Common Crawl's 2026 web graph lost over two-thirds of its links while referring domains held steady

Common Crawl's monthly domain-level link graphs show the number of domains roughly flat from late 2025 to October 2026, while links between them fell from 6.11 billion to 1.82 billion. The author, who runs a backlink API called crawlgraph, compared two quarterly graphs with no crawls in common and found the link total dropped 45% between them. Counts of referring domains for fourteen established sites changed by only -1% to +15%. However, 22% to 37% of each site's referring domains were not observed in the later graph, with a similar number of new domains appearing in their place, so the totals roughly cancel out. The author advises treating a missing referring domain as a possible observation gap and comparing snapshots that share no source crawls.