MCP server · Research

CrawlGraph MCP server

Lets your AI look up who links to a website and find outreach targets that link to your competitors but not to you.

Research For marketing For pr and communications Marketing

This is a small helper that connects your AI assistant to CrawlGraph, a service that keeps a big public map of which websites link to which other websites. Once it is connected, you can just ask your AI in normal words who links to a site, or which sites link to your competitors but never mention you. It is handy for anyone doing marketing, SEO or link building who wants backlink answers without paying for an expensive monthly tool.

What is an MCP server? The 30-second version

On its own, your AI can only chat with you. It cannot go and check who links to a website, because it has no way to reach that kind of data. An MCP server is a small helper program that gives your AI one new skill, here the ability to ask CrawlGraph for backlink information. You add this helper once, and from then on your AI can look things up in CrawlGraph for you whenever you ask.

What this MCP server does

You ask your AI a question in plain words, like who links to a certain site. Your AI passes that request to this helper program. The helper talks to the CrawlGraph service, which holds backlink data built from Common Crawl, a public snapshot of the web. CrawlGraph sends back a list of referring domains, or a list of outreach targets, and your AI shows it to you in the chat. You never type any of the technical details yourself.

Flow diagram: you ask your AI “Who links to mydomain.com?”, the CrawlGraph MCP server connects it to CrawlGraph, and you get back list of linking sites.

Click to zoom

What you can do with it

List every domain that links to a website you name
Find domains that link to your competitors but not to you
Spot publishers who link to all of your competitors, the warmest outreach targets
Compare two Common Crawl snapshots to see which referring domains were added or no longer seen
See which Common Crawl snapshots you can query
Ask your AI to draft outreach emails to the targets it found

Try asking your AI

“Who links to mydomain.com?”
“Show me the domains linking to competitor-a.com and competitor-b.com but not to mydomain.com.”
“Use gap_outreach_targets for mydomain.com against competitor-a.com and competitor-b.com, then draft a short outreach email to each priority target.”
“What changed in the backlinks for example.com between the last two snapshots?”

What it gives back to you

You get back lists and short summaries right in the chat. For a backlink lookup, that is a list of referring domains with authority scores. For a gap analysis, it is a ranked list of domains that link to your competitors but not to you, with a note of which competitors each one links to. For a snapshot comparison, you get counts of added, removed and moved domains, plus a note that these are periodic observations, not live monitoring.

Before you start

What you need

A CrawlGraph API key starting with cg_live (a kind of password for apps; you can get a free one by email at crawlgraph.com/docs/api)
Node.js installed on your computer so the npx command can run
The $99 lifetime CrawlGraph tier if you want to use the gap analysis and outreach target tools

Good to know

The data comes from quarterly Common Crawl snapshots, so it is not live monitoring, and a domain missing from a snapshot is not proof that a link was deleted; also, the gap tools use up your paid quota and need the lifetime tier.

Install it with your AI

Add CrawlGraph MCP server to your AI, no technical skills needed

You don't install anything by hand. You copy one prompt, paste it into an AI that can work on your computer, and it checks, installs and connects the server for you, asking you when it needs something.

Sign in to get the install prompt

Members get a ready-made prompt that lets the Claude desktop app check CrawlGraph MCP server, install it and connect it for them, step by step. You don't need any technical skills: you copy, paste and answer a few questions. Your connected AI can also find and install any of the 4,066 MCP servers here for you.