Sample report · authority from the audit · September 2026
Over six thousand pages link to this site. One in a hundred works against it.
This is a real authority report, with the client’s name removed. This is what the authority component of the SEO and GEO audit looks like: it shows where the links come from, which ones work against the site, and how it stands compared to the competition.
6,090 linking pages, by origin
Trusted domain · 4,156 pages68
Not trusted · 1,934 pages32
Within that, 61 pages are marked as toxic: one in a hundred.
Link profile read on the EQwise SEO platform on September 21, 2026, with link data from Majestic among others. Name, address, industry, and the names of compared competitors have been omitted. The figures have not been adjusted.
The core in four numbers
Link pages
6.090
pages elsewhere on the web with a link to this site
Trusted
68 %
located on a domain that is itself considered trustworthy (4,156)
Toxic
61
marked as toxic: one in a hundred, still to be assessed
Lowest score
0,0
trust of the two most toxic lists, each nearly 5,000 links
The link profileLink Profile The complete overview of all links pointing to your website. is healthy in terms of size and origin: two out of three linking domainsReferring Domains The number of unique websites (domains) that link to your website or page. are themselves trusted. The real work lies in the tail. Sixty-one pages are marked as toxicToxic link A link from an unreliable or spammy website that can harm your search engine visibility., and no one at the client’s end asked for them: they are automated lists that include thousands of domains at once.
They should be assessed and, where necessary, disavowed. That is maintenance, not a scandal.
Where the links come from
A backlinkBacklink A link on another website that points to your website. is a link from another site to yours. Search enginesSearch engine A website used to search the internet, such as Google or Bing. read such a link as a recommendation, and they weigh who is making the recommendation. That is why this report doesn’t just count how many pages link to you, but also whether those pages themselves are on a trustworthy domain.
Two out of three linking domains are on a domain that is itself trusted. Not trusted means unknown or low trust, not toxic; that group is a hundred times smaller and is listed in the next section.
Two questions about the link profile
Toxic links, and what to do with them
Of the 6,090 link pages, 61 are flagged as toxic. These are pages that link to the site without anyone asking. They have a trust score of zero and hundreds to thousands of other links on the same page. Two of them, as they appear in the platform:
| Link pageLink page A page on another website that contains a link to your site. | Judgment | Title | Trust | Links on page |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| directory list A | disavow automated list, no value | Directory Pages Index | 0,0 | 4.999 |
| directory list B | disavow same list under a second domain | Directory Pages Index | 0,0 | 4.999 |
| remaining 59 | review one by one, not based on score alone | — | — | — |
Both lists carry the exact same path and title: one script, two domains. Such pages include domains by the thousand without anyone submitting them. There is no indication that these links were purchased.
What happens next, in three steps
- Review. Each of the 61 is examined. A score alone is no reason to disavowDisavow A Google feature that allows you to indicate that certain links to your site should not be taken into account. a link: a wrongly disavowed good link costs more than spam ever will.
- Compare. Against the list of disavowed links your own team may have already submitted to Google, to ensure nothing is duplicated or contradictory.
- Disavow. The bad ones are put on a list asking Google to ignore them. Search engines already ignore most spam automatically; this is about removing a risk, not repairing damage.
This site alongside three competitors
AuthorityAuthority How much trust search engines and AI have in your website. is relative. A link profile is only strong or weak when compared to the sites you are competing with for the same buyer. To show this, the platform places the site’s profile alongside three competitors appearing in the same search resultsSearch Results The page containing links and advertisements that you see after searching for something on Google..
Two scores you encounter in every link report
Trust FlowTrust Flow A Majestic score from 0 to 100 that indicates the trustworthiness of the links pointing to a website. indicates how close a site is to a core of manually verified, trustworthy sites. A link from a university or a trade association scores high; a link from an automatically generated list does not.
Citation Flow indicates how many links point to a site, regardless of their source. Many links and low trust is the pattern of a site that has been spammed. Few links and high trust is a site that relies on a few good recommendations.
The link figures for the three competitors were not yet in the platform on September 21. Therefore, only their estimated traffic is shown below.
How to read a link comparison
- Trust over Citation. If Trust Flow is close to Citation Flow, the links are of good origin. If Citation is far ahead, there are many links from sites that carry no weight themselves.
- Referring domains matter more than link pages. A thousand links from a single forum weigh less than ten links from ten trade media outlets.
- The link gap. The domains that link to competitor A but not yet to you are the first places to request a mention. They are already writing about your market and already linking to a competitor.
What the traffic adds to the story
The platform also estimates the organic search traffic for this site and the compared competitors, month by month, based on positions and search volumes. This is an estimate and not a count from your own statistics, but the trend is reliable.
| Site | Spring 2023 | Winter 2024/2025 | Summer 2026 | Trend |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| This site | ≈ 70 | ≈ 15,000 | ≈ 800 | declining, lower every quarter since early 2025 |
| Competitor A | ≈ 5,000 | ≈ 8,000 | ≈ 15,000 | rising, peak of ≈ 90,000 in February 2026 |
| Competitor B | ≈ 1,500 | ≈ 7,000 | ≈ 5,000 | flat |
| Competitor C | ≈ 1,000 | ≈ 3,500 | ≈ 3,000 | flat |
Two years ago, this site was the fastest riser in the group; since early 2025, the line has been receding while competitor A’s continues to grow. A link profile rarely explains such a dip on its own, but it is the first place you look. It involves lost links from trade media and partner sites, and new links that the competitor has collected in the meantime.
What this does and does not prove
What it proves
- How many pages link to the site, their origin, and which of them are flagged as toxic. Counted on September 21, 2026, and available for review in the platform.
- The trend of estimated search traffic over three years, for this site and three competitors, from the same source on the same day.
What it does not prove
- That the decline in traffic is caused by the link profile. For that, link history is needed, alongside changes to the site and the market during the same period.
- Whether a toxic link is already causing damage. Search engines ignore most spam themselves; disavowing is a precaution.
How it was measured
A service provider with over two hundred pages, active in an English-speaking market. Link analysis and toxic pages from the EQwise SEO platform, read on September 21, 2026, with link data from Majestic (among others) for Trust Flow and Citation Flow. Traffic estimate from the competitor comparison of the same platform, same day, read from a logarithmic graph and therefore rounded.
The list of domains that link to the competition but not yet to this site belongs to a follow-up measurement and is not included in this example.
Who links to your competitor and not yet to you?
Six thousand links mean little without asking who is giving them. The gap between your link profile and that of the party you are competing with for the same buyer is the list where the work lies. These are sites that are already writing about your market and already linking to someone else.
