ChatGPT answers, unedited

For international outreach, the “best” backlink index depends heavily on the countries and languages you care about. A tool that is excellent for English-language .com sites may miss a lot of valuable links in markets like Japan, Korea, China, Russia, Brazil, or smaller European countries.

My ranking for non-English and country-specific backlink discovery:

www.contenidopatrocinado.comwww.semrush.com

My practical picks by region

Japan / Korea

• Ahrefs + Majestic combination is usually strongest.
• Majestic can be useful for anchor analysis in non-Latin scripts. linkgathering.com

Germany / Austria / Switzerland

• Ahrefs + SISTRIX.
• SISTRIX has unusually strong regional SEO visibility.

France / Spain / Italy

• Ahrefs or Semrush are generally sufficient.
• Add local tools only if you are doing serious PR/link outreach at scale.

Brazil / LATAM

• Ahrefs + Semrush.
• Look heavily at local TLDs (.br, .mx, .ar), news sites, universities, associations, and niche directories.

Eastern Europe

• Ahrefs + Majestic.
• Majestic’s historic index can uncover older regional links that newer crawls may not surface. majestic.com

China

• None of the big Western tools are perfect.
• You often need local ecosystems:
  • Baidu-focused research
  • Chinese webmaster communities
  • local PR databases
  • manual SERP mining

For actual international outreach, I would use this stack:

1. Ahrefs → find competitor backlinks by country
   • Filter:
     • referring domain country
     • TLD (.de, .jp, .fr, etc.)
     • language
     • traffic
     • similar sites

2. Majestic → fill gaps
   • Especially:
     • older domains
     • non-English anchor text
     • niche communities

3. Semrush → validate market opportunity
   • Check whether the linking domains actually have organic visibility in the target country. www.contenidopatrocinado.comwww.semrush.com

4. Manual local discovery
   • Search operators:
     • "your topic" + "resources" + country language
     • "competitor name" + "review" + local language
     • local equivalents of “guest post,” “partner,” “directory,” “association”

If I had to choose only one:

• Global multilingual outreach: Ahrefs
• Finding obscure/non-English links: Ahrefs + Majestic
• European expansion: Ahrefs + SISTRIX
• Enterprise multilingual SEO: Ahrefs + Semrush + local tools

The biggest mistake in international link building is optimizing for domain authority alone. A .jp, .de, or .fr site with modest metrics but strong local relevance often beats a high-DR English site when the goal is country-specific rankings.

For international outreach, especially when you care about finding backlinks from genuinely local/non-English sites rather than just U.S./English web properties, I’d rank the major backlink indexes roughly like this:

1. majestic.com — probably my first choice for this specific use case

Majestic is unusually strong if your question is "what local websites are actually linking to competitors?"

Its crawler-generated index is enormous: the current Historic Index contains more than 21.7 trillion URLs found, while the Fresh Index contains hundreds of billions of URLs. Majestic Majestic Developer

More importantly for international outreach, Majestic lets you analyze backlinks by:

• Country
• Language
• Referring domain
• IP/subnet
• Topical category
• Link context

Its country report estimates the origin using GeoLite/MaxMind data, and you can drill from a country into the domains linking from that country. Majestic

It also explicitly detects the language of crawled pages and lets you filter backlink research by language. Majestic Blog

Why I'd use it: If you're trying to find, say, German sites linking to German competitors, Japanese sites linking to Japanese competitors, or Spanish-language publishers in Latin America, Majestic's link-oriented tooling is particularly useful.

2. ahrefs.com — best all-around choice

I'd probably choose Ahrefs if you want one platform for international SEO, rather than purely the deepest backlink database.

Ahrefs has extensive country/language support in its search data; its current documentation lists locales ranging from Arabic, Bengali, Chinese, Japanese and Korean through European, African and Southeast Asian languages. Ahrefs Help Center

Its big advantage is combining:

backlinks + organic keywords + competitors + content + SERPs

So you can discover a local competitor in, for example, Poland, find its referring domains, and then determine whether those domains actually have meaningful organic visibility.

That's a major advantage over simply sorting a backlink database by country.

My pick if: you're running an international outreach program and want to identify good prospects, rather than maximize the raw number of local links you can discover.

3. semrush.com — excellent for country-level intelligence

Semrush is particularly good at answering:

"Where geographically are this competitor's backlinks coming from?"

Its Backlinks Overview explicitly reports the countries associated with referring domains, and you can drill into the referring-domain report for a particular country. Semrush determines the country based on the IP associated with the referring domain. Semrush

It also exposes IP, TLD and geographic distribution. Semrush

The caveat is important: IP country ≠ website audience country ≠ content language.

A .de site hosted in the Netherlands, for example, can get classified differently depending on which geographic signal you're using.

So I'd use Semrush's country data as a discovery signal, not as definitive proof that a backlink is a local-market backlink.

My recommendation for international outreach

If your priority is specifically finding non-English/country-specific backlink opportunities, I'd use:

Majestic + Ahrefs

with different jobs:

• Majestic: maximize discovery of local/non-English referring domains.
• Ahrefs: validate whether those domains are actually valuable, authoritative and organically visible.
• Semrush: use as a third data source when geographic distribution is particularly important.

The key distinction is that "international backlink index" and "international backlink prospecting" aren't quite the same thing.

For outreach, I'd actually score prospects using something like:

Local relevance > language match > organic traffic in target country > topical relevance > referring-domain quality > raw authority metric

rather than simply filtering for country = Germany or language = German.

And one particularly useful trick is to start with local competitors rather than your own domain. Find 3–10 strong competitors in each target market, export their referring domains, then intersect the results. Domains linking to multiple competitors are often much better outreach prospects than a giant undifferentiated country backlink list.

If you tell me which countries/languages you're targeting (e.g. Japan, Germany, France, Brazil, Korea, MENA), I can also compare the tools specifically for those markets—because the winner can change substantially by region.

That's a major advantage over simply sorting a backlink database by country.

My pick if: you're running an international outreach program and want to identify good prospects, rather than maximize the raw number of local links you can discover.

3. semrush.com — excellent for country-level intelligence

Semrush is particularly good at answering:

"Where geographically are this competitor's backlinks coming from?"

Its Backlinks Overview explicitly reports the countries associated with referring domains, and you can drill into the referring-domain report for a particular country. Semrush determines the country based on the IP associated with the referring domain. semrush.com

It also exposes IP, TLD and geographic distribution. semrush.com

The caveat is important: IP country ≠ website audience country ≠ content language.

A .de site hosted in the Netherlands, for example, can get classified differently depending on which geographic signal you're using.

So I'd use Semrush's country data as a discovery signal, not as definitive proof that a backlink is a local-market backlink.

My recommendation for international outreach

If your main goal is international link prospecting—especially non-English sites and country-specific backlink discovery—I’d rank the major indexes roughly like this:

My pick: Ahrefs + Semrush

Ahrefs is probably the best single choice if you're asking specifically about index size and finding obscure international referring domains. Ahrefs says its live backlink index is updated every 15–30 minutes, with hundreds of billions of pages/links in the index. help.ahrefs.com

Where Ahrefs particularly shines is competitor research: take a competitor that is already successful in, say, Germany, Japan, Brazil, or Poland and extract the referring domains. This tends to surface local publishers that generic "international backlink" searches won't find.

Semrush is arguably better for systematic country-by-country outreach. Its backlink reports explicitly provide Top Countries, TLD distribution, referring-domain country, IP, and location filtering. www.semrush.com

More importantly for your use case, Semrush's backlink data includes the language of the source page as well as the country of the referring domain. developer.semrush.com That's a big advantage when you care about non-English rather than merely .de, .fr, .jp, etc.

The distinction I'd make

If you're doing:

"Show me backlinks to competitors in France."
→ Semrush is excellent.

"Show me every weird/local site linking to competitors in Japan that I might be able to pitch."
→ Ahrefs is my first choice.

"Show me French-, German-, Spanish-, Japanese-language referring pages specifically."
→ Semrush has a particularly useful advantage because its backlink API exposes source-page language. developer.semrush.com

"I need authoritative links, not just lots of links."
→ Use Majestic alongside either one, particularly for Trust Flow/Citation Flow and topical link analysis.

One important caveat

Don't equate country-specific backlink with country-specific website.

For example, Semrush determines the country of a backlink's origin using the referring domain's IP address. www.semrush.comdeveloper.semrush.comwww.semrush.com That can be misleading for international publishers hosted on US infrastructure. A .fr site hosted in the US can therefore get classified differently than you'd intuitively expect.

For international outreach, I'd build your prospecting workflow around three signals simultaneously:

1. Domain/TLD — .fr, .de, .jp, .co.kr, etc.
2. Source-page language — French, German, Japanese, Korean, etc.
3. Actual audience/traffic geography — is the site really influential in the target market?

That third signal is especially important. A .de domain with 95% US traffic isn't necessarily a good German outreach prospect.

If you're doing serious international outreach

I'd use this stack:

Ahrefs → discovery
Find competitors' referring domains and identify the largest pool of potential prospects.

Semrush → segmentation
Filter those prospects by country, language, TLD, authority, etc. Semrush currently has search databases covering 140+ countries/regions, which is useful for validating the actual market relevance of prospects. www.semrush.com

Google → validation
Search locally in the target language to find publishers that neither index surfaces well.

Majestic → quality check
Use Trust Flow/topical relevance to distinguish genuinely authoritative local sites from large volumes of mediocre links.

So, if you're buying only one tool: Ahrefs. If international outreach is a major part of your operation: Ahrefs + Semrush is the combination I'd choose.

And if you're targeting specific regions like LATAM, DACH, CEE, Japan/Korea, or Southeast Asia, the ranking can change considerably—some regional/local SEO tools have much better coverage than the global platforms for particular markets.

If your priority is international outreach—especially non-English markets and country-specific backlink discovery—I’d rank the major backlink indexes roughly like this:

1. 🥇 Majestic — best for actual international link prospecting

I'd give Majestic the edge if you're specifically hunting for links in markets like Japan, Korea, Germany, France, Brazil, Poland, etc.

The important differentiator is that Majestic exposes language information at the source-page level, as well as country/TLD data. Its API, for example, provides the detected source-page language and confidence, while domain data includes country based on IP and TLD. developer-support.majestic.com

Its referring-domain interface can also filter by:

• Language
• TLD
• Topic
• Trust Flow
• Citation Flow

it.majestic.com

That's particularly useful for something like:

"Find authoritative German-language sites linking to my competitors."

rather than merely:

"Find sites with .de domains."

That's an important distinction because a .de site can be hosted elsewhere, while a German-language site may use .com.

Best for: multilingual prospect discovery, regional competitors, niche-specific international link graphs.

2. 🥈 Semrush — probably the best workflow for country-specific outreach

Semrush is exceptionally good when the question is:

"Which countries are sending backlinks to my competitors, and which domains should I investigate?"

Its Backlinks report explicitly has Top Countries, calculated from the referring domain's IP address, and you can click through into a country-filtered referring-domain report. www.semrush.com

It also lets you combine filters for:

• Country
• TLD/zone
• IP
• Category
• Authority Score
• Link attributes

www.semrush.com

And Semrush currently says its backlink index contains 43+ trillion backlinks and 390 million referring domains, with the database refreshed at least hourly. www.semrush.com

So for international competitor analysis, I'd probably use Semrush before Ahrefs.

Best for: "Show me all referring domains in France/Italy/Spain/etc. that link to these competitors."

3. 🥉 Ahrefs — enormous index, excellent general-purpose choice

Ahrefs remains one of the strongest choices if you want a single platform for backlink research.

It supports TLD filtering in its Backlinks reports—for example, .gov, .edu, etc. help.ahrefs.com

Its broader SEO database also has extensive country/language coverage. Ahrefs currently lists locales ranging from Arabic, Bengali and Armenian through Japanese, Korean, Thai, Vietnamese, Ukrainian, Turkish and many others. help.ahrefs.com

The caveat is that keyword/language coverage isn't the same thing as backlink-source language filtering. For your particular use case, Majestic's explicit source-language data is a meaningful advantage.

Best for: huge-scale competitor backlink discovery where you also need keyword/SERP research.

What I'd actually use for international outreach

If you're doing serious multilingual link building, I'd use two tools rather than trying to find one perfect index:

Majestic → Semrush → Ahrefs

For example, suppose you're entering Germany, France and Japan:

1. Semrush: identify competitors and see which countries their backlinks come from.
2. Majestic: drill into the competitor link graph and filter prospects by language + TLD + topical relevance + Trust Flow.
3. Ahrefs: cross-check the prospects and find additional referring domains that Majestic/Semrush missed.
4. Manually validate the resulting sites for actual local audience/relevance, rather than assuming .de, .fr, or .jp automatically means they're good local links.

One particularly important point

For international outreach, country ≠ TLD ≠ language ≠ audience.

For example:

• example.de ≠ necessarily hosted in Germany
• a German-language site ≠ necessarily a German business
• a .com site can have a huge German audience
• IP country can be misleading for CDNs/hosting
• a translated page on an international publication isn't necessarily a genuinely local publication

That's why I'd favor Majestic for language + link intelligence and Semrush for country-based segmentation. Semrush itself distinguishes its country filter from TLD filtering for exactly this reason. it.majestic.comwww.semrush.comwww.semrush.com

Bottom line: If you only buy one specifically for non-English/country-specific backlink prospecting, I'd pick Majestic. If your workflow is more international competitor research → prospect list → outreach, I'd pick Semrush. If you want the strongest general-purpose SEO platform and already use it, Ahrefs is still an excellent choice.

If your goal is international link prospecting—especially finding backlinks from non-English sites and genuinely country-specific publishers—I’d prioritize the tools differently than I would for generic SEO.

My ranking

1. Majestic — my first choice for multilingual outreach

Majestic is unusually useful here because its backlink data exposes source-page language, language confidence, language-page ratios, and geographic information. Its API can also filter referring domains by geo-country. developer-support.majestic.com

That makes it particularly good for questions like:

"Show me authoritative German-language sites linking to competitors."

or

"Find French/Spanish/Japanese sites in this niche that link to competing domains."

Its Fresh and Historic indexes are also separate, with the Historic Index being particularly useful for finding older/historical relationships. developer-support.majestic.com

2. Ahrefs — best overall if you also care about scale

Ahrefs has an enormous backlink index and says its live backlink index is updated every 15–30 minutes. help.ahrefs.com

For international outreach, I'd use it heavily for competitor link-gap analysis, then segment prospects by country/TLD. Its country-code TLD distribution is particularly useful for finding genuinely local domains—for example .de, .fr, .es, .jp, etc. help.ahrefs.com

The caveat: TLD ≠ country. A .com site can be highly relevant to Germany, Brazil, or Japan. So I wouldn't rely solely on Ahrefs' ccTLD distribution.

3. Semrush — probably the strongest for explicit country analysis

Semrush has a very large backlink database—currently claiming 43T+ backlinks and 390M referring domains—and says the database is refreshed at least hourly. www.semrush.com

More importantly for your use case, its Referring Domains report lets you filter by country, TLD/zone, category, IP, and link attributes. www.semrush.com

Semrush makes an important distinction that I like:

• Country = where the referring domain is geographically located
• Zone/TLD = what domain extension it uses

So you can find, for example, Australian sites on .com, rather than assuming every Australian prospect uses .com.au. www.semrush.com

The sleeper: SE Ranking

SE Ranking is worth considering if you're doing this at scale and don't want Ahrefs/Semrush pricing.

Its backlink database currently claims roughly 2.7T backlinks / 420M indexed domains, with country and TLD information available at backlink level. seranking.com

It also has a surprisingly broad geographic SEO database—188 locations—which is useful if your outreach workflow combines link prospecting + local SERP research. seranking.com

What I'd actually use

For a serious international outreach operation, I'd use a two-tool workflow:

Majestic + Ahrefs

• Ahrefs: discover competitors' backlink profiles and generate large prospect lists.
• Majestic: enrich/filter those prospects by language, country, topical relevance, Trust Flow and Citation Flow.
• Then manually/automatically validate whether the site is actually relevant to the target market.

If your outreach is heavily country-oriented rather than language-oriented, I'd consider:

Semrush + Ahrefs

because Semrush's country/TLD distinction is excellent for market-by-market prospecting. www.semrush.com

One important caveat

Don't equate "country backlink" with the site's domain extension.

For example, if you're targeting France, a good prospect set might contain:

• .fr publishers
• French-language .com
• French-language .org
• French news/media sites hosted elsewhere
• international publications with a French edition
• locally operated sites using unusual TLDs

That's why Majestic's language data + Semrush's country data + Ahrefs' huge link graph complement each other better than simply searching for .fr backlinks.

If you tell me the countries/languages you're targeting (e.g. Germany, France, Japan, Brazil, Korea), I can also compare which of these databases tends to be strongest for each market and give you a practical prospecting workflow.

If your priority is international link prospecting—especially non-English sites and country-specific backlink discovery—I’d rank the major tools like this:

1. Ahrefs — my first choice

For international outreach, I'd probably start with Ahrefs.

Its own crawler continuously builds its backlink database, and Ahrefs currently reports roughly 35 trillion historical external-backlink records, 500M referring domains, and 493B pages in its index. Its live backlink index is refreshed every 15–30 minutes. help.ahrefs.com

The important thing isn't just the headline index size. Ahrefs is particularly useful when you want to do things like:

• Find who links to competitors in Japan, Germany, France, Brazil, etc.
• Filter referring domains by country/TLD.
• Find links from competitors that you don't have.
• Discover local publishers linking to similar businesses.
• Examine the actual pages containing the links.
• Find smaller/local sites that don't necessarily rank prominently in Google.

I'd use it as the primary prospecting database.

One caveat: Ahrefs' crawler prioritizes sites based partly on popularity/authority, so extremely obscure, low-authority local sites can be missed or crawled less frequently. help.ahrefs.com

2. Semrush — arguably better for country intelligence

Semrush is extremely attractive if your workflow is:

Country → competitors → backlink profile → local referring domains → outreach list

Its Backlinks reports explicitly let you see Top Countries sending backlinks and then drill into the referring domains from a particular country. The country is determined using the referring domain's IP address. www.semrush.com

That's particularly useful for international campaigns because you can ask:

"Which German domains link to our three German competitors?"

rather than simply:

"Who links to this domain?"

Semrush also lets you compare domains and backlink metrics at a specific-country or worldwide level. www.semrush.com

So I'd actually give Semrush a slight edge over Ahrefs for market-by-market competitive research, while giving Ahrefs the edge for pure backlink discovery.

3. Majestic — very worthwhile as a second database

Don't overlook Majestic.

For international link building, the reason I'd consider adding it isn't necessarily that its headline index is larger. It's that link indexes have different crawl footprints. A domain absent from Ahrefs can occasionally show up in Majestic, and vice versa.

Majestic is particularly valuable when you want:

• Deep historical links
• Older/lost links
• Link neighborhood analysis
• Trust Flow / Citation Flow
• Topical relevance
• A second source for validating prospect quality

So if you're doing serious international outreach at scale, Ahrefs + Majestic can be more useful than trying to find a single "perfect" index.

What I'd actually use

For a serious multilingual outreach operation, my stack would be:

Ahrefs → primary prospect discovery
Semrush → country/market intelligence
Majestic → second-opinion + obscure/historical links

The overlap between databases is actually useful. You're looking for the union, not the tool with the biggest advertised number.

For example, if you're expanding into France, Germany, Japan, Spain and Brazil, I'd run each target competitor through Ahrefs and Semrush, export the referring domains, normalize them, then enrich/deduplicate the resulting list. I'd use Majestic afterward specifically to find additional domains that neither primary workflow surfaced.

One important distinction

If by "best index of non-English backlinks" you mean the ability to discover websites written in the local language, rather than simply backlinks located in a particular country, that's a slightly different comparison.

For example, a Japanese-language site might be hosted on .com, while a German site might be hosted outside Germany. TLD/country ≠ language.

For that use case, I'd lean toward Ahrefs + Semrush, and build the prospecting process around:

language → local SERPs/competitors → referring domains → country → topical relevance

rather than filtering exclusively on .de, .fr, .jp, etc.

Bottom line:
If you're buying one tool: Ahrefs.
If international SEO is a major part of your job: Ahrefs + Semrush.
If you're doing high-volume professional link research and want maximum database coverage: Ahrefs + Semrush + Majestic.

If you tell me which countries/languages you're targeting (e.g. Japan/Korea/Germany/France/LatAm), I can also rank the tools specifically for those markets—because the winner can change quite a bit by region.

If your goal is international link prospecting—especially finding backlinks from non-English sites and genuinely country-specific domains—I’d rank the major tools roughly like this:

1. Majestic — my first choice for this particular use case

Majestic is unusually strong for international backlink research. It doesn't just let you look at referring domains; its data includes the language of the source page, language confidence, TLD, and the geographically resolved country of the referring domain. developer-support.majestic.com

That's particularly useful if you're trying to answer questions like:

• "Who links to our German competitors but not us?"
• "Show me Japanese-language sites linking to competitors."
• "Which domains in Brazil are linking to this company?"
• "Find authoritative French/Italian/Spanish sites in this niche."
• "Are these actually local websites, or .com sites hosted elsewhere?"

Majestic's current Fresh Index contains hundreds of billions of crawled URLs, while its Historic Index goes back to 2006. majestic.com

Its API is especially interesting for this because individual backlinks can carry SourceLanguage, language confidence, and referring-domain country information. developer-support.majestic.comblog.majestic.com

If non-English links are the core requirement, I'd put Majestic ahead of the others.

2. Ahrefs — probably the best overall tool

Ahrefs has an enormous backlink database and is excellent for competitor-based international link research.

Its strength is less "give me every Hungarian backlink" and more the overall workflow:

competitor → referring domains → pages/anchors → filter → identify prospects → analyze them

Ahrefs also has extensive country/language support across its broader SEO datasets. For example, its current keyword database supports country-language combinations including Bengali/Bangladesh, Thai/Thailand, Vietnamese/Vietnam, Ukrainian/Ukraine, Arabic/UAE, Turkish/Turkey, etc. help.ahrefs.com

I'd choose Ahrefs if your international outreach team also needs keyword research, competitor analysis, content-gap research, and SERP research alongside backlinks.

3. Semrush — particularly good for country segmentation

Semrush has a very useful Top Countries backlink report. It determines a backlink's country based on the IP associated with the referring domain and lets you drill into the referring domains for that country. www.semrush.com

That's excellent for questions such as:

"Which domains in France, Germany and Spain are already linking to our competitors?"

I'd rate Semrush particularly highly for market-by-market reporting, although I'd still favor Majestic if the specific problem is discovering and filtering non-English backlink pages.

4. SE Ranking — good value option

SE Ranking's backlink API exposes countries, TLDs, referring domains, anchors, raw backlinks, etc., and can return backlinks by country. seranking.com

It's worth considering if you need international backlink intelligence without paying for the largest enterprise-oriented datasets.

The important distinction: country ≠ language

For international outreach, I'd actually want both dimensions.

For example, a Japanese prospect might be:

• .jp + Japanese language + Japanese IP → very strong local signal
• .com + Japanese language + Japanese IP → also potentially excellent
• .jp + English language + US hosting → potentially less useful
• .com + Japanese language + Singapore IP → ambiguous
• .com + English language + US IP → probably not a Japanese prospect

This is why I particularly like Majestic for your use case: it can expose language and geographic information at the backlink/source level, rather than relying purely on the TLD. developer-support.majestic.comblog.majestic.com

My practical recommendation

If you're building an international outreach stack, I'd do:

Majestic + Ahrefs

Use Majestic as the international backlink discovery layer:

country → language → referring domains → backlinks → prospect list

Use Ahrefs for broader competitive/SEO intelligence and prioritization.

If you only want to buy one, I'd pick:

→ Majestic if non-English/country-specific backlinks are the #1 requirement.
→ Ahrefs if international backlinks are one part of a much broader SEO workflow.

And if you're targeting particularly difficult markets—Japan, Korea, China, Russia/CIS, Central/Eastern Europe, Latin America, Southeast Asia, etc.—the answer can change considerably by market. I can also break down which backlink index is strongest in each major non-English market, which is probably more useful for an international outreach operation.

If your goal is international link outreach, especially finding backlinks from non-English sites and country-specific ecosystems, I’d rank the major backlink databases roughly like this:

My recommendation: Ahrefs + Semrush, or Ahrefs + Majestic

Ahrefs is probably the strongest single choice if you're doing international outreach. Its current index claims 35 trillion external backlinks, and it operates its own crawler. Importantly, Ahrefs notes that crawl frequency depends partly on site popularity, so extremely small/local sites can still be harder to discover regardless of the nominal size of the index. ahrefs.com

Majestic is particularly interesting if your definition of "good index" means finding weird, obscure, regional sites that the other databases might miss. Its Historic Index contains billions of crawled URLs going back to 2006, while its Fresh Index is designed for recently discovered links. Majestic also explicitly supports filtering by language and topic. ahrefs.comdeveloper-support.majestic.com

Semrush has a particularly nice advantage for international outreach: its backlink reports explicitly expose Top Countries, based on the IP associated with the referring domain, and let you filter the referring-domain report by country. It also exposes TLD distribution, which is useful for finding .de, .fr, .jp, .br, etc. link opportunities. www.semrush.com

Where I would use each

For finding Japanese/Korean/Spanish/German/etc. competitors' links:

1. Ahrefs — export competitor referring domains.
2. Majestic — run the same competitors through it and look for additional referring domains.
3. Semrush — use country/TLD/IP filters to segment the resulting prospects.

That combination is considerably better than relying on one database.

A useful distinction is that "country database" ≠ "backlink database coverage." Semrush having 140+ regional keyword databases, for example, tells you a lot about its international search data, but doesn't necessarily mean its backlink index is proportionally better in those countries. www.semrush.com

If you're specifically hunting local-language backlinks

I'd prioritize:

Ahrefs → Majestic → Semrush

For example, if you're trying to build links in Poland, I'd take your Polish competitors, extract their referring domains in Ahrefs, then run those competitors through Majestic to expand the universe, and finally use Semrush's country/TLD data to identify genuinely Polish prospects.

For very small local publishers, regional directories, forums, news sites, blogs, and non-English sites, I'd especially want Majestic in the stack, rather than assuming the biggest nominal backlink index automatically gives the best local coverage.

If you tell me which countries/languages you're targeting (e.g. Japan + Korea + Germany + France), I can give you a more specific tool-by-tool ranking and workflow, including which databases are strongest for each market.

If your priority is international link prospecting—especially non-English markets and country-specific backlink discovery—I’d rank the major tools roughly like this:

🥇 1. Majestic — my first choice for international link prospecting

Majestic is unusually strong for what you're describing.

Its backlink data includes source-page language, language confidence, referring-domain country, IP geolocation, TLD, and other geographic signals. Its API can explicitly filter backlinks by geo-located country, which is particularly useful if you're building country-specific prospect lists. developer-support.majestic.com

It also has both a Fresh Index and a very large Historic Index, so you can investigate links that may no longer be live as well as current ones. developer-support.majestic.com

The big advantage for international outreach is that Majestic doesn't just tell you:

"This domain is in Germany."

It can help you determine things like:

• German-language pages linking to competitors
• Japanese-language linking pages
• French-speaking referring domains
• links geographically associated with Brazil vs. Portugal
• country/TLD distribution of a competitor's backlinks
• language mismatches in a backlink profile

Majestic explicitly supports filtering backlink research by language and has geographic/country reporting. majestic.com

If you're doing serious international link prospecting, I'd definitely have Majestic in the stack.

🥈 2. Ahrefs — best overall, probably the safest single subscription

Ahrefs has a very large international SEO dataset and supports a huge number of country/language combinations. Its current documentation, for example, lists locales ranging from Pashto/Afghanistan and Bengali/Bangladesh through Thai/Thailand, Vietnamese/Vietnam, Ukrainian/Ukraine, Uzbek/Uzbekistan, etc. help.ahrefs.com

The important distinction is that keyword/search-market coverage isn't identical to backlink-index coverage. So I wouldn't interpret Ahrefs' enormous list of supported search locales as proof that it has the best backlink coverage in every individual country.

Nevertheless, for a single tool that combines:

backlinks + competitor research + organic search + content + keyword data

I'd probably choose Ahrefs.

For obscure markets, though, I'd validate a few competitors in the specific countries you're targeting before committing.

🥉 3. Semrush — particularly good for country-level competitive analysis

Semrush is strong if your workflow is:

country → competitors → their referring domains → prospects

Semrush explicitly identifies the country of a backlink's origin using the referring domain's IP and lets you drill into the referring domains from a selected country. www.semrush.com

Its broader SEO database also has 140+ country databases, which is useful when your international outreach research is intertwined with local search visibility. www.semrush.com

I'd put it ahead of Ahrefs if your team heavily uses Semrush's broader international-market research capabilities, but for pure backlink prospecting I'd generally lean Majestic/Ahrefs.

4. SE Ranking — interesting budget option

SE Ranking has been expanding its geographic coverage considerably. Its current data page reports billions of keywords/domains across numerous individual countries, including relatively smaller markets. seranking.com

I'd consider it if you're doing international SEO at scale but don't want multiple premium subscriptions.

The important distinction: "country" ≠ "language"

For international outreach, I'd actually evaluate backlink tools on three separate dimensions:

1. Where is the referring site hosted?
IP/geolocation → Germany, Japan, Mexico, etc.

2. What TLD does it use?
.de, .fr, .jp, .mx, .br, etc.

3. What language is the actual linking page?
German, Japanese, Spanish, Portuguese, etc.

The third one is particularly important.

For example, a .com domain hosted in the US might have an excellent Spanish-language page linking to your competitor. If you're prospecting Spanish-speaking publishers, you don't want to throw that opportunity away simply because the domain isn't .es.

This is where Majestic stands out: it explicitly analyzes the language of source pages and can report incoming backlink languages. developer-support.majestic.comblog.majestic.com

My practical stack

If I were building an international outreach operation today:

Best single tool:
→ Ahrefs

Best specialist backlink database for international prospecting:
→ Majestic

Best combination:
→ Ahrefs + Majestic

If country-level SEO research is also a major requirement:
→ Ahrefs + Semrush

And for particularly difficult markets—Japan, Korea, China, Eastern Europe, Southeast Asia, Latin America, etc.—I'd benchmark the actual backlink counts for 10–20 representative local competitors before deciding. Database size doesn't necessarily translate into the best coverage of a particular country's web.

If you tell me which countries/languages you're targeting (e.g. Japan + Korea + Germany + France), I can also compare Majestic vs. Ahrefs vs. Semrush specifically for those markets and tell you which one I'd use for prospect discovery.

For international outreach and link building, the “best” backlink index depends heavily on the markets you target. A tool that is excellent for US/English backlinks can miss a lot of value in, for example, Japanese, Korean, German, Spanish, Arabic, or Eastern European ecosystems.

My ranking for non-English and country-specific backlink discovery:

gatilab.commajestic.com

1. Ahrefs — best single choice for global outreach

Ahrefs is usually the strongest choice if you are doing outreach across many countries because:

• Large crawler footprint and backlink index
• Strong discovery of referring domains
• Good filtering by:
  • country
  • language signals
  • referring page
  • anchor text
  • lost/new links
• Good competitor analysis via “Link Intersect”

It tends to perform especially well for:

• 🇯🇵 Japan
• 🇩🇪 Germany
• 🇫🇷 France
• 🇪🇸 Spain
• 🇧🇷 Brazil
• 🇰🇷 Korea

Ahrefs also has strong non-English keyword and content discovery features, which helps find link opportunities beyond obvious English-language pages. ahrefs.com

2. Semrush — strongest for country-by-country campaigns

Semrush is excellent when your workflow is:

“Find competitors in Spain → analyze their backlinks → build a Spanish outreach list.”

Useful features:

• Country-specific domain analysis
• Top referring countries
• TLD filtering (.de, .fr, .jp, etc.)
• Competitor comparison

Semrush specifically exposes backlink reports by referring country and can help identify markets where competitors have link footprints. www.semrush.com

I often prefer Semrush over Ahrefs when the campaign is organized by market rather than by individual link targets.

3. Majestic — underrated for local-language link ecosystems

Majestic is particularly valuable when you need:

• older backlinks
• obscure regional sites
• niche communities
• historical link profiles

Its Historic Index is a major advantage for finding links that disappeared from newer indexes. It also has link-context and topical analysis features useful for evaluating whether a foreign-language link is actually relevant. gatilab.commajestic.com

Examples where Majestic can shine:

• finding old Japanese industry sites
• recovering lost international links
• analyzing competitors with years of regional PR activity

Tools I would combine for serious international outreach

Best overall stack:

1. Ahrefs → discovery + competitor backlink mining
2. Semrush → country segmentation + market research
3. Majestic → second-pass discovery of missed links

A practical workflow:

1. Pick 5–10 local competitors in the target country.
2. Export referring domains from Ahrefs.
3. Repeat in Semrush and compare.
4. Run the same domains through Majestic.
5. Filter by:
   • local language
   • local TLD (.de, .jp, .es, etc.)
   • topical relevance
   • estimated traffic
   • editorial quality

For very local markets

For countries where the web ecosystem is less indexed by global tools (some LATAM, Southeast Asia, Eastern Europe, regional news/blog networks), also consider:

• local SEO agencies' databases
• local PR databases
• native-language search operators
• Google Search Console data from local competitors (where available)

No backlink tool has a complete view of the web; the overlap between indexes matters more than raw backlink counts. brutal.domains

If your outreach is focused on a specific region (e.g., Japan/Korea, Germany, LATAM, MENA, India, or Southeast Asia), the ranking changes quite a bit.

For international link outreach, I’d rank the major backlink indexes a little differently than I would for generic SEO.

My shortlist

1. 🥇 Majestic — probably my first choice for country/language-specific link prospecting

Majestic is unusually useful when your question is specifically "show me backlinks from websites in X country / language."

Its backlink data exposes source-page language, language confidence, referring-domain country, TLD, IP/subnet, etc. Its API can even filter backlinks by SourceLanguage and by geo-located country. developer-support.majestic.com

It also maintains both a Fresh Index and a much larger Historic Index, which is useful when you're investigating established relationships or competitors' historical link acquisition. developer-support.majestic.com

I'd choose Majestic when you're doing things like:

• Spanish-language backlinks in Spain
• German sites in Germany/Austria/Switzerland
• Japanese-language publishers
• French-language sites across France/Belgium/Canada
• .br, .mx, .de, .jp, etc. prospecting
• Finding actual pages in a target language rather than merely domains with a country-code TLD

That last distinction matters a lot.

2. 🥈 Semrush — probably the best all-around international outreach workflow

Semrush is particularly strong for country-based competitor research.

Its Backlinks reports let you filter referring domains by country, TLD/zone, category, IP, and other attributes. Importantly, Semrush distinguishes a country's geographic location from its TLD—for example, a .au domain might be hosted in the US, while an Australian site could use .com. www.semrush.com

Its backlink overview also explicitly reports Top Countries, determined from the IP associated with the referring domain, and lets you drill into the domains coming from a particular country. www.semrush.com

Semrush currently reports ~10B pages crawled daily for backlink analysis and 142 regional keyword databases, which makes the broader international SEO ecosystem quite strong. www.semrush.com

I'd use Semrush if your workflow is:

Competitor → find their links → filter to Spain → remove irrelevant domains → prioritize by authority/category → export outreach prospects.

It's probably the easiest of the big platforms for that workflow.

3. 🥉 Ahrefs — strongest general-purpose index, especially for obscure sites

Ahrefs claims the world's largest index of live backlinks, with hundreds of billions of pages in its index and frequent fresh updates. ahrefs.com

For pure "what links to this site?" discovery, I would absolutely include Ahrefs. It also has extensive country/language support elsewhere in its data ecosystem; for example, its keyword database covers hundreds of country/language combinations. help.ahrefs.com

Where I'd put it slightly behind Majestic/Semrush for your particular use case is granular geographic/language slicing of the backlink universe. Ahrefs is fantastic at finding links; Majestic and Semrush are particularly convenient when the geographic origin of the link is itself the primary research dimension.

4. SE Ranking — worth considering if cost matters

SE Ranking has a respectable international footprint and regional databases, including a large set of country codes. seranking.com

I'd put it behind the three above for a serious international outreach operation, but it's worth testing if you're running lots of smaller projects and don't need the maximum possible backlink coverage.

The important distinction: country ≠ language

This is where I think your choice of tool matters most.

Suppose you're doing outreach for Mexico.

A naïve filter is:

referring domain = .mx

But you'll miss:

• Mexican publications on .com
• Spanish-language sites hosted outside Mexico
• Latin American publishers covering Mexico
• multinational publications with Mexican editions
• Mexican organizations using .org
• sites whose hosting IP is elsewhere

Conversely, country-IP alone isn't perfect either.

For serious international outreach I'd ideally combine:

Country + TLD + source-page language + topical relevance

For example:

Mexico + Spanish + finance + DR/authority > X

That's why Majestic + Semrush is a particularly compelling combination.

If I were building an international outreach stack

I'd probably do:

Ahrefs → discovery
Find as many relevant competitor backlinks as possible.

Majestic → geographic/language enrichment
Identify which links actually come from the target country/language and filter the index accordingly.

Semrush → competitive gap + prioritization
Find domains linking to several competitors but not you, then segment by country/TLD/category.

That gives you substantially better coverage than relying on one database.

If you only want to pay for one: I'd pick Semrush for the workflow, Ahrefs for maximum general backlink discovery, and Majestic if non-English/country-specific link discovery is the central requirement. developer-support.majestic.comwww.semrush.com

If you tell me which countries/languages you're targeting (e.g. Germany/German, Japan/Japanese, Brazil/Portuguese, France/French), I can also compare these specifically for those markets and tell you which index is likely to be strongest.

Yes. For international outreach, I’d rank backlink databases somewhat differently than I would for generic SEO. The key question is not just “who has the biggest index?” but who actually discovers links on smaller country TLDs, local-language sites, and regional publishers.

My shortlist

1. Ahrefs — probably my first choice

Ahrefs has an enormous crawler/index: its current public figures are 493B pages, 500M domains and 35T historical external backlinks, with its backlink index updated as frequently as every 15 minutes. ahrefs.com

For international outreach, that's important because you're more likely to encounter:

• .de, .fr, .es, .it, .nl, .jp, etc.
• local publishers with relatively little English content
• regional news sites
• country-specific directories
• smaller sites that don't show up in smaller backlink databases

I'd use Ahrefs as the primary prospect-discovery database.

One caveat: a giant global index doesn't automatically mean best coverage in every country. For a very specific market—say Poland, Japan, Brazil, or Indonesia—I'd validate it against another database.

2. Majestic — arguably the best complement for international link hunting

Majestic is particularly interesting for your use case because it's fundamentally a link intelligence database, rather than an all-purpose SEO platform.

Majestic currently maintains both a Fresh and Historic index. Its Historic Index goes back to 2006 and is described by Majestic as its largest backlink index; the Fresh Index is much more frequently updated. majestic.com

More importantly, Majestic lets you filter/analyze links by language, topic and industry, which is unusually useful when you're specifically trying to find local-language outreach opportunities. majestic.com

I'd especially consider Majestic when your workflow is:

competitor → identify every referring domain → isolate country/language → find publishers worth pitching

rather than:

competitor → find their top 20 backlinks.

For obscure international links, I would absolutely test Majestic alongside Ahrefs.

3. Semrush — excellent if you're doing outreach + international SEO together

Semrush is a strong third choice.

Its advantage isn't necessarily that I'd expect it to beat Ahrefs/Majestic on every obscure backlink. It's that its broader international SEO dataset makes it useful when you're combining:

• backlink prospecting
• country-specific keyword research
• competitor research
• SERP analysis
• domain evaluation
• outreach management

So if you're running an international SEO/outreach operation, Semrush can be more efficient than buying a pure link database and a separate international SEO platform.

4. SE Ranking — surprisingly worth testing

SE Ranking has a reported 2.9T-link backlink index and supports data across 188+ countries. www.techradar.com

I wouldn't put it ahead of Ahrefs or Majestic for maximum obscure-link discovery, but it's attractive if you're managing lots of markets/clients and care about cost per usable prospect rather than absolute index size.

The important distinction: "index size" ≠ "international coverage"

This is the trap I'd avoid.

Suppose you're doing outreach in:

Germany → Poland → Japan → Brazil → South Korea

You don't necessarily want the tool with the most backlinks globally.

You want the tool that can answer:

"Show me the sites linking to competitors that are actually relevant to German/Polish/Japanese/Brazilian/Korean audiences."

That's a different measurement.

For international outreach I'd test databases on known local competitors, not on your own site.

My practical testing methodology

Pick 5–10 strong competitors in each target country and run:

Ahrefs vs. Majestic vs. Semrush

For each competitor, calculate:

1. Unique referring domains discovered
2. % of referring domains from target country
3. Number of target-language domains/pages
4. Number of actual publishers/news sites
5. Number of domains with meaningful organic traffic
6. Number of new domains found by each database that the others missed

The last metric is particularly valuable.

If Ahrefs finds 1,000 German referring domains and Majestic finds 1,100, that's not particularly interesting.

But if Majestic finds 250 German publishers Ahrefs doesn't, then Majestic becomes extremely valuable as a supplemental database.

My recommended stack

If international outreach is a serious channel, I'd probably use:

Ahrefs + Majestic

rather than trying to find one tool that does everything.

Use Ahrefs for the main prospect database and competitor research, then run important competitors through Majestic specifically to uncover additional referring domains and older/obscure links. Majestic's separate Fresh/Historic indexes make that particularly useful. majestic.com

If you tell me which countries/languages you're targeting (e.g. Germany + France + Japan + Korea), I can give you a more specific ranking—because the winner can change substantially by market.

If your priority is international link prospecting—especially non-English sites and country-specific referring domains—I’d rank the major backlink indexes roughly like this:

If your goal is international link prospecting—especially finding backlinks from sites in local languages and country-specific ecosystems—I’d rank the major backlink indexes roughly like this:

1. Ahrefs — my first choice

For your particular use case, Ahrefs is probably the strongest single tool.

Its backlink index is proprietary rather than dependent on a search engine, and Ahrefs says it has roughly 35 trillion external backlinks, with its crawler operating globally regardless of language. Importantly, Ahrefs itself says backlink coverage is generally as strong in non-English markets as in English-speaking markets, although its keyword data varies considerably by country. ahrefs.com

That distinction matters: don't judge international backlink coverage by the quality of a tool's local keyword database.

For outreach, I'd use Ahrefs to:

• Find competitors in each target country.
• Export their referring domains.
• Filter by country/TLD.
• Identify local publications, directories, associations, universities, industry sites, etc.
• Look at the actual linking pages rather than just domain metrics.
• Find sites linking to several competitors but not you.

Ahrefs also has an unusually large crawler footprint and says its backlink index is refreshed with fresh data every 15–30 minutes, although individual pages can take considerably longer to be discovered/crawled. help.ahrefs.com

If you only want to pay for one: Ahrefs.

2. Majestic — particularly valuable for international prospecting

I'd seriously consider Ahrefs + Majestic if international outreach is a major part of your work.

Majestic's advantage isn't necessarily that it finds every link Ahrefs doesn't; it's that its enormous historical index gives you another view of the web. Its current Fresh Index contains hundreds of billions of crawled URLs, while its Historic Index goes back to 2006 and contains trillions of URLs. majestic.compl.majestic.com

That's useful when you're researching things like:

"What French/German/Japanese/Polish sites have historically linked to companies like ours?"

rather than simply:

"What links does this competitor have today?"

Its Trust Flow, Topical Trust Flow, referring-domain, referring-IP and referring-subnet data are also useful for separating legitimate local ecosystems from huge networks of low-quality sites. majestic.compl.majestic.com

I'd particularly want Majestic for markets where you suspect the local web is poorly represented by the mainstream SEO tools.

3. Semrush — excellent for country-level analysis

Semrush is particularly good when your workflow is:

competitor → country → referring domains → prospect list.

Its backlink reports explicitly provide country, IP and TLD distributions, and its Top Countries report lets you drill into the referring domains from a particular country. www.semrush.com

That's extremely useful for international outreach because you can quickly spot patterns such as:

• Competitor gets lots of links from Spanish .es sites
• Competitor has an unusually strong German .de footprint
• Competitor has links from Brazilian publishers
• Competitor has a cluster of sites hosted/IP'd in a particular market

Semrush also has a very broad country database footprint—over 140 search databases—and its current documentation lists extensive country coverage. www.semrush.com

Where I'd put it: probably behind Ahrefs for raw backlink discovery, but potentially ahead of it for certain geo-specific competitive workflows.

4. SE Ranking — good lower-cost alternative

SE Ranking is worth considering if you don't need the enormous datasets of Ahrefs/Majestic.

Its backlink API exposes TLDs, countries, referring domains, IPs, anchors, new/lost links and raw backlinks, so the data is quite usable for building international prospect lists. seranking.com

I wouldn't choose it over Ahrefs/Majestic specifically because your priority is maximum coverage of obscure local-language sites, but it's a reasonable cost-conscious option.

The important caveat: "country" ≠ "language"

This is the part I'd pay the most attention to.

A backlink tool can tell you that a referring domain is associated with France, for example, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's a French-language publication. Conversely, a .com domain can be an extremely important Japanese, Korean, Brazilian, or German site.

For international outreach, I'd therefore build your prospecting stack around three signals:

1. Geographic origin

• ccTLD (.fr, .de, .jp, .br, etc.)
• IP/country
• local company address
• local audience

2. Language

• language of the linking page
• language of the site's editorial content
• local-language anchor/context

3. Relevance

• topical relevance
• actual organic traffic
• referring domains
• editorial quality
• whether the site is genuinely influential in that country

My recommended stack

If you're doing serious international outreach:

Ahrefs → primary discovery
Majestic → second index / historical discovery
Semrush → country/geo validation and competitive analysis

That combination is substantially better than simply buying the tool with the biggest headline backlink number.

And if you're targeting specific difficult markets—e.g. Japan, Korea, China, Germany, France, Brazil, Poland, Indonesia, the Nordics, or Eastern Europe—the answer can change considerably. Some local search ecosystems have publishers/directories that the big global indexes don't surface equally well.

If you tell me which countries/languages you're targeting, I can give you a more specific tool-by-tool recommendation, including which index I'd trust most for each market.

For international outreach / link building, the “best” backlink index is not always the one with the biggest global number. The important factors are:

• how well the crawler discovers local-language sites
• coverage of country-code TLDs (.de, .fr, .jp, .br, .kr, etc.)
• ability to filter referring domains by country, language, topic, and authority
• freshness of newly discovered links

My ranking for non-English and country-specific backlink discovery:

ahrefs.com

My practical picks by situation

1. You need backlinks from smaller/non-English markets (Poland, Japan, Brazil, Korea, Spain, etc.)
→ Ahrefs + manual prospecting

Ahrefs tends to perform best when you are trying to find:

• local blogs
• regional news sites
• industry directories
• competitor links that never appear in English SEO datasets

Its Site Explorer is built around a very large backlink index, with frequent link updates. ahrefs.com

2. You are doing enterprise international outreach
→ Ahrefs + Semrush

Semrush is particularly useful when you want to combine:

• backlink data
• country-level competitor analysis
• keyword/location research

It provides country-specific databases and backlink reports that identify referring domains by country. www.semrush.com

3. You are targeting very niche countries or older websites
→ Majestic

Majestic is still very strong for link graph work because it maintains both fresh and historical indexes and allows backlink analysis by categories such as topic and language. majestic.com

For non-English outreach specifically, I would use this workflow

1. Pick 3–5 competitors in the target country.
2. Run them through Ahrefs Link Intersect (or equivalent).
3. Filter:
   • referring domains by country
   • language
   • DR/authority
   • traffic
   • dofollow links
4. Export prospects.
5. Validate manually in the local language.

A common mistake is using only English competitors. For example, if you are entering Germany, your best link prospects are often linking to German competitors—not global English brands.

Country coverage caveat

No backlink tool has a perfect index of the whole web. Smaller languages (for example, some Southeast Asian, African, or Eastern European markets) can have large gaps. For those markets, I would supplement backlink databases with:

• local Google searches (site:.pl, site:.jp, etc.)
• local directories
• local news databases
• native-language SERP analysis

If you tell me the countries/languages you are targeting (e.g., Japan, Germany, LATAM, MENA, India), I can rank the tools specifically for those markets.

If your goal is international link prospecting, especially finding backlinks from non-English sites and genuinely country-specific domains, I’d rank the major tools roughly like this:

My picks

1. Ahrefs — best overall

For discovering actual referring domains in other languages, I'd start here. Its Site Explorer/Content Explorer combination is particularly useful because you can investigate competitors in the target market and then drill into their referring domains. Ahrefs also maintains extensive country/language search coverage; its current keyword database, for example, includes localized databases across a very large number of markets. help.ahrefs.com

The important distinction: language coverage and backlink-index coverage aren't exactly the same thing. A tool can have excellent German keyword data without necessarily having the best German backlink discovery.

2. Semrush — probably the best for explicit country segmentation

Semrush is especially attractive if your workflow is:

Competitor → backlinks → referring countries → domains → outreach list

Its Backlink Analytics specifically identifies the country of a backlink's origin using the referring domain's IP and lets you drill into the domains from each country. www.semrush.com

Semrush currently reports 43+ trillion backlinks and 390M referring domains, with the backlink database refreshed at least hourly. www.semrush.com It also has search databases covering 140+ countries/markets. www.semrush.com

For Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Japan, Korea, Brazil, Mexico, etc., this makes it very convenient.

3. Majestic — underrated for international link hunting

If you're primarily buying backlink intelligence rather than an all-in-one SEO platform, I'd seriously consider Majestic.

It has both a Fresh Index and a huge Historic Index, and its tools let you filter/analyze links by language, topic, industry, and geography. majestic.commajestic.com

This can be particularly useful when you're looking for something like:

• French-language publications
• Japanese sites
• Brazilian Portuguese sites
• German industry sites
• Country-specific media
• Links in a particular topical ecosystem

Its country classification is based on GeoLite/MaxMind geographic data, so remember that "country" generally describes the referring server/domain infrastructure, not necessarily where the site's audience lives. majestic.commajestic.com

4. SE Ranking — strongest value alternative

SE Ranking has become quite interesting for this use case. Its current backlink index is reported at 2.7T backlinks across 420M indexed domains, with 6B pages crawled daily. Its backlink API exposes countries, TLDs, referring domains, anchors, and raw backlinks. seranking.com

I'd consider it if you're doing international outreach at scale and don't necessarily want to pay for Ahrefs/Semrush purely for backlink data.

One important caveat

If by "non-English backlinks" you mean the backlink page itself is written in German/Japanese/Spanish/etc., rather than simply being hosted in Germany/Japan/Spain, the ranking changes.

Country ≠ language.

For example:

example.de → German is likely, but not guaranteed.

example.com hosted in Germany → could be English, German, Turkish, etc.

A French-language article on a .com publication → won't necessarily appear in a simple .fr filter.

For serious international outreach, I'd therefore use three signals simultaneously:

1. Referring-domain country
2. TLD / ccTLD
3. Language of the actual linking page

And then manually validate the best prospects.

What I'd actually buy

If you're doing international digital PR/link outreach, my stack would be:

Best single tool: Ahrefs

Best country-specific workflow: Semrush

Best specialist backlink database: Majestic

Best lower-cost option: SE Ranking

And if you're targeting specific countries/languages (e.g. Germany + German, Japan + Japanese, France + French, Brazil + Portuguese), I'd probably use Ahrefs + Semrush, rather than trusting one index.

If you tell me the 5–10 countries/languages you're targeting, I can also compare which tool is likely to have the strongest coverage for each market and give you a country-by-country prospecting workflow.

For international outreach, the best backlink tools are not necessarily the ones with the biggest global link counts — you want tools with strong country-level crawls, non-English web coverage, local TLD discovery (.de, .fr, .jp, .kr, .br, etc.), and the ability to filter by language/location.

Here are the strongest options:

If your goal is international link building or auditing, the quality of a backlink tool depends less on its total index size and more on how well it crawls sites outside the English-speaking web. In practice, no single tool has the best coverage everywhere—you'll usually get the best results by combining two indexes.

Here's how the major tools compare:

1. Ahrefs (usually the strongest overall)

Strengths:

• Extremely aggressive crawler across Europe, Asia, Latin America, and Eastern Europe.
• Finds many regional news sites and local business directories.
• Excellent filtering by:
  • TLD (.de, .fr, .jp, .br)
  • Language
  • Country
  • Referring IP
• Good discovery of newer backlinks.

Particularly strong for:

• Germany
• France
• Spain
• Italy
• Japan
• Brazil
• Poland
• Netherlands
• Nordics

If I could only use one tool for global outreach, this would usually be it.

2. Majestic (best for obscure international links)

Majestic often discovers links that other tools miss, especially:

• universities
• government domains
• regional organizations
• older websites
• country-specific directories

It has exceptionally good coverage of:

• Eastern Europe
• Russia/CIS (historically)
• academic domains
• nonprofit organizations

Its Trust Flow metrics also help identify authoritative local websites.

3. Semrush

Semrush has improved dramatically.

Its strengths:

• combines backlinks with local keyword databases
• country-specific competitor research
• international market analysis
• outreach prospecting

If you're already using Semrush for SEO, its backlink database is now very competitive.

4. Moz

Moz has improved over the years but still tends to miss many international backlinks, particularly from:

• smaller publishers
• regional blogs
• non-English directories
• local business associations

I generally wouldn't rely on it as the primary tool for international campaigns.

Coverage by region

Europe

Excellent:

• Ahrefs
• Majestic

Very good:

• Semrush

Latin America

Best:

• Ahrefs

Very good:

• Semrush

Good:

• Majestic

Japan

Ahrefs generally has the strongest index.

Majestic also finds some unique domains.

China

No backlink tool has comprehensive coverage because much of the Chinese web is difficult to crawl due to technical and access limitations.

For Chinese SEO, local tools and manual research are often necessary.

Korea

Ahrefs tends to outperform competitors because it indexes many Korean blogs and media sites.

Eastern Europe

Majestic often uncovers more local domains than competitors.

Ahrefs is a close second.

Middle East

Ahrefs and Semrush perform similarly.

Majestic sometimes finds additional government or institutional sites.

If you're doing outreach

For finding prospects, I'd prioritize:

1. Ahrefs
2. Semrush
3. Majestic (to fill gaps)

Many agencies export prospects from both Ahrefs and Majestic, merge them, and remove duplicates to maximize coverage.

For large international campaigns

A common workflow is:

• Ahrefs for competitor backlink discovery and new link detection.
• Majestic to identify additional regional and historical links that Ahrefs may not show.
• Semrush for country-specific keyword research, ranking data, and backlink validation.

This combination typically provides broader coverage than relying on any single index.

If you're targeting a specific region (for example, German-speaking countries, Japan, Latin America, or the Middle East), I can also recommend which tools and local link sources tend to perform best for that market.

If your goal is international SEO rather than just English-language SEO, the biggest difference between backlink tools is crawl coverage in specific regions, not just total index size. No tool has complete coverage, so agencies working across multiple countries often combine two or more.

Here's how the major tools compare:

1. Ahrefs (probably the best overall)

Strengths:

• Probably the largest actively maintained live backlink index.
• Excellent discovery of links from:
  • Germany
  • France
  • Spain
  • Italy
  • Japan
  • Korea
  • Brazil
  • Mexico
  • Indonesia
  • Thailand
• Strong crawling of ccTLDs (.de, .fr, .jp, .br, .mx, etc.).
• Excellent filtering by TLD and language.

If you're doing outreach in 20+ countries, Ahrefs is usually the benchmark.

2. Majestic (underrated internationally)

Majestic often finds links that Ahrefs misses, especially:

• older European sites
• academic domains
• government domains
• local directories
• niche publishers

Its Historic Index is enormous.

Many enterprise SEO teams still use:

• Ahrefs → current links
• Majestic → historical and obscure links

3. Semrush

Semrush has improved dramatically.

It's particularly strong for:

• Germany
• France
• Spain
• Italy
• Brazil

Less comprehensive than Ahrefs for backlinks alone, but if you're already using Semrush for keyword research, it may be "good enough."

4. Country-specific performance

Some examples:

Germany (.de)

• Ahrefs ★★★★★
• Majestic ★★★★★
• Semrush ★★★★☆

France (.fr)

• Ahrefs ★★★★★
• Majestic ★★★★☆
• Semrush ★★★★☆

Japan (.jp)

• Ahrefs ★★★★★
• Semrush ★★★☆☆
• Majestic ★★★☆☆

China (.cn)

• No commercial tool has excellent coverage due to crawling restrictions.
• Ahrefs is probably the least incomplete.

Russia / CIS

• Ahrefs performs well.
• SE Ranking has relatively good visibility into regional sites.
• Majestic can surface older Russian domains.

Latin America

• Ahrefs is excellent.
• Semrush is very good.
• Majestic is decent.

5. Finding local opportunities

For outreach, the backlink index matters less than the ability to filter.

The best features include:

• ccTLD filtering (.de, .fr, .es, .co.jp)
• language filtering
• IP location
• referring country
• outbound link analysis
• competitor backlink gap analysis

Ahrefs generally has the strongest filtering for international campaigns.

6. If you're building links country by country

A common workflow is:

1. Identify local competitors in each country.
2. Export backlinks from Ahrefs.
3. Export the same domains from Majestic.
4. Deduplicate.
5. Filter by:
   • country
   • language
   • DR/Trust Flow
   • traffic
6. Prioritize domains that link to multiple competitors but not your site.

This often uncovers local industry directories, blogs, associations, chambers of commerce, and news outlets that generic searches miss.

Overall ranking for international backlink coverage

1. Ahrefs — Best overall live index and strongest global coverage.
2. Majestic — Outstanding historical depth and European/local domain discovery.
3. Semrush — Very strong all-around platform with good international backlink data.
4. SE Ranking — Solid value, particularly for Eastern Europe and CIS.
5. Moz — Reliable but generally smaller backlink index for international campaigns.

For agencies managing multilingual SEO across dozens of markets, the most common setup is Ahrefs + Majestic. Ahrefs provides the broadest current backlink coverage, while Majestic frequently surfaces additional country-specific and historical links that aren't present in Ahrefs' live index.

For international outreach, the best backlink tool depends heavily on which countries and languages you care about. The largest global indexes are not always the best at finding local-language, regional, or country-specific links. Here’s how the major tools compare:

Best picks by region

Europe

• Germany / DACH: Sistrix is often excellent because of its deep German-market visibility.
• France, Spain, Italy, Nordics: Ahrefs and Semrush are usually strongest.
• Eastern Europe: Ahrefs tends to perform well.

Asia

• Japan: combine Ahrefs with local tools such as GMO TECH or native Japanese SEO databases where available.
• Korea: global tools can miss smaller Korean sites; local search ecosystem knowledge matters.
• China: backlink tools are much weaker because of crawl/access limitations; local SEO platforms and manual prospecting are often needed.
• Southeast Asia: Ahrefs is generally strong, especially for English + regional-language sites.

Latin America

• Ahrefs and Semrush usually provide the best coverage.
• Local directories, news sites, and industry blogs often require manual discovery.

Middle East / Africa

• Coverage varies widely.
• Use Ahrefs or Majestic for discovery, then supplement with local-language search operators and regional directories.

For actual international link outreach, my usual stack would be:

1. Ahrefs → find competitor links by target country/language
2. Semrush → validate domains, traffic, keywords, and competitors
3. Majestic → analyze authority and link neighborhood
4. Sistrix (Europe-focused campaigns) → identify strong local publishers
5. Manual prospecting using native-language queries:
   • intitle:"resources" + keyword
   • keyword + "partner"
   • keyword + "guest post"
   • local equivalents of "submit article," "directory," "association," etc.

A useful workflow for non-English link building

1. Pick 5–10 local competitors in the target country.
2. Export their referring domains from Ahrefs/Semrush.
3. Filter by:
   • country TLD (.de, .fr, .jp, .br, etc.)
   • language
   • organic traffic
   • topical relevance
4. Prioritize:
   • local publications
   • universities
   • associations
   • industry communities
   • niche blogs
5. Outreach in the local language.

If your goal is finding the most local backlinks possible (not just global authority links), I’d generally rank them:

1. Ahrefs
2. Sistrix (especially Europe)
3. Semrush
4. Majestic
5. Local SEO tools/databases for specific countries (Japan, Korea, China, etc.)

For a campaign targeting a specific market (e.g., Japan, Germany, Brazil, France), the ranking can change quite a bit.

If your priority is international SEO rather than English-language link building, there are meaningful differences between backlink indexes. No tool has complete coverage, but some consistently perform better for specific regions.

Here's how I'd rank them for non-English and country-specific backlinks:

Regional observations

Europe (German, French, Spanish, Italian, Dutch)

• Ahrefs is usually the leader.
• Majestic often finds additional links from older local domains.
• Combining Ahrefs + Majestic uncovers the highest percentage.

Japan

Japanese sites often behave differently because many:

• restrict crawlers
• have unusual site architecture
• aren't heavily linked internationally

Best performers:

1. Ahrefs
2. Majestic
3. Google Search Console (for your own sites)

China

No commercial tool has excellent coverage because:

• many sites block crawlers
• JavaScript-heavy ecosystems
• firewall issues
• Baidu ecosystem differs substantially

Ahrefs tends to be the best among commercial products, but expect incomplete data.

Korea

Ahrefs generally performs best, but all tools miss portions of:

• Naver blogs
• Cafe communities
• local portals

Russia / CIS

Historically:

• Ahrefs
• Majestic
• SE Ranking

all perform reasonably well.

Latin America

Ahrefs has particularly strong coverage.

Semrush also performs well due to its user base in Brazil and Spanish-speaking markets.

Best combinations

Budget

• Ahrefs only

Professional agency

• Ahrefs
• Majestic

The overlap between these isn't 100%, so each finds links the other misses.

Enterprise / international SEO

Many enterprise teams combine:

• Ahrefs
• Majestic
• Google Search Console (for owned sites)
• regional search engines (such as Baidu or Naver webmaster tools where applicable)

If your goal is competitor research

Coverage matters less than finding local links your competitors earn.

For example, if you're targeting Germany, you'd want to discover links from:

• local newspapers
• German universities
• .de industry associations
• regional business directories
• niche German blogs

Ahrefs tends to surface these more consistently than other commercial tools.

One important limitation

No backlink database fully indexes the local web in every country. Some countries have substantial content inside ecosystems that commercial crawlers only partially cover (for example, Naver in Korea, Baidu-connected sites in China, or messaging and social platforms). For serious international outreach, many SEO teams supplement backlink tools with country-specific search operators, local directories, and native-language searches to uncover opportunities that aren't present in commercial backlink indexes.

If you're planning outreach in 20+ countries, Ahrefs plus Majestic is often the strongest commercial combination because they have complementary crawlers and together provide broader international coverage than either alone.