A common and understandable mix-up: people expect to find their backlinks listed somewhere in Google Analytics. They're not there — Analytics and backlink tracking are fundamentally different data sources.
Why backlinks don't show up in Analytics
Google Analytics measures behavior on your own site — sessions, pageviews, conversions — based on tracking code running in visitors' browsers. It has no visibility into the broader web's link graph; it only knows about a link if someone actually clicks it and lands on your site, in which case it shows up as a "referral" source, not a backlink per se. A backlink that exists but never gets clicked is completely invisible to Analytics.
What Analytics can show you instead
Check Acquisition → Traffic acquisition (or the equivalent report) and filter by "Referral" as a channel — this shows you sites that are actively sending click traffic to you, which is a useful subset of your backlinks (the ones people are actually using), even though it's not your complete backlink profile.
Where to actually check your backlinks for free
Google Search Console has a "Links" report showing top linking sites and pages Google has discovered pointing to you — this is free, and it's Google's own data, making it the most authoritative free source available, though it isn't necessarily exhaustive or real-time. Several third-party tools also offer limited free backlink lookups, typically capped at a certain number of results per day, which are useful for spot-checking specific pages or competitors even though the full picture usually requires a paid plan.
The bottom line
Analytics tells you which backlinks are actually driving traffic; Search Console's Links report tells you which backlinks Google has discovered, whether or not anyone's clicking them. Neither replaces the other, and neither is the wrong place to look — they're just answering different questions.
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