Same name, new job

BackTweets is older than most of the web remembers. It launched back in 2009, in the early days of Twitter, with a simple and slightly magical trick: paste a URL and see every tweet that ever linked to it - shortened links unfurled, the whole trail laid bare. Before “social listening” had a name and a sales team, BackTweets was quietly answering the only question that mattered: who is actually passing this around?

The web didn’t stand still, and neither did BackTweets. A link’s journey stopped beginning and ending on one timeline. It started running through Reddit threads and Hacker News comments, news pieces and old archives, and increasingly through an AI that reads all of it and decides, on your behalf, which handful of sources are worth citing. “Who tweeted my link” became a free, built-in commodity. “Where does my link actually travel, and does the AI ever bring me up?” stayed wide open.

So that is the job now. Paste a URL and BackTweets traces where it surfaces across the open web - who links it, who mentions it, when it first appeared and how far it has spread - then adds the newer frontier: how visible you are when AI assistants answer real questions. Where the trail runs thin, we say so. Every figure carries the sample behind it. No vanity metrics, no invented search volume.

BackTweets is built and run by Sorezki, carrying the same name and the same simple promise into an era that, conveniently, needs it again: show people where their link really travels, and stay honest about what we can and can’t see.