Is the link actually there?
Paste up to 10 pairs and we fetch each page right now: whether the link is on it, what relit carries, the anchor as published, whether the page tells search engines to ignore it, and how many other outbound links sit beside yours. No account, no crawl index, no waiting for somebody else’s recrawl — which is why it can tell you a link is gone rather than that it was seen once.
Why this reads differently
A backlink index answers “have you ever seen this link?”. A fetch answers “is it there?”. The gap between those two is where a paid link quietly becomes a nofollow in month three, where a guest post gets moved behind a canonical, and where a page picks up forty new outbound links after the invoice cleared — none of which changes an index entry, and all of which change what the link is worth.
This is the same reader that runs every night against links bought on LinkBourse. There the reading is not information, it is the settlement: a link that comes down inside its guaranteed term is reversed out of the publisher’s balance automatically, and a night we could not reach the page is never counted against them.