How I Built a Free Backlink Intelligence Tool on Common Crawl + DuckDB (opens in new tab)

The problem Backlink data is a $1.5B/year SaaS category. Ahrefs is $129/month, SEMrush is $140/month, Moz is $99/month. As an indie I needed competitor backlinks for outreach — the prospecting half of what these tools do — but I wasn't going to pay $1,548/year just for a quarterly list of domains. Turns out the data is already public. Common Crawl publishes a hyperlink graph every ~3 months containing every public link they discover. The latest release I pulled has 4.4 billion edges across 12...