aggregated analyses.
Gap prompts	Prompts where you're absent but this domain is cited — the priority signal.
Already linking	Whether this domain also shows up as one of your detected backlink sources.

Depends on AI Visibility

This view reads your AI Visibility citation history — set up brands and prompts there first. No extra analysis runs and no extra cost.

Permissions

Backlinks is gated by two permissions: backlinks.view (see all three views) and backlinks.manage (dismiss or restore sources). Owners, admins, and developers get both; analysts get view-only.

From the CLI

Every view is available over the CLI for scripts and CI:

kitbase backlinks list --project <id>            # detected sources
kitbase backlinks detail --domain example.com    # drill into one source
kitbase backlinks reclamation                    # dead pages with inbound links
kitbase backlinks opportunities                  # AI-cited domains to target
kitbase backlinks update <id> --status ignored   # dismiss a source

Next steps

• Web Analytics — the referrer data behind Sources and Reclamation.
• AI Visibility — the citation data behind AI opportunities.
• API reference — the REST endpoints behind every view.