About CranSEO, a link-data API for people who work in notebooks
We run one product: backlinks, referring domains, anchors and a DR score as JSON. This page explains who it is for and where it stops.
CranSEO research team ·
What we build and why it is small
The product is narrow. Backlinks, referring domains, anchor text, top pages and a 0-100 Domain Rating, all returned as JSON from a REST endpoint.
Our own crawler feeds our own link index. It holds 181,132,097 domains, 2,774,625,913 domain-to-domain links and about 798.5 billion backlinks, and it refreshes roughly once a month.
We wrote the site for analysts who live in R and Quarto, because their needs are specific: stable shapes, cheap reruns and nothing hidden behind a sales call. Among dataforseo competitors we are the narrow one by design.
What we do and do not offer
| We offer | We leave to others |
|---|---|
| Backlinks, referring domains, anchors, top pages | Keyword research and volumes |
| DR on a log scale, our own metric | Rank tracking and SERP snapshots |
| Prepaid credit, $0.0001 each, no subscription | Daily-fresh crawling |
| Free actions with no key | Large dashboards with client portals |
How the index is built and how it ages
Our crawler walks the web and records which domains link to which. That is the whole trick.
The result is a graph of 2,774,625,913 domain-to-domain links across 181,132,097 domains, plus the page-level backlinks behind them. We refresh it roughly once a month, which means a link added last week may not appear yet and a link removed last week may still be shown.
We say this on every page that matters because analysts hate surprises. If your report needs daily-fresh crawl data, use Ahrefs or Semrush for that column and keep us for the cheap, repeatable link tables.
How to judge us
Test, then decide. The free actions need no key, and the sign-up credit is $100 with no card.
If the output slots into your tibble and the monthly rhythm suits your reports, stay. If you need keyword suites, Ahrefs and Semrush are the fuller products, and we would rather you use them than bend our API into the wrong job.
Everything on this site comes from the product itself and our own index. Read the action glossary for the specifics, or the monthly runbook for how we suggest running it.
The DR formula, in public
No black box here. DR equals round(100 times the natural log of referring domains plus one, divided by the log of 2 times 10 to the seventh).
It depends on one input, the count of referring domains, so you can recompute it from a refdomains pull and check our arithmetic in a notebook. It is a log scale, comparable in spirit to Ahrefs DR or Moz DA but not the same number, and we never claim it predicts rankings.
Who reads our pages
Mostly people with a notebook open. Analysts, mostly, plus the odd developer who inherited a report.
Their questions repeat: how to price a monthly job, how to join links to a Search Console export, how to keep a key out of a repository. Each page here answers one of those, with the same restraint, and the pricing budget and the join example are good places to start.
We label every worked example as an example. No invented clients, no quoted results, no ranking promises, because a table of made-up numbers is fine as long as nobody mistakes it for evidence.
Where to go next
Pick by task. Choosing between providers? Read the decision tree. Scoring a column of domains? The bulk checker page has code and thresholds.
Sign-in is Google only, and top-ups are in USDT (TRC-20) from the account page. The privacy and terms pages in the footer say the rest, in general terms and without legal ornament.