ChatGPT answers, unedited

For international outreach/link prospecting, I’d look at the major backlink indexes a little differently than I would for general SEO reporting. The key question is: how well does the crawler actually discover links from the countries/languages I care about?

My practical shortlist

1. Ahrefs — strongest general-purpose choice

ahrefs.com is probably where I'd start if your goal is finding actual outreach prospects across many countries.

Ahrefs says its crawler operates globally regardless of language, and specifically notes that backlink coverage tends to be similarly strong in non-English markets. Its current backlink index is also extremely large: it reports 35 trillion historical backlink records and 493.9 billion pages in its index, with live-backlink data refreshed every 15–30 minutes. Ahrefs Ahrefs

The important caveat: Ahrefs' keyword coverage varies substantially by country, especially in smaller markets. That's different from backlink coverage, which Ahrefs says is generally strong internationally. Ahrefs

I'd choose Ahrefs when: you're prospecting across, say, Germany + France + Japan + Brazil + Korea and want one large database rather than a specialist tool for each market.

2. Majestic — particularly interesting for multilingual outreach

majestic.com has a feature that makes it unusually useful for your specific question: it explicitly detects the language of source pages and incoming anchor text.

For example, its reports can break incoming links down by languages such as German, French, Chinese, Japanese, etc. Majestic Blog Majestic

Its API also exposes the language of the source page, including multiple detected languages for multilingual domains. Majestic Developer

And the underlying index is enormous: Majestic currently reports roughly 533 billion unique URLs found in Fresh and 21.7 trillion unique URLs found in Historic. Majestic

That's why I'd seriously consider Majestic if your workflow is:

"Show me websites linking to competitors where the source page is French/German/Japanese/Spanish/etc."

rather than merely:

"Show me links originating from France."

For pure multilingual link research, Majestic may actually be more useful than Semrush.

3. Semrush — particularly good for country-specific prospecting

semrush.com has a very useful Top Countries dimension in Backlink Analytics. It determines the country of a referring domain using its IP address, and you can filter referring domains based on that country. Semrush Semrush Developer

That makes it especially convenient for workflows like:

Competitor → backlinks → referring domains → Germany → export prospects

or:

Competitor → backlinks → Japan → identify domains you don't already have links from.

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

One important distinction: country ≠ language. A .fr or French-hosted site isn't necessarily French-language, and an English-language site can be physically hosted in France. Semrush's country metric is based on the referring domain's IP. Semrush

What I'd use for an international outreach stack

If you're doing serious multilingual/country-specific outreach, I'd actually use two indexes rather than betting on one:

Ahrefs + Majestic

• Ahrefs: broad competitor backlink discovery and prospect volume.
• Majestic: language-specific validation, Link Graph, Trust Flow, topical relevance, and additional prospects Ahrefs didn't surface.
• Semrush: particularly useful as a third database when you're working through a defined list of target countries.

The overlap between databases is not complete, so running the same competitor through two crawlers can uncover materially different prospects.

One important distinction

If by "best index" you mean finding backlinks from websites in a particular country, I'd lean:

Semrush / Ahrefs

If you mean finding backlinks from pages written in a particular language, I'd lean:

Majestic / Ahrefs

If you mean maximum raw backlink discovery across the international web, I'd compare:

Ahrefs / Majestic / Semrush, rather than assuming the biggest advertised index automatically has the best coverage for your particular country.

For a real international campaign, I'd also test the tools against 5–10 competitors in each target market and measure unique referring domains discovered, because published index sizes don't tell you which crawler has better coverage of, say, Korean news sites, Polish blogs, Brazilian directories, or Japanese publishers.

Its API also exposes the language of the source page, including multiple detected languages for multilingual domains. Majestic Developer

And the underlying index is enormous: Majestic currently reports roughly 533 billion unique URLs found in Fresh and 21.7 trillion unique URLs found in Historic. Majestic

That's why I'd seriously consider Majestic if your workflow is:

"Show me websites linking to competitors where the source page is French/German/Japanese/Spanish/etc."

rather than merely:

"Show me links originating from France."

For pure multilingual link research, Majestic may actually be more useful than Semrush.

3. Semrush — particularly good for country-specific prospecting

semrush.com has a very useful Top Countries dimension in Backlink Analytics. It determines the country of a referring domain using its IP address, and you can filter referring domains based on that country. Semrush Semrush Developer

That makes it especially convenient for workflows like:

Competitor → backlinks → referring domains → Germany → export prospects

or:

Competitor → backlinks → Japan → identify domains you don't already have links from.

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

One important distinction: country ≠ language. A .fr or French-hosted site isn't necessarily French-language, and an English-language site can be physically hosted in France. Semrush's country metric is based on the referring domain's IP.

What I'd use for an international outreach stack

For international outreach and link building, the “best” backlink index depends less on total link count and more on whether the tool has good coverage in the countries, languages, and niches you care about. No index captures the entire web, and different crawlers have different blind spots. LinkVetted

Here is how I’d rank the major tools specifically for non-English / country-specific backlink discovery:

Gatilab Majestic## My practical ranking for international outreach

1. Ahrefs — best overall for foreign-language link discovery

Ahrefs tends to perform very well when you are researching:

• Japanese sites
• German-language sites
• Spanish/Portuguese markets
• Eastern European sites
• niche blogs and publishers outside the US/UK

Why:

• Strong crawler coverage
• Good filtering by referring domain, language signals, country, anchor text, and traffic
• Excellent competitor backlink research workflows

Use cases:

• “Find every French site linking to competitors”
• “Find Korean bloggers covering this product category”
• “Find Spanish-language PR opportunities”

Contenido Patrocinado### 2. Semrush — best if you run many country campaigns

Semrush is particularly useful when your workflow combines:

• backlink research
• keyword research by country
• competitive analysis
• outreach management

Its backlink reports include geographic views such as top countries associated with referring domains, which can help identify where competitors are earning links internationally. Semrush

Good fit:

• International SEO teams
• Agencies managing dozens of markets
• Localization campaigns

3. Majestic — underrated for regional authority discovery

Majestic is worth adding when you care about:

• historical links
• niche authority
• link neighborhood analysis

Its country reporting can help identify where linking sites are located, and its historical index is useful for finding older relationships competitors built years ago. Majestic

Good fit:

• Enterprise SEO
• Link audits
• Finding long-standing industry relationships

Tools I would add for specific regions

Japan

Consider pairing a global tool with local search tools because many Japanese publishers, directories, and blogs are underrepresented in Western SEO databases.

Useful additions:

• GMO TECH tools
• Japanese webmaster databases/directories
• manual Google.jp prospecting

China

Western backlink indexes are often incomplete for Chinese-language ecosystems.

Look at:

• Baidu ecosystem data
• local PR databases
• Chinese SEO platforms

South Korea

Consider:

• Naver-focused research
• Korean blog/community platforms
• local influencer databases

Russia / Eastern Europe

Ahrefs + Majestic often work well, but supplement with local-language searches because many regional sites are small and crawl frequency varies.

Recommended stack by budget

Lean setup

• Ahrefs or Semrush
• Google Search operators in target languages
• Spreadsheet outreach tracking

Serious international link building

• Ahrefs (prospecting)
• Semrush (market analysis)
• Majestic (historical/link quality checks)
• Local-language SERP research

Enterprise

• Ahrefs + Semrush + Majestic
• Local PR databases
• Native-language outreach specialists

A useful test before committing

Take 5–10 competitor domains from your target country and compare:

1. Number of referring domains found
2. Number of local-language domains found
3. Country-code TLD coverage (.de, .fr, .jp, .kr, etc.)
4. Whether it finds known local publications you already know

The winner for your market may differ from the global winner because crawler coverage varies by region. LinkVetted

If you tell me the countries/languages you’re targeting (e.g., Japan, Germany, Brazil, France, India) and the niche, I can suggest the most effective stack and workflow.

For international link prospecting, I’d focus less on raw backlink-count claims and more on whether the tool lets you reliably slice the index by country, TLD, language, and referring domain.

How I’d compare the major indexes

Ahrefs currently reports 35T backlink records and 185 locations in its Site Explorer data. Its strength is breadth: you can start with a competitor in a particular market and work backward through its referring domains. Ahrefs Ahrefs

Semrush is particularly useful if your definition of "country-specific" means sites actually located in that country. Its Backlinks/Referring Domains reports allow filtering by country and TLD/zone separately. That's important because a .de domain isn't necessarily hosted or operated in Germany, while a country filter can identify domains based in Germany regardless of whether they're .de, .com, etc. Semrush Semrush

Majestic is probably the most interesting one for your specific question. Its reports explicitly expose detected languages of pages and incoming anchor text, in addition to country-level analysis. Its Advanced Reports can estimate the countries from which backlinks originate, and its Site Explorer examples show language distributions for incoming backlinks. Majestic Majestic

Majestic also has a very large Historic Index, with records going back to 2006, alongside its current Fresh Index. Majestic

My practical take

If you're doing international outreach, I'd use:

1. Majestic — when language and country provenance are the primary concern.
2. Semrush — when you want to build prospect lists specifically around countries/TLDs and export/filter them.
3. Ahrefs — when you want the strongest general-purpose competitor/backlink discovery and then identify international opportunities within it.

The interesting combination is Ahrefs + Majestic: Ahrefs for discovering a large universe of potential referring domains, then Majestic for examining the language/country characteristics of those links.

One caveat: "country of backlink" is inherently imperfect. Semrush, for example, determines referring-domain country using the domain's IP address, while Majestic uses GeoLite/MaxMind data for its country estimates. Neither necessarily tells you where the site's audience or editorial operation is located. developer.semrush.com Majestic

If you're targeting something specific like German, French, Japanese, Korean, Spanish, or Middle Eastern publishers, I can also compare the tools specifically for which one is most likely to surface local-language editorial links, rather than just country-coded domains.

Majestic also has a very large Historic Index, with records going back to 2006, alongside its current Fresh Index.

My practical take

If your priority is international outreach—especially discovering backlinks from non-English sites and specific countries—I’d rank the major tools roughly like this:

1. Majestic — best for your specific use case

I'd probably choose Majestic if the main question is "who is linking to sites in this country/language?"

It has unusually strong geographic and language-oriented backlink functionality. Its reports can identify the country of referring domains, and you can drill down into the domains linking from a particular country. It also detects the language of linking pages/domains, including incoming-language analysis. majestic.com

Its API can also filter backlinks by geo-located country, which is particularly useful if you're building an outreach prospecting workflow. developer-support.majestic.com

The underlying index is enormous: Majestic currently reports roughly 543B unique URLs found in its Fresh Index and 21.7T in its Historic Index. developer-support.majestic.com

Why I'd use it:
If you're doing something like:

"Find German-language sites linking to competitors, then identify Spanish sites linking to companies in our vertical, then build outreach lists"

Majestic is particularly well suited.

2. Semrush — best all-around international workflow

Semrush is probably my #1 alternative and arguably better if you're doing broader international SEO rather than purely backlink intelligence.

Its Backlink Analytics has a Top Countries view showing domains linking from individual countries, specifically intended for analyzing international PR/link-building strategies. www.semrush.com

Its API also exposes referring domains by country, using the referring domain's IP location. developer.semrush.com

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

Big advantage: Semrush combines backlinks with its huge international keyword/ranking databases—over 140 country databases—so you can go from:

country → competitors → backlinks → organic visibility → outreach prospects. www.semrush.com

3. Ahrefs — excellent breadth, slightly less specialized for geo filtering

Ahrefs remains one of the strongest choices for raw backlink discovery and competitor research.

I'd put it ahead of Semrush in some conventional backlink-analysis workflows, but for your particular question—non-English/country-specific link discovery—I prefer Majestic/Semrush because their geographic/language functionality is more directly exposed.

One important distinction: Ahrefs' extensive international language/locale coverage is especially evident in its keyword databases; that shouldn't automatically be interpreted as equivalent geographic coverage of its backlink index. help.ahrefs.com

My recommendation for international outreach

If you're actually building prospect lists, I'd use:

Majestic + Semrush

rather than trying to pick one.

A good workflow is:

1. Semrush: identify competitors that perform well in the target country.
2. Majestic: pull their referring domains and filter/segment by country and language.
3. Remove obvious global directories, sitewide links, PBN-ish domains, etc.
4. Prioritize sites where:
   • linking-page language = target language
   • referring-domain country = target market
   • topical relevance is high
   • the site has genuine organic traffic
   • competitor links are editorial/content links rather than directories
5. Use Ahrefs as a third-source cross-check for important prospects.

One important caveat

Country of IP ≠ country of audience. A .de domain hosted in the Netherlands, for example, can still be an excellent German-market prospect. Conversely, a domain whose server resolves to Germany doesn't necessarily target Germany.

So for international outreach I'd score prospects using three signals simultaneously:

language + TLD/domain market + actual audience/organic traffic

rather than simply filtering "backlinks from Germany."

If you tell me which countries/languages you're targeting (e.g. Germany, France, Japan, Korea, Brazil) and whether you're looking for guest posts, digital PR, resource links, or competitor backlink replication, I can give you a much more specific tool/workflow recommendation.

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

My ranking

1. Majestic — probably my first choice for this specific job

Majestic is unusually strong when your question is "show me websites linking to competitors from this particular country/language."

Its tools expose geographic information, language, TLD, IP location and referring domains, and its Advanced Reports have a dedicated Countries view. Majestic Majestic Blog

Its underlying index is also enormous: Majestic currently reports roughly 542 billion unique URLs found in its Fresh Index and more than 21.7 trillion URLs found historically. Majestic

The particularly useful part for international outreach is that you can combine things like:

• referring country = Germany
• page language = German
• Trust Flow > X
• topical category = your industry
• referring domain = competitor's backlinks

That's much closer to an international outreach prospecting database than simply looking at a site's overall backlink count.

Verdict: If your primary goal is finding German/French/Japanese/Spanish/etc. sites that actually link to competitors, I'd start with Majestic.

2. Ahrefs — best overall alternative

Ahrefs has an extremely large backlink index—currently advertising 35 trillion live backlinks and coverage across 185 locations. Ahrefs

Its Site Explorer is excellent for:

• competitor backlink discovery
• referring-domain analysis
• broken-link prospecting
• identifying pages attracting links
• comparing multiple international competitors

The API also exposes backlink/referring-domain data and country-level metrics. Ahrefs for Developers

I'd choose Ahrefs over Majestic if you're doing international SEO as a whole, rather than primarily international link acquisition.

3. DataForSEO — sleeper choice if you're serious about scale

If by "tool" you mean something you can use to build a prospecting database, DataForSEO is particularly interesting.

Its Backlinks API exposes:

• domain_from_country
• tld_from
• page_from_language
• referring-page data
• referring-domain data
• backlink rank
• platform type
• first-seen dates
• spam scores

and lets you filter/group specifically by country or language. DataForSEO Docs DataForSEO

It also explicitly provides geographic distribution of referring links by country. DataForSEO

That means you could theoretically query:

Competitor A → backlinks → French pages → France/Belgium/Switzerland → news/blogs → DR/authority threshold → export prospects

rather than manually digging through thousands of links.

Verdict: For an agency or in-house team building an automated international outreach pipeline, I'd seriously consider DataForSEO + your own database/UI.

4. Semrush — very good if international search research matters too

Semrush has extensive country-specific search databases—over 140 databases—and is particularly useful when you want to combine backlink research with country-specific keyword/competitor research. Semrush

I'd put it behind Ahrefs/Majestic specifically for backlink-index depth in obscure non-English markets, though.

What I'd actually use

If your objective is international digital PR / link outreach, my stack would be:

Majestic → discovery
Find competitor links by country + language + topical relevance.

Ahrefs → validation
Check the prospect's organic traffic, referring domains, pages, rankings, and overall quality.

DataForSEO → scale/automation
If you're processing thousands or millions of backlinks and want structured country/language filtering.

One important caveat: "country" isn't the same thing as "country-specific audience." A .de domain may be hosted elsewhere, and an IP geolocation can be misleading. Likewise, a French-language site isn't necessarily based in France. The best international prospecting combines TLD + referring-domain country + page language + actual audience/traffic geography.

If you're targeting specific markets such as Japan, Korea, Germany, France, Spain/LatAm, Brazil, or the Nordics, I can also give you a market-by-market ranking of which backlink index tends to be strongest in each region.

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

1. majestic.com — best for international backlink intelligence

I'd put Majestic first if the specific question is "show me links from websites in this country/language."

Its backlink data exposes both source-page language and geo-located country, and its API lets you filter referring domains by country. Majestic Developer Majestic Developer

That's particularly useful for things like:

• Spanish-language sites linking to competitors
• German/French/Italian publications
• .de, .fr, .es, .br, .jp, etc.
• Finding which countries already link to a competitor
• Separating an actual local link profile from a globally distributed one

Majestic also has an enormous Historic Index, currently reporting more than 21 trillion unique URLs found, so it can be particularly valuable when you're looking for older/local links that aren't necessarily prominent today. Majestic Developer Majestic

My pick: if international outreach is the primary use case, start here.

2. semrush.com — probably the best all-around option

Semrush is particularly good when your workflow is:

competitor → country → referring domains → prospect list

Its Backlinks Overview explicitly provides Top Countries, with country determined from the IP associated with the referring domain, and you can drill into the domains linking from that country. Semrush

Its current backlink database is also very large—Semrush says it contains 43+ trillion backlinks and 390 million referring domains, with the database refreshed at least hourly. Semrush

For international SEO generally, Semrush has an additional advantage: its keyword databases cover 140+ countries/databases, which makes it easier to connect backlink research with actual local search demand. Semrush

My pick: best if backlink prospecting is only one component of a broader international SEO workflow.

3. ahrefs.com — excellent, particularly for content-driven outreach

Ahrefs has very broad international search data and supports a huge number of country/language combinations in its keyword databases. Ahrefs Help Center

I'd favor it when you're doing:

"Which local publications/sites are linking to content similar to ours?"

rather than purely:

"Give me every backlink from Germany."

Its Content Explorer + Site Explorer combination can be particularly productive for finding local publications and content that already attract links, which is useful for building an outreach list.

The important distinction

There's a subtle issue with "country-specific backlinks": country and language aren't the same thing.

For example:

• A French-language page can be hosted in Canada.
• A .de site can publish content in English.
• A Brazilian company can use a .com domain.
• A Spanish publication may have servers/IPs outside Spain.

So for serious international outreach, I'd use three signals simultaneously:

Country
→ referring-domain IP / geo data + ccTLD

Language
→ detected language of the linking page

Local relevance
→ whether the publication actually targets your desired market

Majestic is unusually interesting here because its backlink data exposes both source-page language and country information, rather than making you rely exclusively on TLD. Majestic Developer Majestic Developer

My recommended stack

If you're doing a lot of international outreach, I'd actually use:

Majestic + Semrush

Use Majestic to maximize discovery of geographically/language-specific opportunities, then Semrush to evaluate the market, organic visibility, keywords, and competitor landscape.

If budget only allows one:

• International backlink discovery: Majestic
• International SEO + backlinks: Semrush
• Content-led link building: Ahrefs

And if you're specifically targeting, say, Japan, Germany, France, Brazil, Korea, or Eastern Europe, I can also compare which of these databases tends to be strongest market by market—that's a more useful comparison than the global rankings because the coverage varies considerably by region.

Local relevance
→ whether the publication actually targets your desired market

Majestic is unusually interesting here because its backlink data exposes both source-page language and country information, rather than making you rely exclusively on TLD.

My recommended stack

If you're doing a lot of international outreach, I'd actually use:

Majestic + Semrush

Use Majestic to maximize discovery of geographically/language-specific opportunities, then Semrush to evaluate the market, organic visibility, keywords, and competitor landscape.

If budget only allows one:

I'd favor it when you're doing:

"Which local publications/sites are linking to content similar to ours?"

rather than purely:

"Give me every backlink from Germany."

Its Content Explorer + Site Explorer combination can be particularly productive for finding local publications and content that already attract links, which is useful for building an outreach list.

The important distinction

There's a subtle issue with "country-specific backlinks": country and language aren't the same thing.

For example:

For international link prospecting, especially when you care about non-English sites and country-specific publishers, I’d rank the major backlink indexes roughly like this:

1. Ahrefs — best overall

ahrefs.com is probably my first choice if you're doing serious international outreach.

Its current Site Explorer index claims 35 trillion live backlinks, 21.7B pages, and coverage across 185 locations. Ahrefs

More importantly for your use case, Ahrefs lets you inspect the country-code TLD distribution of referring domains. You can identify, for example, whether a competitor's links come disproportionately from .de, .fr, .es, .jp, .br, etc. Ahrefs Help Center

Why I'd choose it: If you're trying to answer "Who links to my German competitors but doesn't link to me?", Ahrefs is extremely good at turning that into a prospecting list.

2. Majestic — arguably the best complement for obscure international links

majestic.com is the one I'd add if international link acquisition is a major part of your workflow.

Majestic currently reports roughly 545B unique URLs in its Fresh Index and 21.7T in its Historic Index. Majestic Majestic

What makes it particularly interesting for your question is that Majestic explicitly analyzes languages of incoming links. Its Site Explorer can show the language distribution of incoming backlinks—for example, Czech, Danish, German, French, Spanish, etc. Majestic

It also has a Countries report that estimates the countries backlinks originate from and lets you drill into the domains linking from that country. Majestic

That makes Majestic particularly useful for:

• Japanese/Korean/Chinese prospects
• Eastern European markets
• country-specific publishers
• discovering links that aren't obvious from English-language competitor research
• analyzing the historical link ecosystem of a market

If I had to choose only two tools for global outreach: Ahrefs + Majestic.

3. Semrush — very good if international SEO is broader than link building

semrush.com has extensive international search databases—over 140 country databases according to its current documentation. Semrush

I'd put it behind Ahrefs/Majestic specifically for backlink-index depth, but it becomes very attractive if your workflow is:

country → local competitors → local keywords → local SERPs → backlink prospects

rather than simply:

competitor → backlinks → outreach list.

The important distinction: country ≠ language

This matters a lot for international outreach.

A .fr domain doesn't necessarily mean French-language content, and a Spanish-language site doesn't necessarily use .es.

For example, a Mexican publisher may be .com, while a German publisher may be .com rather than .de.

So I'd use both:

1. Language/content analysis — find sites actually publishing in the target language.
2. Country analysis — find sites geographically associated with the target market.
3. ccTLD analysis — .de, .fr, .it, .nl, .jp, etc.
4. Competitor intersection — find domains linking to several local competitors.
5. SERP research — identify publishers ranking for local-language commercial/informational queries.

This is why I particularly like Majestic + Ahrefs together. Majestic's language/country reporting gives you another dimension beyond simply looking at the referring domain's TLD. Majestic Majestic

My practical stack

If you're doing international digital PR/link outreach, I'd use:

Ahrefs → primary prospect discovery
Majestic → second-pass discovery + language/country validation
Semrush → local SERP/competitor/keyword intelligence
Google → manual validation of actual publisher relevance

And I wouldn't rely on a single backlink index. No commercial crawler has a complete view of the web, and the gaps become more noticeable in smaller-language ecosystems.

If you tell me which markets you're targeting (e.g. Germany, France, Japan, Korea, Brazil, Mexico, Nordics, CEE), I can also rank the tools by country/language—because the winner isn't necessarily the same for German vs. Japanese vs. Polish backlink discovery.

A .fr domain doesn't necessarily mean French-language content, and a Spanish-language site doesn't necessarily use .es.

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

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

For international outreach, Majestic is unusually strong because its backlink data exposes both source language and geographic information.

Its API, for example, provides the detected language of the linking page and can filter referring domains by geo-country. Majestic Developer Majestic Developer

Its Advanced Reports also have a dedicated Countries report that estimates the country of backlink sources and lets you drill into the domains linking from that country. Majestic

That makes it particularly useful for questions like:

"Show me German-language sites in Germany linking to my competitors."

or:

"Find Japanese sites that link to the top 10 companies in this niche."

Majestic also has an enormous historical index—its current site reports trillions of URLs found—and maintains both Fresh and Historic indexes. Majestic

I'd choose Majestic if international link intelligence is the primary job.

2. ahrefs.com — probably the best all-around choice

Ahrefs has an extremely large backlink database and a very active crawler; its current figures are around 493B pages in its index, 209M domains and 35T historical external backlinks. Ahrefs

It's excellent for competitor-based prospecting:

• Find competitors in Spain → extract their Spanish referring domains.
• Find competitors in Japan → identify Japanese publishers linking to them.
• Filter prospects by domain, language, traffic, DR, etc.
• Investigate individual pages rather than just domains.

The caveat is that coverage isn't identical across languages/countries. Ahrefs' crawler can also miss links on sites that restrict AhrefsBot; for example, Ahrefs specifically says some LinkedIn/Quora/SlideShare links aren't available because those sites restrict or partially allow crawling. Ahrefs Help Center

I'd choose Ahrefs if you're doing international SEO broadly rather than exclusively link intelligence.

3. semrush.com — excellent for country segmentation

Semrush is particularly convenient when the question is:

"Which countries are already linking to this competitor?"

Its Backlinks Overview has a Top Countries report based on the IP address associated with the referring domain, and you can drill into the referring domains from a particular country. Semrush

That makes it very good for building country-specific outreach lists:

Competitor → country → referring domains → prospect list

I'd put Semrush slightly behind Majestic/Ahrefs for pure backlink-index depth, but it can be more convenient for market-level SEO analysis.

My practical stack

If you're doing serious international outreach, I'd actually use two tools rather than trying to find one perfect index:

Majestic + Ahrefs

Use Majestic for:

• Country-specific backlink discovery
• Language filtering
• Historical link intelligence
• Link-quality analysis
• Finding unusual/non-English link networks

Use Ahrefs for:

• Competitor link-gap analysis
• Finding individual linking pages
• Organic traffic/keyword context
• Prospect qualification
• General SEO research

Then optionally add Semrush when you need a more convenient country-by-country market view.

One important distinction

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

For example, a .fr domain isn't necessarily a French-market publisher, while a .com site hosted in France may be highly relevant to France. IP geolocation, ccTLD, detected page language, traffic country, and actual editorial audience are different signals.

For international outreach I'd ideally score prospects using:

Target country + page language + organic traffic from target country + topical relevance + referring-domain authority + competitor links

That produces much better prospect lists than simply filtering for .de, .fr, .es, etc.

Bottom line: If your question is specifically "Which backlink database gives me the deepest ability to uncover non-English and country-specific links?", Majestic is the standout. If you want the best overall SEO/backlink platform, I'd pick Ahrefs, with Majestic alongside it for international link intelligence. Majestic Majestic Developer Ahrefs

If you tell me which markets/languages you're targeting (e.g. Germany, France, Japan, Korea, Brazil, Spain), I can also give you a country-by-country recommendation of which index tends to be strongest and exactly how I'd build the prospecting workflow.

For international outreach, especially when you need non-English, local-language, or country-specific backlinks, the “biggest index” is less important than how well the crawler discovers regional sites, handles non-Latin anchors, and lets you filter by country/TLD/language. No tool has a complete view of the web; each has its own crawl footprint. LinkVetted

My ranking for global link prospecting:

Backly Contenido Patrocinado### My recommended stack by region

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

• Ahrefs + SISTRIX
• Add Semrush if you need country-level competitor research

Japan / Korea / China / Southeast Asia

• Ahrefs is usually the strongest starting point
• Supplement with local search engines, local PR databases, and native-language outreach tools because many smaller sites are not well represented in Western indexes

Latin America

• Ahrefs + Semrush is usually sufficient
• Pay attention to country filters (.mx, .br, .ar, .cl, etc.) rather than just Spanish-language links

Eastern Europe / Cyrillic markets

• Ahrefs + Majestic is a good combination
• Majestic can be useful for older regional domains and historical link discovery

Features I would prioritize for international outreach

Look for:

• Referring domains by country - Example: “Show me all .de domains linking to competitors”
• TLD filters - .fr, .jp, .kr, .br, .in, etc.
• Anchor text in local scripts - Cyrillic, Japanese, Korean, Arabic, Chinese
• Competitor link intersect - “Which local sites link to my competitors but not me?”
• Language/topic relevance - A high-authority English backlink is often less valuable than a niche-relevant local-language mention

Semrush, for example, supports country-level backlink analysis and filtering of referring domains by geography. Semrush

If I were running a global outreach campaign

I would use:

1. Ahrefs → primary prospect discovery
2. Semrush → country segmentation + competitor gaps
3. Majestic → second opinion for hard-to-find links and historical domains
4. Native/local SEO tools only for markets where Western crawlers are weaker

For a team doing serious international outreach, I would not rely on a single index. Export prospects from two tools, deduplicate domains, then prioritize by:

• local organic traffic
• topical relevance
• local-language content
• outbound link patterns
• actual audience location

That tends to produce much better outreach lists than simply sorting by DR/DA.

For international outreach, the “best” backlink index depends less on total link count and more on whether the tool can reliably surface local publishers, language-specific sites, regional domains (.de, .jp, .br, etc.), and links from smaller non-English websites. Backly Majestic

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

Backly Majestic## 1. Ahrefs — usually the strongest choice for international outreach

ahrefs.com

Best use cases:

• Finding who links to competitors in a specific country
• Discovering local bloggers, publishers, resource pages, and niche communities
• Link intersect campaigns (“sites linking to competitors but not you”)
• Anchor text analysis across languages

Why it tends to perform well internationally:

• Large crawl footprint
• Strong discovery of smaller sites
• Good filters for referring domains, languages, and top-level domains
• Strong competitor-based prospecting workflow

For example, if you are doing outreach in Germany:

• Enter 5 German competitors
• Export referring domains
• Filter by .de, German-language pages, DR/traffic thresholds
• Build a local outreach list

Ahrefs is generally my first choice when the goal is “find 500 sites in another country that might link to me.” Ahrefs

2. Semrush — best when you need country segmentation

semrush.com

Semrush is especially useful when international SEO is broader than backlinks:

• Country-by-country competitor analysis
• Organic visibility by market
• Link profiles segmented by country
• Outreach integrated with broader SEO campaigns

Its backlink reports include country-based analysis of referring domains, which is useful for identifying where competitors are earning links. Semrush

I would often choose Semrush if you are running:

• multilingual SEO
• PR campaigns across many countries
• enterprise international campaigns

3. Majestic — underrated for non-English link ecosystems

majestic.com

Majestic is particularly interesting for international work because it has:

• a huge historic link database
• strong link graph analysis
• topical classification
• detailed link context metrics Majestic

Where it can beat others:

• older regional websites
• obscure directories/resources
• markets where websites are less optimized for Google
• forensic backlink research

It is often a good second tool alongside Ahrefs.

4. Regional SEO tools can beat global tools in certain markets

For serious international campaigns, I would sometimes add local tools:

• Japan: tools that understand Japanese SERPs and local publishers
• South Korea: Naver-focused tools matter because Google is not the dominant discovery engine everywhere
• China: Baidu ecosystem tools are more relevant
• Russia/CIS: Yandex-focused research can matter
• Latin America: local SEO agencies/databases can uncover publishers missed by global crawlers

A global index may know a site exists but may not understand its actual influence in that market.

Recommended stack by campaign type

Global link building (10+ countries)

1. Ahrefs → discovery
2. Semrush → market segmentation
3. Majestic → fill gaps/history

Single-country outreach

1. Ahrefs competitor backlink mining
2. Local SERP research
3. Industry directories/news sites/influencers

Non-English niche markets

1. Ahrefs
2. Majestic
3. Manual local search in native language

A practical test: take 3–5 local competitors in your target country and compare how many relevant referring domains each tool finds. The winner is usually not the one with the biggest advertised index, but the one that finds the most real local publishers you would actually email. Backly Semrush

If you tell me the countries/languages you are targeting (e.g., Japan, Germany, Brazil, France, MENA), I can rank the tools more specifically—coverage varies a lot by market.

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

1. Majestic — my pick for international outreach

For your specific use case, Majestic is probably the strongest choice.

Its backlink data includes source-page language, language confidence, and geographic information. You can filter/analyze backlinks by language and country, rather than merely looking at the TLD. Majestic Blog Majestic Developer

This is particularly useful for something like:

"Show me German-language sites linking to my competitors, regardless of whether they're .de."

That's much more useful internationally than simply filtering .de domains.

Majestic also has an enormous Historic Index and a frequently updated Fresh Index. Its current documentation reports trillions of URLs in the Historic Index. Majestic Developer Majestic

It explicitly supports filtering backlink data by language, topic, and other metrics. Majestic

Best for: German, French, Spanish, Japanese, Korean, Chinese, etc. outreach where you care about the actual language of the linking page.

2. Ahrefs — probably the best all-around alternative

Ahrefs is probably what I'd choose if international backlinks are only one part of a broader SEO workflow.

Its huge advantage is the combination of:

• backlink discovery
• referring-domain analysis
• organic traffic
• keywords
• competing pages/domains
• content research
• anchor text
• country/locale SEO data

Ahrefs has extensive country/language coverage across its SEO databases; its current documentation lists locales ranging from Pashto in Afghanistan to Bengali in Bangladesh and many others. Ahrefs Help Center

For finding prospects, I'd often use Ahrefs first to identify competitors and their strongest referring domains, then segment those domains by country/language.

Best for: an international SEO team that wants one tool covering both link intelligence and market/keyword intelligence.

3. Semrush — particularly good for country segmentation

Semrush is very good if your workflow starts with:

"We're entering Germany, France, Japan and Brazil. What are competitors doing in each market?"

Its Backlinks Overview specifically provides a Top Countries view and lets you drill into the referring domains from a particular country. Semrush says this is designed for analyzing the international scope of competitors' PR and link-building strategies. Semrush

Semrush also has 140+ country databases for its broader search-data ecosystem. Semrush

The distinction I'd make is:

Majestic → better for link-centric geographic/language investigation.
Semrush → better for broader international market intelligence.

The important distinction: country ≠ language

For international outreach, I'd strongly recommend not relying on country TLD alone.

For example:

• example.de → probably German, but not necessarily
• example.com → could be German, French, Japanese, etc.
• example.ch → could be German, French, Italian or Romansh
• example.ca → could be English or French
• a Japanese-language site may use .com
• a Brazilian site may use .com.br

Majestic is unusually useful here because it can identify the language of the source page, rather than treating the domain extension as the language. It also provides geographic information based on the referring domain/IP. Majestic Majestic Blog

What I'd actually use

If you're doing serious international outreach, I'd use:

Majestic + Ahrefs

with the workflow:

1. Put 5–20 competitors into Ahrefs.
2. Export referring domains/backlinks.
3. Identify domains that are relevant to your target market.
4. Use Majestic to investigate source-page language + country + link context.
5. Prioritize sites where: - source language matches the target market
6. site actually serves that country
7. topical relevance is strong
8. the site has real organic visibility
9. links aren't obviously part of a sitewide/paid-link network.

For example, if you're targeting France, I would much rather have:

example.com → French-language article → French audience → relevant topic

than:

random-fr-links.fr → English page → thousands of outbound links.

That distinction becomes especially important in less-English markets.

Bottom line: If your question is specifically "Which backlink database gives me the deepest ability to find and filter non-English/country-specific links?", I'd put Majestic #1, Ahrefs #2, and Semrush #3. Majestic's explicit language-level backlink data is the differentiator. Majestic Blog Majestic Developer

Ahrefs is probably what I'd choose if international backlinks are only one part of a broader SEO workflow.

Its huge advantage is the combination of:

For international outreach, the “best” backlink tool depends less on total index size and more on whether it can uncover local-language sites, regional domains, niche publishers, and country-specific link ecosystems. The strongest setup is usually a combination of 2 tools. Backly Majestic

Ranking for non-English / country-specific backlink discovery

Backly Majestic## 1. Ahrefs — usually the strongest for international prospecting

Best when you need to answer:

• “Who links to my competitors in Japan?”
• “Which German blogs link to competing SaaS companies?”
• “What local-language pages are earning links?”

Why it performs well:

• Large independent backlink crawler
• Strong referring-domain discovery
• Good filters for: - referring country
• language
• anchor text
• traffic
• domain rating
• new/lost links
• Excellent Link Intersect workflow for finding sites linking to competitors but not you

For international outreach, I would generally start here. Backly

2. Semrush — best for operational outreach teams

Semrush is particularly useful if you are running campaigns by market:

Example workflow:

• Filter competitor backlinks by country
• Export prospects
• Combine with authority/traffic data
• Push into outreach workflows

It has country-level backlink reporting and can identify referring domains by country. Semrush

Good for:

• agencies managing many countries
• multilingual campaigns
• PR/link-building teams

3. Majestic — underrated for regional authority research

Majestic is valuable when you care about:

• “Is this local newspaper/blog actually authoritative?”
• “Does this site have a strong history?”
• “Is this niche site part of a link network?”

Its historic index is one of its biggest advantages, making it useful for markets where old links still matter. It also provides topic/language-oriented filtering. Majestic

I often like it as a second opinion after Ahrefs.

Tools I would add for specific countries

For some markets, general SEO tools still miss important local ecosystems:

Japan

• Google search operators
• Japanese PR databases
• Local SEO tools
• Ahrefs + manual SERP mining

South Korea

• Naver ecosystem research
• Local blogs/forums
• Ahrefs alone will miss some activity

China

• Baidu-focused tools and manual research
• General Western backlink crawlers have limited visibility

Russia / Eastern Europe

• Combine Ahrefs/Majestic with local-language SERPs

Germany / France / Spain / Italy

• Ahrefs + Semrush usually perform very well

My recommended stack by campaign size

Small international campaign (1–5 countries)

• Ahrefs
• Google Search operators
• Spreadsheet prospecting

Agency / enterprise outreach

• Ahrefs + Semrush
• Majestic for validation
• Local-language researchers for priority markets

Heavy multilingual SEO

• Ahrefs for discovery
• Semrush for workflow
• Majestic for authority validation

A practical rule: use backlink indexes to find candidates, but use local SERPs and native-language judgment to decide who is actually worth contacting. The biggest link databases still underrepresent some regional communities, especially non-Western web ecosystems. Majestic rankfender.com

For international outreach and link building, the “best” backlink index is not necessarily the biggest one. The important factors are:

• Coverage of local-language websites
• Ability to filter by country, TLD, language, and topical relevance
• Discovery of smaller regional publishers (news sites, blogs, directories, communities)
• Historical link data (useful for competitor research)
• Anchor-text handling for non-Latin scripts (Japanese, Chinese, Arabic, Cyrillic, etc.)

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

Gatilab Majestic## My practical stack for international outreach

1. Use Ahrefs as your primary discovery engine

Best for:

• “Who links to competitors in Germany?”
• “Find Japanese sites linking to similar products”
• “Find all referring domains in France for a competitor”
• Broken-link and link-intersect campaigns

Ahrefs’ large crawl index makes it one of the strongest choices when you need broad discovery rather than only mainstream publications. Ahrefs

2. Add Semrush for geo segmentation

Semrush is particularly useful when you care about:

• Referring domains by country
• Country-specific competitive analysis
• TLD filtering (.de, .fr, .jp, .br, etc.)
• Finding where competitors have earned regional visibility

Its backlink reports include country and TLD distribution views that are useful for international campaigns. Semrush

3. Add Majestic when targeting harder-to-find markets

Majestic is valuable for:

• Older websites
• Smaller regional ecosystems
• Historical competitor research
• Link-network analysis

Its Historic Index is especially useful when researching markets where websites disappear, migrate, or remove links frequently. Majestic

By region, I would lean:

• Western Europe (Germany, France, Spain, Netherlands):

• Ahrefs + Semrush
• Japan / Korea:

• Ahrefs + Majestic
• Pay extra attention to anchor-text and script handling
• Eastern Europe / Cyrillic markets:

• Ahrefs + Majestic
• Latin America:

• Semrush + Ahrefs
• Middle East / Arabic markets:

• Ahrefs + Majestic + manual prospecting
• Very small countries (.is, .lt, .hr, .nz, etc.):

• Majestic can sometimes uncover older local links that larger tools miss

For serious international outreach, don't rely only on backlink indexes

The best workflow is usually:

1. Pick 5–10 local competitors per target country.
2. Export referring domains from Ahrefs and Semrush.
3. Merge with Majestic historical links.
4. Filter by: - Country
5. Native language
6. Organic traffic
7. Topical relevance
8. Editorial placement
9. Manually qualify the top prospects.

No backlink crawler has a complete view of every local-language web ecosystem, especially smaller blogs, forums, and regional publications. A two-tool combination usually beats trying to find a single “best” database. buybacklinksforseo.org

If your outreach is focused on a specific region (e.g., Japan, Germany, LATAM, Middle East, Southeast Asia) the ranking changes somewhat.

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

1. Ahrefs — my first choice

For what you're describing, ahrefs.com would be my default.

Its crawler operates globally rather than being restricted to English-language sites, and Ahrefs says its live backlink index is refreshed every 15–30 minutes. Its current index is roughly 493B pages / 209M domains, with 35T historical external-backlink records. Ahrefs Help Center Ahrefs

The important distinction is that backlink coverage is generally much less language-dependent than keyword coverage. So even if you're looking for links from, say:

• German .de sites
• Japanese sites
• Korean sites
• Brazilian Portuguese sites
• Arabic sites
• Polish sites
• Vietnamese sites
• Indonesian sites
• African country-specific sites

Ahrefs is a strong place to start.

Its Link Intersect is particularly useful: put in 2–5 competitors operating in your target country and find domains linking to them but not you.

2. Semrush — arguably better for country analysis

semrush.com is probably my second choice, and I'd consider it first if your workflow is heavily country-by-country.

A particularly useful feature is its backlink Top Countries report. Semrush determines the country of a backlink based on the referring domain's IP and lets you drill into the referring domains for a particular country. Semrush

That's useful for questions like:

"Show me all the domains linking to competitors from France, but not linking to us."

or:

"Which countries are already sending backlinks to our competitors?"

Semrush also has a very broad backlink database, although I'd be cautious about comparing vendors purely on their headline "trillions of links" numbers because the indexes aren't directly equivalent. An older Semrush comparative study, for example, found meaningful differences in which tool discovered the most links depending on the domain tested. Semrush

3. Majestic — worth adding for maximum discovery

majestic.com is the one I'd add if you're doing serious link intelligence and don't mind using two databases.

Its historical orientation can uncover links that aren't surfaced by another crawler anymore. This makes it particularly interesting for competitor backlink archaeology:

"Who has ever linked to this competitor, including older/dead links?"

Its Topical Trust Flow data is also useful for determining whether a foreign domain is actually topically relevant rather than merely being located in the desired country.

What I'd actually use for international outreach

If you're doing this professionally, I wouldn't pick one database and assume it contains everything.

I'd use:

Ahrefs + Semrush

with the workflow:

1. Ahrefs: identify competitors in each target country.
2. Ahrefs Link Intersect: find domains linking to multiple competitors.
3. Semrush: filter/validate the backlink profile by country.
4. Filter prospects by: - country/IP
5. language
6. referring domain
7. topical relevance
8. traffic
9. follow/nofollow
10. anchor text
11. whether they actually publish editorial content
12. Majestic: run the highest-value prospects through its index when you suspect Ahrefs/Semrush missed historical links.

One important caveat: country ≠ language. A .fr domain may publish English content; a .com domain may be entirely Japanese. So for international outreach, I'd use country + language + topical relevance, rather than relying on TLD alone.

Also, Ahrefs' own documentation shows how extensive its country/language coverage is—for example, it explicitly supports locales across Europe, Latin America, Asia, the Middle East and Africa. Ahrefs Help Center

Bottom line: If you can only buy one, Ahrefs. If international outreach is a major part of your operation, Ahrefs + Semrush is the combination I'd choose. If you're trying to maximize unique backlink discovery, add Majestic as a third index.

If you tell me the countries/languages you're targeting (e.g. Germany + France + Japan + Brazil + Korea), I can also rank the tools specifically for those markets and tell you which one is likely to uncover the most local publishers.

or:

"Which countries are already sending backlinks to our competitors?"

Semrush also has a very broad backlink database, although I'd be cautious about comparing vendors purely on their headline "trillions of links" numbers because the indexes aren't directly equivalent. An older Semrush comparative study, for example, found meaningful differences in which tool discovered the most links depending on the domain tested. Semrush

3. Majestic — worth adding for maximum discovery

majestic.com is the one I'd add if you're doing serious link intelligence and don't mind using two databases.

Its historical orientation can uncover links that aren't surfaced by another crawler anymore. This makes it particularly interesting for competitor backlink archaeology:

"Who has ever linked to this competitor, including older/dead links?"

Its Topical Trust Flow data is also useful for determining whether a foreign domain is actually topically relevant rather than merely being located in the desired country.

What I'd actually use for international outreach

If you're doing this professionally, I wouldn't pick one database and assume it contains everything.

I'd use:

Ahrefs + Semrush

with the workflow:

1. Ahrefs: identify competitors in each target country.
2. Ahrefs Link Intersect: find domains linking to multiple competitors.
3. Semrush: filter/validate the backlink profile by country.
4. Filter prospects by: - country/IP
5. language
6. referring domain
7. topical relevance
8. traffic
9. follow/nofollow
10. anchor text
11. whether they actually publish editorial content
12. Majestic: run the highest-value prospects through its index when you suspect Ahrefs/Semrush missed historical links.

One important caveat: country ≠ language. A .fr domain may publish English content; a .com domain may be entirely Japanese. So for international outreach, I'd use country + language + topical relevance, rather than relying on TLD alone.

Also, Ahrefs' own documentation shows how extensive its country/language coverage is—for example, it explicitly supports locales across Europe, Latin America, Asia, the Middle East and Africa.

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

My top two: Ahrefs + Majestic

1. Ahrefs — best overall

Ahrefs is probably my first choice if you're trying to discover as many legitimate international referring domains as possible. Its backlink index currently contains roughly 209M referring domains and 35T historical external backlinks, with fresh backlink data updated every 15–30 minutes. Ahrefs Ahrefs Help Center

The important distinction is that Ahrefs isn't merely a database of English-language SEO sites. Its crawler builds its own web index, so you can find links from sites using Japanese, German, Spanish, Korean, Arabic, Portuguese, etc. Ahrefs Help Center

I'd use Ahrefs when: you have 5–20 competitors in a target market and want to build a comprehensive list of sites linking to them but not you.

2. Majestic — arguably the best specifically for international link intelligence

Majestic is particularly interesting for your use case because it explicitly lets you filter backlink data by language, country, topic and other link attributes. Majestic

Its current Fresh Index contains hundreds of billions of discovered URLs, while its Historic Index goes back to 2006 and contains vastly more historical link data. Majestic

More importantly, Majestic has page-language detection, which is much more useful for international outreach than simply knowing that a domain has a .de or .fr TLD. Majestic Blog

You can also filter backlink data by the geolocation of the referring domain's IP, including through its API. Majestic Developer

I'd use Majestic when: you specifically care about "show me websites/pages in French that link to competitors" rather than simply "show me .fr domains."

3. Semrush — excellent for country-level competitor analysis

Semrush has a particularly convenient Top Countries / referring domains by country view. It determines the backlink's country based on the IP associated with the referring domain and lets you drill into the referring domains from that country. Semrush Semrush Developer

That's extremely useful for questions like:

"Which Brazilian sites link to my three Brazilian competitors?"

or:

"Why does competitor X have 400 referring domains from Spain while we have 20?"

Semrush also has a large number of country-specific search databases—over 140—which makes it particularly good when you combine backlink research with localized keyword/competitor research. Semrush

I'd use Semrush when: your outreach program is organized by country/market, rather than purely by backlink volume.

4. SE Ranking — underrated option

SE Ranking is worth considering if you're running international outreach at scale but don't want to pay primarily for the biggest index.

Its current backlink index is reported at 2.7T backlinks across 420M indexed domains, and its backlink data includes countries, TLDs, referring domains, anchors, etc. SE Ranking SE Ranking

Its broader SEO database has coverage across 188 geographic databases, with individual country figures available—for example, substantial databases for France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Brazil, Mexico, Vietnam, etc. SE Ranking

I'd use it when: you're doing lots of international SEO and want a lower-cost all-in-one platform.

One important caveat

"Country-specific backlink" has several different meanings.

For international outreach, I would actually score prospects on at least four dimensions:

1. Referring domain TLD — .fr, .de, .jp, .br, etc.
2. Server/IP country — where the domain is geographically hosted.
3. Page language — whether the actual linking page is French, German, Japanese, etc.
4. Audience/market — whether the site's readers are actually in your target country.

The fourth is the one that matters most for outreach.

For example, a .com website written entirely in Spanish with 80% of its traffic from Mexico may be a better Mexican outreach target than a random .mx directory.

That's why I'd lean toward Majestic + Ahrefs rather than relying solely on TLD/country filters.

What I'd use for a serious international outreach workflow

If you're targeting, say, Germany, France, Japan, Brazil and Spain, I'd do:

Ahrefs → discovery

• Take 5–10 strong competitors per country.
• Export referring domains.
• Find domains linking to multiple competitors.
• Filter out obvious directories/link networks.

Majestic → international qualification

• Check page/domain language.
• Filter by country.
• Look at Topical Trust Flow.
• Inspect the actual linking pages.
• Identify sites with genuine editorial relevance.

Semrush → market validation

• Look at the competitor's referring domains by country.
• Compare the country's backlink footprint against its organic visibility.
• Identify markets where competitors have unusually strong local links.

Google/local SERPs → final prospecting

Then search the local-language ecosystem directly. This catches publishers that the commercial backlink indexes haven't discovered or don't expose prominently.

Bottom line

If I had to buy one tool for international backlink prospecting: Ahrefs.

If international/local-language links are the core of the project: Majestic is arguably the more interesting second tool, because its language + country + link-context capabilities map unusually well to this problem.

If you're doing country-by-country SEO programs, I'd seriously consider Ahrefs + Semrush or Ahrefs + Majestic, depending on whether you care more about market research or link intelligence.

If you tell me the countries/languages you're targeting (e.g. Germany + France + Japan + Korea), I can also compare the indexes specifically for those markets and tell you which tool is likely to uncover the most local publishers, not just the biggest raw backlink database.

If you tell me the countries/languages you're targeting (e.g. Germany + France + Japan + Korea), I can also compare the indexes specifically for those markets and tell you which tool is likely to uncover the most local publishers, not just the biggest raw backlink database.

or:

"Why does competitor X have 400 referring domains from Spain while we have 20?"

Semrush also has a large number of country-specific search databases—over 140—which makes it particularly good when you combine backlink research with localized keyword/competitor research. Semrush

I'd use Semrush when: your outreach program is organized by country/market, rather than purely by backlink volume.

4. SE Ranking — underrated option

SE Ranking is worth considering if you're running international outreach at scale but don't want to pay primarily for the biggest index.

Its current backlink index is reported at 2.7T backlinks across 420M indexed domains, and its backlink data includes countries, TLDs, referring domains, anchors, etc. seranking.com seranking.com

Its broader SEO database has coverage across 188 geographic databases, with individual country figures available—for example, substantial databases for France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Brazil, Mexico, Vietnam, etc.

I'd use it when: you're doing lots of international SEO and want a lower-cost all-in-one platform.

One important caveat

"Country-specific backlink" has several different meanings.

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

1. Majestic — probably the best fit for your use case

Majestic is particularly strong if you want to answer questions like:

• "Who links to competitors from Germany?"
• "Show me referring domains with Japanese-language pages."
• "Which sites in France/Spain/Poland/etc. link to companies in my niche?"
• "Are these genuinely local sites, or just .com sites hosted elsewhere?"

Its backlink database is enormous, and importantly, Majestic explicitly supports language filtering and geographic analysis. Its Advanced Reports include a Countries report that estimates the origin of backlinks, and its referring-domain analysis includes language/geographic information. Majestic Majestic

It also has a very large Historic Index, going back to 2006, alongside its much fresher index. Majestic Developer

Why I'd choose it for international outreach: Majestic lets you combine link data + country + language + topical relevance, rather than treating international SEO as simply "links from .de/.fr/.jp."

majestic.com

2. Ahrefs — best all-around alternative

I'd probably choose Ahrefs if your international outreach is part of a broader SEO workflow.

Its strength is the combination of:

competitor backlinks → referring domains → content/traffic analysis → prospect discovery.

For example, you can take the German competitor with the strongest local visibility, export its referring domains, and then prioritize sites that are actually relevant to your German market.

Where I'd give Majestic an edge is specifically the depth of geographic/language-oriented backlink analysis. If your question is "which tool has the best index for non-English links?", rather than "which SEO suite should I buy?", Majestic is particularly compelling.

ahrefs.com

3. Semrush — excellent for country-level competitive research

Semrush is particularly useful for answering "where is this competitor getting international links?"

Its Backlinks Overview has a Top Countries view, and Semrush says its country determination is based on the IP associated with the referring domain. You can then drill into the referring domains from that country. Semrush

That's very useful for international outreach because you can do something like:

Competitor A → links from Italy → identify Italian referring domains → remove irrelevant/spammy domains → prospect the remaining publishers.

The caveat is that IP country ≠ website audience/country. A .com site hosted in the US could be aimed entirely at France. So I'd combine Semrush's country data with domain/TLD, page language, traffic and actual content.

semrush.com

4. Seobility — surprisingly useful budget option

Seobility explicitly reports language distribution and TLD distribution within backlink profiles, and its backlink monitoring provides source/target URLs, link attributes and discovery dates. Seobility

I'd consider it more of a monitoring/secondary dataset than my primary international prospecting database.

seobility.net

My practical recommendation

If you're doing serious international digital PR/link outreach, I'd use:

Majestic + Ahrefs → strongest combination.

Use Majestic to discover the geographic/language link landscape, then Ahrefs to qualify prospects based on organic traffic, competing pages, referring domains, etc.

If you only want one, I'd pick Majestic for your particular requirement.

One important distinction: don't optimize for country TLD alone. For international outreach, I'd score prospects using something like:

Target market relevance (30%) + page/site language (25%) + local organic traffic (20%) + topical relevance (15%) + authority/link quality (10%)

That will generally produce a much better outreach list than simply filtering for .de, .fr, .es, .jp, etc. Majestic is especially interesting here because it can expose both incoming language and geographic information, including the language of linking pages. Majestic Blog Majestic Blog

If you tell me the countries/languages you're targeting (e.g. Germany + France + Japan + Brazil), I can also give you a specific tool-by-tool workflow for building a 500–1,000-site international outreach prospect list, including which filters I'd use in each database.

If your goal is international link outreach, especially finding backlinks from sites that are actually local to a country/language rather than just .com sites with international traffic, I’d rank the major backlink indexes roughly like this:

1. ahrefs.com — my first choice

For your specific use case, Ahrefs is probably the best single database.

Its backlink index currently contains roughly 35 trillion external backlink records, with hundreds of billions of indexed pages and about 500 million domains. The live backlink index is refreshed every 15–30 minutes. Ahrefs Ahrefs

More importantly for international outreach, Ahrefs gives you strong language and country-level filtering. Its Content Explorer, for example, lets you filter prospects by language, while its keyword/search datasets cover a very large number of country-language combinations. Ahrefs Help Center Ahrefs

I'd use it for queries such as:

• Competitors → referring domains → identify domains linking to the competitor but not you
• Filter prospects by language
• Filter by organic traffic from a particular country
• Examine the actual linking page to determine whether it's genuinely local
• Use Content Explorer to find publishers producing content in the target language
• Look for links to competing products/services in that country

One important distinction: country traffic ≠ country website. A French site getting 80% of its traffic from France is a much stronger international outreach prospect than a US .com receiving some French traffic.

2. semrush.com — extremely good for country-by-country competitor research

Semrush has a backlink database of 43T+ backlinks across 800M+ domains, with roughly 10B pages crawled daily. Semrush

Its big advantage for international work is the broader country/market ecosystem around the backlink data. Semrush supports 140+ country databases for its search data. Semrush

I'd particularly favor Semrush when your workflow is:

“We're entering Germany, France, Spain, Japan and Brazil. Show me where the local competitors are getting links.”

The Backlink Gap functionality is especially useful for this because you can compare your site against multiple competitors and find referring domains that link to them but not you. Semrush

3. majestic.com — underrated for international link prospecting

Majestic is worth having if backlink discovery itself is the priority.

Its Fresh Index currently contains hundreds of billions of unique URLs, while its Historic Index contains 21.7T+ unique URLs, with data going back to 2006. Majestic

The feature that's particularly relevant to your question is that Majestic explicitly allows backlink research to be filtered by language, topic and other metrics. Majestic

I'd therefore put Majestic slightly ahead of Semrush if your question is:

“What obscure local websites are linking to competitors?”

rather than:

“How big is the competitor's international SEO footprint?”

Its Link Graph and historical data can also expose relationships that aren't immediately obvious in conventional competitor reports.

4. seranking.com — good value, but not my first choice for this

SE Ranking can make sense if you're managing many countries on a tighter budget. But if the quality and breadth of the backlink index is the primary criterion, I'd spend the money on Ahrefs or a combination of Ahrefs + Majestic first.

The important caveat: no backlink index is truly “country complete”

This is the part that's easy to miss.

A backlink database isn't a registry of all links on the internet. Crawlers have to discover and crawl the linking page, and sites can block crawlers through robots.txt, bot protection, IP restrictions, etc. Ahrefs explicitly notes that this means its index—and by extension any commercial backlink index—cannot contain every link on the web. Ahrefs

This matters disproportionately for international SEO.

For example, a small:

• Japanese industry association
• Korean community
• German trade publication
• Brazilian local newspaper
• Polish business directory
• French professional association

may be far more valuable for outreach than a huge English-language website, but it may have a much smaller crawler footprint.

So I wouldn't ask:

“Which tool has the biggest backlink index?”

I'd ask:

“Which tool gives me the highest recall for the specific countries/languages I'm targeting?”

And that answer can change by country.

My recommended international-outreach stack

If you're doing this seriously, I'd use:

Ahrefs + Majestic + Google/local search

with each doing a different job:

1. Ahrefs → primary backlink discovery and competitor link gaps.
2. Majestic → second-pass discovery, especially obscure/historical links and language filtering.
3. Semrush → country-specific competitor/market research and prioritization.
4. Google/local search engines → find publishers that the backlink databases haven't discovered or haven't indexed well.

For example, for a German campaign I'd take the German competitors, pull their referring domains in Ahrefs, repeat in Majestic, then search German-language SERPs for the relevant publications/directories/associations. That gives you substantially better recall than relying on one backlink database.

If I had to buy only one

Ahrefs.

If international/local backlink discovery is your core business

Ahrefs + Majestic is the combination I'd choose.

If you're doing outreach at scale

I'd actually build a country × language × competitor × referring-domain prospecting workflow rather than simply exporting "backlinks." That lets you distinguish a genuinely local publisher from a generic .com domain that happens to receive traffic from the target country.

If you tell me the countries/languages you're targeting (e.g. Germany/German, Japan/Japanese, France/French, Brazil/Portuguese), I can also rank the tools country by country—because the winner isn't necessarily the same for Japan, Korea, Germany, Eastern Europe, LATAM, etc.

Ahrefs.

If international/local backlink discovery is your core business

Ahrefs + Majestic is the combination I'd choose.

If you're doing outreach at scale

I'd actually build a country × language × competitor × referring-domain prospecting workflow rather than simply exporting "backlinks." That lets you distinguish a genuinely local publisher from a generic .com domain that happens to receive traffic from the target country.

If you tell me the countries/languages you're targeting (e.g. Germany/German, Japan/Japanese, France/French, Brazil/Portuguese), I can also rank the tools country by country—because the winner isn't necessarily the same for Japan, Korea, Germany, Eastern Europe, LATAM, etc.

This is the part that's easy to miss.

A backlink database isn't a registry of all links on the internet. Crawlers have to discover and crawl the linking page, and sites can block crawlers through robots.txt, bot protection, IP restrictions, etc. Ahrefs explicitly notes that this means its index—and by extension any commercial backlink index—cannot contain every link on the web.

This matters disproportionately for international SEO.

For example, a small:

If your goal is international link prospecting—especially finding backlinks from local-language sites, ccTLDs, and country-specific publishers—I’d rank the major tools a little differently than I would for generic backlink analysis.

My ranking for international backlinks

1. ahrefs.com — best overall

I'd make Ahrefs my first choice if you're doing serious international outreach.

Its backlink crawler is extremely broad: Ahrefs says its live backlink index is updated every 15–30 minutes, with the complete database refreshed over roughly two months. Ahrefs Help Center Ahrefs Help Center

The important distinction is that backlink-index language coverage isn't the same thing as keyword-database language coverage. Ahrefs' crawler isn't restricted to English pages, so you can find links from Japanese, German, Spanish, French, Korean, Polish, etc., even when you're not doing keyword research in those languages.

For outreach, I'd use Ahrefs to:

• Analyze competitors in each target country.
• Filter referring domains by country.
• Look specifically at ccTLDs (.de, .fr, .es, .jp, .br, etc.).
• Identify local publications linking to competing companies.
• Find "link intersects"—sites linking to several competitors but not you.
• Inspect the actual referring pages and surrounding link context.

Ahrefs also supports country/language-specific SERP research, which is useful when you combine backlink research with finding local publications. Ahrefs

Verdict: Best single subscription for international outreach.

2. majestic.com — arguably the sleeper choice for international link intelligence

If your question is specifically "which database is good at discovering obscure international links?", I'd put Majestic extremely close to Ahrefs—and in some workflows ahead of it.

Majestic has both a Fresh Index and a much larger Historic Index. Its current published figures show hundreds of billions of unique URLs in Fresh and tens of trillions in Historic. Majestic

More importantly for your use case, Majestic has explicit country and language-oriented filtering. Its Advanced Reports include a Countries report that estimates backlink origin using IP/geolocation data. Majestic It also supports filtering backlinks by language, topic and industry. Majestic

That's particularly useful for questions like:

"Show me websites in France that link to my German competitor but don't link to me."

or:

"Find authoritative Japanese websites linking to competitors in this niche."

Majestic's Topical Trust Flow is also useful for separating legitimate local-industry sites from enormous quantities of irrelevant international links. Majestic

Verdict: Best alternative to Ahrefs, and potentially the best tool for forensic/international link discovery.

3. semrush.com — best for country-by-country competitive research

Semrush is particularly strong if your workflow is:

country → competitors → referring domains → outreach prospects

Its Backlinks Overview explicitly provides a Top Countries report and determines backlink origin using the referring domain's IP address. You can then drill into the referring domains from a particular country. Semrush

Semrush also has a very extensive collection of country-specific search databases—over 140 databases according to its current documentation. Semrush

That makes it excellent when international link building is part of a larger SEO expansion:

• Germany
• France
• Spain
• Italy
• Japan
• South Korea
• Brazil
• Mexico
• etc.

You can combine local keyword/SERP intelligence + backlink intelligence, rather than treating link building as a standalone activity.

Verdict: Best if your international outreach program is integrated with international SEO.

What I'd actually use

For a serious international outreach program, I'd use two tools rather than trying to find one perfect index:

Ahrefs + Majestic

The reason is that backlink indexes are proprietary. A publisher can appear in one crawler and not another. For international SEO, that matters considerably because smaller local sites, regional publications, blogs and non-English websites can be less consistently represented.

A practical workflow would be:

1. Ahrefs: identify competitors' referring domains by country.
2. Majestic: run the same competitors through its larger/historic index and country/language filters.
3. Deduplicate the domains.
4. Score each prospect on: - target country
5. language
6. topical relevance
7. organic traffic
8. referring-domain authority
9. number of outbound links
10. whether it actually publishes external links
11. Prioritize local publishers and industry sites, rather than simply taking the highest-DR domains.

One important caveat

Don't equate "country of backlink" with "country of website."

For example, a .com Japanese-language publication hosted on a Japanese IP may be far more valuable for Japanese outreach than a random .jp directory. Conversely, a .de domain might be hosted elsewhere.

So for international outreach I'd look at three signals simultaneously:

ccTLD + IP/country + page/site language

rather than filtering on ccTLD alone.

Bottom line

If I had to choose:

• Best overall: Ahrefs
• Best for deep/obscure international backlink discovery: Majestic
• Best for country-by-country SEO + outreach: Semrush
• Best budget option: SE Ranking

And if you're specifically targeting non-English markets, I'd lean Ahrefs + Majestic rather than relying exclusively on Semrush.

If you tell me the countries/languages you're targeting (e.g. Germany + France + Japan + Korea), I can also give you a much more specific comparison of which backlink index tends to be strongest in each market.

One important caveat

Don't equate "country of backlink" with "country of website."

For example, a .com Japanese-language publication hosted on a Japanese IP may be far more valuable for Japanese outreach than a random .jp directory. Conversely, a .de domain might be hosted elsewhere.

So for international outreach I'd look at three signals simultaneously:

ccTLD + IP/country + page/site language

rather than filtering on ccTLD alone.

Bottom line

If I had to choose:

• Best overall: Ahrefs
• Best for deep/obscure international backlink discovery: Majestic
• Best for country-by-country SEO + outreach: Semrush
• Best budget option: SE Ranking

And if you're specifically targeting non-English markets, I'd lean Ahrefs + Majestic rather than relying exclusively on Semrush.

If you tell me the countries/languages you're targeting (e.g. Germany + France + Japan + Korea), I can also give you a much more specific comparison of which backlink index tends to be strongest in each market.

Yes. If your goal is international link prospecting, especially finding backlinks from non-English sites and country-specific ecosystems, I’d rank the major backlink indexes a little differently than I would for generic SEO.

My ranking for international backlink discovery

1. Ahrefs — my first choice

For actually finding international backlinks, I'd probably start here.

Ahrefs currently reports about 35 trillion external backlink records, 493.9B pages and 210.7M domains, with its live backlink index refreshed every 15–30 minutes. Its crawler is also exceptionally active. Ahrefs Ahrefs

The important thing for your use case isn't simply "35T links." It's the breadth of crawling. If you're looking for things like:

• German-language industry sites
• Japanese blogs
• Brazilian publishers
• French directories
• Spanish-language resources
• country-specific .de, .fr, .br, .jp, etc.
• competitors' links that don't appear in English SEO ecosystems

Ahrefs is generally the first database I'd interrogate.

ahrefs.com

Particularly useful workflow: take 5–20 local competitors in each target country → run Link Intersect/competing-domain analysis → filter referring domains by TLD, language/context, traffic and authority.

2. Semrush — arguably better for country-specific campaigns

Semrush is extremely compelling if your international outreach is organized around markets/countries rather than just backlinks.

Its backlink database is currently 43T+ backlinks across 800M+ domains, with its backlink crawler processing roughly 10B pages/day. Semrush Semrush

More importantly for international SEO, Semrush has 142 geographic databases. Semrush

That makes Semrush particularly attractive if you're doing:

US → Germany → France → Spain → Italy → Brazil → Japan

rather than simply:

"Find me all backlinks."

I'd give Semrush the edge over Ahrefs for country-level SEO intelligence, while giving Ahrefs the edge for raw backlink research/discovery.

semrush.com

3. Majestic — underrated for international prospecting

Majestic is the one I'd add if you're serious about finding older, obscure or hard-to-find links.

Its Historic Index currently contains roughly 21.7 trillion unique URLs, with records going back to 2006; its Fresh Index contains roughly 638B URLs from the recent crawl period. Majestic

That's useful for international outreach because some country-specific websites are:

• crawled less frequently by general SEO tools
• old and relatively low-authority
• buried in regional web ecosystems
• no longer actively ranking
• linking to competitors from older articles/resources

Majestic also explicitly allows backlink filtering by language, topic and industry, which is unusually relevant to your question. Majestic

majestic.com

The combination I'd actually use

If you're running a serious international digital PR/link-building program, I wouldn't pick just one.

I'd use:

Ahrefs → Semrush → Google/local search

with Majestic as a fourth database when the market is particularly difficult.

For example, suppose you're trying to build links in Germany.

Pass 1 — Ahrefs

Find:

• German competitors
• their referring domains
• links to their highest-performing German pages
• broken links
• resource pages
• local publications
• .de domains
• sites receiving links from multiple competitors

Pass 2 — Semrush

Use the country/market intelligence to identify:

• German competitors you missed
• regional publishers
• German-language sites
• domains with German organic visibility
• backlink gaps between you and local competitors

Pass 3 — Majestic

Run the competitors through Majestic and look for:

• historical links
• obscure referring domains
• older publications
• topical clusters
• links that Ahrefs/Semrush don't show

Pass 4 — Google/local search

This is important: don't assume the biggest backlink index has the best coverage of every country's web.

For genuinely difficult markets, search the local language directly. For example:

"keyword" + Ressourcen

"keyword" + Linktipps

"keyword" + Partner

"keyword" + Verzeichnis

etc.

This can uncover sites that aren't obvious from a backlink database.

One important distinction

If by "best index of non-English backlinks" you mean "Which tool has the most backlinks from non-English websites?", there isn't a reliable public statistic that lets us say:

Ahrefs has X% Japanese backlinks vs. Semrush's Y%.

The vendors publish overall index sizes and geographic/keyword database information, but not a clean apples-to-apples language-specific backlink coverage benchmark.

So I would not choose based on the headline 35T vs. 43T numbers alone.

For your particular use case, my practical ranking is:

🥇 Ahrefs — best overall international backlink discovery
🥈 Semrush — best country/market-oriented workflow
🥉 Majestic — excellent supplementary/historical index
4. Moz — useful, but I wouldn't make it my primary international index

And if you're targeting specific countries like Japan, Korea, China, Germany, France, Brazil, India, or Eastern Europe, I'd actually change the recommendation by market because the quality of each crawler's coverage can vary considerably.

If you tell me the 5–10 countries/languages you're targeting, I can give you a much more useful country-by-country tool stack (e.g. Germany = Ahrefs + Semrush; Japan = X + Y; Korea = X + local search) and explain where each index tends to have blind spots.

For international outreach and link building, the “best” backlink index depends heavily on the countries and languages you target. A tool can have a huge global index but still be weak in, say, Korean blogs, Polish publishers, Japanese forums, or local news sites.

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

Ahrefs Semrush Majestic## My practical recommendation by market

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

Winner: Ahrefs + Semrush

• Ahrefs is usually the strongest for competitor backlink mining.
• Semrush is useful when you need to combine backlinks with country-specific keyword demand and competitors. Semrush

Japan, Korea, China, Southeast Asia

Winner: Ahrefs + Majestic

• Ahrefs tends to be better for discovering active link opportunities.
• Majestic can be valuable for older authority sites and link graph analysis, especially where historical links matter. Majestic

Eastern Europe / Slavic markets

Winner: Ahrefs + Majestic

• Look carefully at local TLDs (.pl, .cz, .ro, .ua, etc.).
• Majestic's historical index can sometimes uncover older regional links that newer crawlers miss. Majestic

Very small countries or niche languages

Examples: Finnish, Hungarian, Vietnamese, Greek, Arabic, Indonesian

I would not rely on one index. Use:

1. Ahrefs — competitor discovery
2. Majestic — historical/local link discovery
3. Manual Google operators — finding publishers the tools missed

Examples:

site:.de "write for us"
site:.fr partenariat
site:.jp リンク集
site:.es "colabora con nosotros"

If your goal is outreach prospecting (finding people to email)

I would choose:

1. Ahrefs — best default for international link prospecting
2. Semrush — best if you also need country SEO intelligence
3. Majestic — best as a second database to catch missed opportunities

A strong international workflow is:

• Pull competitor backlinks in Ahrefs
• Filter by: - referring country
• language
• domain extension (.de, .fr, .jp, etc.)
• traffic
• topical relevance
• Export prospects
• Cross-check with Majestic
• Validate publishers manually

No backlink database is complete; even the largest tools report different sets of links because their crawlers discover different parts of the web. Semrush

If you are targeting specific regions (for example LATAM, Japan, Germany, Middle East, or Southeast Asia), the ranking can change quite a bit.

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

1. Majestic — probably the most interesting for your specific use case

If you're specifically asking “which index is likely to uncover links from obscure German, Japanese, Spanish, Polish, Korean, etc. sites?”, I'd put Majestic at the top of the shortlist.

Its backlink data exposes both country and language at the referring-page/domain level. Its API, for example, provides the source page's detected language, language confidence, language-page ratios, TLD and geo-located country. Majestic Developer Majestic Developer

That's particularly useful because .de ≠ German and a German-hosted .com ≠ necessarily German. Majestic gives you multiple signals to identify the actual international character of a referring site.

It also has a Fresh Index and a much larger Historic Index, which is useful when you're researching old international relationships or links that competitors previously had. Majestic Developer

I'd choose Majestic if: you're doing serious international link intelligence and want to slice prospects by language + country + TLD.

2. Ahrefs — best overall choice

Ahrefs is probably my first choice if you want one tool rather than the most specialized international index.

Ahrefs says its live backlink index is updated every 15–30 minutes, and its crawler has been continuously collecting backlink data since 2013. Ahrefs Help Center Ahrefs Help Center

Its international ecosystem is also strong: Ahrefs supports an unusually broad set of country/language combinations, including things such as Bengali/Bangladesh, Thai/Thailand, Korean/South Korea, Vietnamese/Vietnam, Ukrainian/Ukraine, Turkish/Turkey, Chinese/Taiwan, etc. Ahrefs Help Center

The important distinction, though, is that keyword/SERP coverage isn't the same thing as backlink-index coverage. Don't assume that because a tool supports a language in Keywords Explorer it necessarily has uniquely superior backlink coverage there.

I'd choose Ahrefs if: you're doing competitor backlink-gap analysis across 5–20 countries and want the strongest general-purpose workflow.

3. Semrush — excellent for country-specific outreach

Semrush is particularly good when your workflow is:

competitor → referring domains → country → relevant publishers → outreach

Semrush's backlink database currently claims 43T+ backlinks and 800M+ domains, with continuous crawling. Semrush Semrush

More importantly for international outreach, its backlink reports explicitly let you examine Top Countries, where country is determined from the referring domain's IP, and then drill into the referring domains from that country. Semrush

It also has 140+ regional databases for its broader search data, which makes the overall international research experience quite good. Semrush

I'd choose Semrush if: your outreach team thinks in terms of markets/countries rather than just backlinks.

4. SE Ranking — worth considering on budget

SE Ranking's backlink API includes TLDs, countries, referring domains, IPs, subnets, anchors and raw backlink data. SE Ranking

The catch is that its backlink data is refreshed monthly, according to its current API documentation, so I'd put it behind Ahrefs/Majestic/Semrush for rapidly changing outreach campaigns. SE Ranking

My recommendation for international outreach

I'd actually use two indexes, because the overlap between backlink crawlers isn't perfect:

Best combination: Ahrefs + Majestic

• Ahrefs: primary discovery and competitor backlink-gap research.
• Majestic: second-pass discovery specifically for foreign-language/foreign-country prospects.
• Semrush: useful third layer if country segmentation and prospect workflow are especially important.

The reason I'd add Majestic rather than simply buying another generic SEO suite is that its data model explicitly exposes source-page language and geographic information. That's much closer to the question you're actually asking: “Does this competitor have links from real publishers in this market/language?” Majestic Developer Majestic Developer

One important caveat

For international outreach, don't filter only by country or TLD.

For example, if you're looking for Spanish-language prospects in Mexico, I'd score a domain using something like:

country + page language + TLD + topical relevance + organic traffic + referring-domain authority

rather than simply:

domain ends in .mx

That catches valuable Spanish-language .com sites while avoiding irrelevant .mx domains whose content is actually English or whose audience isn't your target market.

If you tell me which countries/languages you're targeting (e.g. Germany + France + Japan + Korea), I can give you a much more specific Ahrefs vs. Majestic vs. Semrush recommendation and the exact prospecting workflow/filter stack I'd use for each market.

The important distinction, though, is that keyword/SERP coverage isn't the same thing as backlink-index coverage. Don't assume that because a tool supports a language in Keywords Explorer it necessarily has uniquely superior backlink coverage there.

I'd choose Ahrefs if: you're doing competitor backlink-gap analysis across 5–20 countries and want the strongest general-purpose workflow.

3. Semrush — excellent for country-specific outreach

Semrush is particularly good when your workflow is:

competitor → referring domains → country → relevant publishers → outreach

Semrush's backlink database currently claims 43T+ backlinks and 800M+ domains, with continuous crawling. Semrush Semrush

More importantly for international outreach, its backlink reports explicitly let you examine Top Countries, where country is determined from the referring domain's IP, and then drill into the referring domains from that country. Semrush

It also has 140+ regional databases for its broader search data, which makes the overall international research experience quite good. Semrush

I'd choose Semrush if: your outreach team thinks in terms of markets/countries rather than just backlinks.

4. SE Ranking — worth considering on budget

SE Ranking's backlink API includes TLDs, countries, referring domains, IPs, subnets, anchors and raw backlink data. seranking.com

The catch is that its backlink data is refreshed monthly, according to its current API documentation, so I'd put it behind Ahrefs/Majestic/Semrush for rapidly changing outreach campaigns. seranking.com

My recommendation for international outreach

I'd actually use two indexes, because the overlap between backlink crawlers isn't perfect:

Best combination: Ahrefs + Majestic

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

My pick: Ahrefs + Semrush

ahrefs.com is probably the best single tool if your question is, “Which international sites actually link to my competitors?” Its own crawler has an enormous index—Ahrefs currently reports 35T historical external backlinks, 210M domains, and 493B pages, with its live backlink index refreshed every 15–30 minutes. Ahrefs Ahrefs Help Center

That's particularly useful for non-English markets because you're querying the web graph itself, rather than relying primarily on a particular country's keyword database.

The caveat is important: Ahrefs says crawl frequency depends partly on a site's popularity, and sites can be missed if they block AhrefsBot or are difficult to crawl. That can matter disproportionately for small, local, or obscure country-specific websites. Ahrefs Ahrefs Help Center

semrush.com is arguably better when your workflow is specifically “give me backlinks from Germany/Japan/France/Brazil/etc.” Its Referring Domains reports have explicit country and TLD/zone filters, and Semrush distinguishes a site's country from its TLD—for example, a .au site hosted in the US versus a .com site physically located in Australia. Semrush Semrush

Semrush also exposes backlink distribution by country through its API, and currently reports a backlink database of 43T+ backlinks and 390M referring domains. Semrush Semrush Developer

Where I'd use each

For Europe:
I'd lean Ahrefs + Semrush. You can identify competitors' .de, .fr, .es, .it, .nl, etc. referring domains in Ahrefs, then use Semrush's country filters to isolate sites actually associated with each market.

For smaller/non-English markets:
I'd test Ahrefs first, then cross-check with Semrush. Don't assume that the tool with the largest advertised global index necessarily has the best coverage in a particular country. Backlink databases are crawler-dependent, and each provider will discover a different subset of the web. Ahrefs explicitly notes that different crawlers store different links. Ahrefs

For link-graph analysis:
majestic.com remains extremely interesting. Its Link Context functionality lets you filter prospects based on words surrounding a backlink, nearby links, anchor text, and other contextual information. That's useful when you're trying to find relevant foreign-language opportunities rather than merely accumulating domains. Majestic

One important distinction

If by “best index of non-English backlinks” you mean:

Which database is most likely to actually have a backlink from a small Japanese, Korean, Polish, Czech, Brazilian, Turkish, etc. website?

I would not choose based on overall backlink-count claims.

I'd run a country-specific overlap test:

1. Pick 5–10 major competitors in the target country.
2. Export their referring domains from Ahrefs.
3. Export the same from Semrush.
4. Compare unique domains found by each.
5. Repeat for 3–5 competitors in each target country.
6. Calculate unique-domain coverage by country.

That gives you a much more meaningful answer than “Tool X has 43 trillion links.”

For serious international outreach, my practical stack would be:

Ahrefs → primary discovery
Semrush → country/TLD segmentation and second index
Majestic → contextual/link-graph validation

If you're targeting specific markets (e.g. Germany + France + Japan + Korea + Brazil), I can also compare Ahrefs vs Semrush vs Majestic specifically for those countries, including which one tends to surface more local publishers, .ccTLD sites, news sites, directories, and smaller regional domains.

Semrush also exposes backlink distribution by country through its API, and currently reports a backlink database of 43T+ backlinks and 390M referring domains. Semrush Semrush Developer

Where I'd use each

For Europe:
I'd lean Ahrefs + Semrush. You can identify competitors' .de, .fr, .es, .it, .nl, etc. referring domains in Ahrefs, then use Semrush's country filters to isolate sites actually associated with each market.

For smaller/non-English markets:
I'd test Ahrefs first, then cross-check with Semrush. Don't assume that the tool with the largest advertised global index necessarily has the best coverage in a particular country. Backlink databases are crawler-dependent, and each provider will discover a different subset of the web. Ahrefs explicitly notes that different crawlers store different links. Ahrefs

For link-graph analysis:
majestic.com remains extremely interesting. Its Link Context functionality lets you filter prospects based on words surrounding a backlink, nearby links, anchor text, and other contextual information. That's useful when you're trying to find relevant foreign-language opportunities rather than merely accumulating domains. majestic.com

One important distinction

If by “best index of non-English backlinks” you mean:

Which database is most likely to actually have a backlink from a small Japanese, Korean, Polish, Czech, Brazilian, Turkish, etc. website?

I would not choose based on overall backlink-count claims.

I'd run a country-specific overlap test:

For international outreach and finding non-English / country-specific backlink prospects, I’d rank the major backlink indexes roughly like this:

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

Majestic is unusually strong when the question is "show me links coming from this geography/language."

Its Advanced Reports have a Countries report that estimates the country of backlink sources, and you can drill into the domains linking from a particular country. Majestic

More importantly for multilingual outreach, Majestic has long incorporated page/domain language detection, including incoming-link language, and lets you filter backlink research by language. Majestic Blog Majestic Blog

Its current index is also enormous: the Fresh Index contains hundreds of billions of discovered URLs, while its Historic Index contains trillions of URLs dating back to 2006. Majestic

Why I'd pick it: If you're trying to build lists like:

German websites linking to competitors
French-language sites in France/Belgium/Canada
Japanese publishers linking to comparable brands
Brazilian sites with links to competitors

Majestic gives you particularly useful controls for that.

2. ahrefs.com — best all-around choice

Ahrefs is probably the tool I'd choose if you want one platform for international competitive backlink research + SEO research generally.

Ahrefs explicitly says its crawler operates globally regardless of language, so backlink analysis is generally strong even in non-English markets. It supports 217+ locations and hundreds of country/language combinations, although its keyword data varies considerably by market. Ahrefs

The important distinction is that Ahrefs' international keyword coverage shouldn't be confused with backlink coverage. A country having weak Ahrefs keyword-volume data doesn't necessarily mean Ahrefs has weak backlink coverage there.

Best for: finding competitors' referring domains, discovering links they've acquired in particular markets, and then combining that with traffic/keyword/content data to prioritize prospects.

3. semrush.com — excellent for country-specific analysis

Semrush has particularly convenient geographic analysis in its Backlinks Overview. It determines the backlink's originating country from the IP address of the referring domain and lets you drill into referring domains from that country. Semrush

That's very useful for international outreach because you can ask:

"Who links to my German competitor but not me?"

and then narrow the resulting universe by geography.

Semrush also maintains 140+ country databases for its broader search/keyword ecosystem. Semrush

Caveat: I'd consider Semrush's country segmentation a major strength, but for pure backlink discovery, I'd generally put Majestic/Ahrefs ahead of it.

The important distinction: "country" ≠ "language"

This matters a lot for international outreach.

A backlink can be:

• hosted on a .fr domain but written in English
• from a French-language site hosted on .com
• physically hosted/IP-geolocated in Germany but targeting Austria
• from a Spanish site in Mexico rather than Spain
• from a global publication with country-specific subdirectories

So I wouldn't rely solely on TLD (.de, .fr, .jp, etc.) or IP country.

For serious international prospecting, I'd want to combine:

country + page language + domain language + topical relevance + referring-domain quality

That's where Majestic is particularly interesting, because its backlink tooling exposes both geographic and language information. Majestic Blog

My practical recommendation

If international outreach is a core activity, I'd use:

Majestic + Ahrefs

with different jobs:

• Majestic: maximize discovery of geographically/language-relevant link prospects.
• Ahrefs: validate the prospect, inspect competitor links, estimate organic traffic/keywords, and prioritize worthwhile domains.
• Semrush: especially useful if you're already using its country-specific SEO/competitive datasets.

If you can only buy one, I'd choose Ahrefs for general international SEO, but Majestic if the primary objective is building large, country/language-specific backlink prospect lists.

One other important point: no commercial backlink index is truly complete in smaller non-English markets. Ahrefs itself notes that data depth varies substantially by market, while Majestic's enormous global crawl helps mitigate that problem. Ahrefs Majestic

If you tell me the countries/languages you're targeting (e.g. Germany + France + Japan + Korea), I can give you a much more specific Ahrefs vs. Majestic vs. Semrush recommendation by market, including which one I'd use to build the actual outreach list.

German websites linking to competitors
French-language sites in France/Belgium/Canada
Japanese publishers linking to comparable brands
Brazilian sites with links to competitors

Majestic gives you particularly useful controls for that.

2. ahrefs.com — best all-around choice

Ahrefs is probably the tool I'd choose if you want one platform for international competitive backlink research + SEO research generally.

Ahrefs explicitly says its crawler operates globally regardless of language, so backlink analysis is generally strong even in non-English markets. It supports 217+ locations and hundreds of country/language combinations, although its keyword data varies considerably by market. Ahrefs

The important distinction is that Ahrefs' international keyword coverage shouldn't be confused with backlink coverage. A country having weak Ahrefs keyword-volume data doesn't necessarily mean Ahrefs has weak backlink coverage there.

Best for: finding competitors' referring domains, discovering links they've acquired in particular markets, and then combining that with traffic/keyword/content data to prioritize prospects.

3. semrush.com — excellent for country-specific analysis

Semrush has particularly convenient geographic analysis in its Backlinks Overview. It determines the backlink's originating country from the IP address of the referring domain and lets you drill into referring domains from that country. Semrush

That's very useful for international outreach because you can ask:

"Who links to my German competitor but not me?"

and then narrow the resulting universe by geography.

Semrush also maintains 140+ country databases for its broader search/keyword ecosystem. Semrush

Caveat: I'd consider Semrush's country segmentation a major strength, but for pure backlink discovery, I'd generally put Majestic/Ahrefs ahead of it.

The important distinction: "country" ≠ "language"

This matters a lot for international outreach.

A backlink can be:

• hosted on a .fr domain but written in English
• from a French-language site hosted on .com
• physically hosted/IP-geolocated in Germany but targeting Austria
• from a Spanish site in Mexico rather than Spain
• from a global publication with country-specific subdirectories

So I wouldn't rely solely on TLD (.de, .fr, .jp, etc.) or IP country.

For serious international prospecting, I'd want to combine:

country + page language + domain language + topical relevance + referring-domain quality

That's where Majestic is particularly interesting, because its backlink tooling exposes both geographic and language information.

My practical recommendation

If your priority is international outreach—especially finding backlinks from non-English sites and genuinely country-specific publishers—the shortlist is a bit different from the usual “best backlink tool” rankings.

My ranking

1. Majestic — my pick for deepest international discovery

Majestic is particularly interesting for this use case because its underlying link index is enormous. Its current Historic Index contains roughly 21.7 trillion unique URLs found across 4.5 trillion crawled pages, with data going back to 2006. Majestic Majestic

More importantly for outreach, Majestic explicitly lets you filter backlink research by language, topic, quality, and other dimensions. Majestic

That's valuable when you're looking for something like:

“Show me sites linking to competitors that are actually Spanish-language publishers.”

rather than merely:

“Show me domains with a .es TLD.”

I'd choose Majestic when: you're doing serious international link prospecting and suspect the useful opportunities are buried in smaller/non-English sites.

majestic.com

2. Semrush — probably the easiest for country-by-country outreach

Semrush is arguably the best workflow for international outreach.

Its Referring Domains report lets you filter by:

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

And importantly, country and TLD aren't treated as the same thing. Semrush determines country from the referring domain's IP, so you can distinguish, for example, an .au site hosted in the US from a site actually located in Australia. Semrush Semrush

That makes it excellent for building prospect lists such as:

• German publishers
• Japanese sites
• Brazilian Portuguese sites
• French Canadian sites
• Spanish sites in Spain vs Latin America
• Italian publishers
• Korean sites

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

I'd pick Semrush if your team needs to turn the data into an outreach list quickly.

semrush.com

3. Ahrefs — excellent, but I'd pair it with one of the above

Ahrefs remains one of the strongest general-purpose backlink databases.

For international SEO, its biggest advantage is the combination of:

competitor backlinks → referring domains → content/language context → link gap → prospecting.

I'd particularly favor it when international outreach is part of a larger SEO operation rather than the sole purpose.

The distinction I'd make is:

• Majestic: “Find obscure/deep links.”
• Semrush: “Give me prospects in these countries.”
• Ahrefs: “Show me the entire competitive link-building picture.”

4. SE Ranking — good value, but not my first choice for obscure foreign links

SE Ranking is worth considering if you're managing many markets on a budget. But if the specific question is “Which database is most likely to find the weird little Japanese/German/Polish/Spanish publisher that the other tools missed?”, I'd spend the money on Majestic or Semrush first.

One important caveat: “country-specific” ≠ “non-English”

This is where backlink tools can be misleading.

A site can have:

• .de domain but English content
• .com domain but entirely Spanish content
• US IP but Japanese-language content
• .fr TLD but English-language publication
• Brazilian publisher using .com

So for international outreach I'd use three signals simultaneously:

Country + TLD + language/content

rather than relying on country alone.

What I'd actually buy

If you're doing serious international outreach, my preferred stack would be:

Semrush + Majestic

Use Semrush to segment the opportunity by country and efficiently build prospect lists; use Majestic as the second database when you want to expand the universe and uncover links/sites the first index didn't surface.

If budget only allows one, I'd choose:

• Semrush → if operational prospecting and country segmentation are the priority.
• Majestic → if maximum backlink discovery, especially obscure/non-English links, is the priority.
• Ahrefs → if you're already using it for broader SEO and want one all-purpose platform.

If you tell me which markets/languages you're targeting (e.g. Germany + France + Japan + Korea), I can also compare the tools specifically for those markets—the relative coverage can be quite different by country.

What I'd actually buy

If you're doing serious international outreach, my preferred stack would be:

Semrush + Majestic

Use Semrush to segment the opportunity by country and efficiently build prospect lists; use Majestic as the second database when you want to expand the universe and uncover links/sites the first index didn't surface.

If budget only allows one, I'd choose:

• Semrush → if operational prospecting and country segmentation are the priority.
• Majestic → if maximum backlink discovery, especially obscure/non-English links, is the priority.
• Ahrefs → if you're already using it for broader SEO and want one all-purpose platform.

If you tell me which markets/languages you're targeting (e.g. Germany + France + Japan + Korea), I can also compare the tools specifically for those markets—the relative coverage can be quite different by country.

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