Ahrefs FAQ
8 common questions about Ahrefs — answered.
Ahrefs has four plans: Lite at $129/month (essentials for small businesses), Standard at $249/month (most popular, full SEO toolkit), Advanced at $449/month (more data and features for agencies), and Enterprise at $14,990/year (custom limits and API access). Annual billing saves roughly 2 months. All plans include the core toolset — plans differ mainly in data limits and user seats.
Ahrefs offers limited free tools including a free backlink checker, keyword generator, and website authority checker. These give a taste of the data but are capped at a few results per query. There's no free plan with dashboard access. For serious SEO work, you need a paid plan starting at $129/month.
Ahrefs has the larger backlink index and a more intuitive UI for link building and content gap analysis. Semrush is the more comprehensive all-in-one suite covering SEO, PPC, social media, and content marketing. Choose Ahrefs if backlinks and content research are your primary focus; choose Semrush if you need a broader marketing toolkit. Most professional SEOs have used both.
Ahrefs has the largest backlink index in the industry with over 35 trillion known links, 271 billion indexed pages, and data from 200+ million root domains. The crawler processes 8 billion pages daily, making it one of the most active web crawlers after Google. The index updates every 15-30 minutes for new and lost links.
Yes, Ahrefs offers an API but it's only available on the Enterprise plan ($14,990/year) or as a separate API subscription. The API provides access to backlink data, organic keywords, referring domains, and more via REST endpoints with JSON responses. For non-Enterprise users, Ahrefs offers data export (CSV) from all tools.
Ahrefs keyword data is among the most accurate in the industry for search volume, using clickstream data calibrated against Google Search Console. Their Keyword Difficulty (KD) score correlates well with actual ranking difficulty. Traffic estimates are directionally accurate but, like all third-party tools, can be off by 20-50% compared to actual Google Analytics data.
Yes, Rank Tracker is one of Ahrefs' core tools. It tracks keyword positions daily across desktop and mobile in 170+ countries. Limits depend on your plan: Lite tracks 750 keywords, Standard tracks 2,000, Advanced tracks 5,000. You can track competitors alongside your own rankings and get email alerts for significant position changes.
Domain Rating (DR) is Ahrefs' proprietary metric that scores a website's backlink profile strength on a 0-100 scale. It's calculated based on the quantity and quality of external backlinks pointing to a domain. DR is relative (not linear) — going from 70 to 71 is much harder than 20 to 21. It's useful for quick competitive benchmarking but shouldn't be the sole metric for link building decisions.