Ahrefs

Ahrefs is an SEO toolset on its own web index: backlinks, keyword research, site audits, rank tracking and AI search visibility, free for verified site owners.

Ahrefs is an SEO toolset for anyone whose job is organic search, built on the company's own web crawler and keyword indexes rather than on licensed data. It answers where a site's links come from, which keywords are worth chasing, what is technically wrong with the pages and how rankings move week to week. It is made by Ahrefs Pte. Ltd., a bootstrapped Singapore company founded in 2010. Site Explorer shows any domain's backlinks, referring domains, organic keywords and traffic estimates. Keywords Explorer generates keyword ideas with difficulty, volume and intent, clusters them by Parent Topic, and its Content Gap report lists the keywords competitors rank for that a site does not. Site Audit crawls a site for technical and on-page issues, including Core Web Vitals. Rank Tracker follows positions per keyword and location, tracks the SERP features that appear alongside them, AI Overviews included, and reports Share of Voice against named competitors. Content Explorer searches the index for top-performing pages and link prospects. Brand Radar tracks brand mentions across AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot, YouTube and Reddit. AI Content Helper scores a draft against the pages that already rank, and Bot Analytics reads the HTTP logs forwarded by Cloudflare to show which crawlers hit which pages. Portfolios, Batch Analysis, email alerts and Report Builder sit around the core tools. The vendor's own plan taglines say who each tier is for: Lite for small businesses and personal projects, Standard for freelance SEOs and consultants, Advanced for lean in-house teams, and Enterprise for companies that need single sign-on, an audit log and uncapped API access. Site owners who only want to look at their own domain use Ahrefs Free, the renamed Ahrefs Webmaster Tools, which gives Site Audit and a limited Site Explorer view for verified sites. Ahrefs is sold per workspace, monthly or on an annual commitment, from Starter through Enterprise, with extra users and add-ons such as Brand Radar prompt packages and the Content Kit priced separately. The plan cards list every tier. In daily use Ahrefs is where an SEO researches keywords and clusters them into topics, audits a backlink profile, runs the technical crawl before a site relaunch, tracks weekly rankings and share of voice, and now checks how often a brand is named in AI answers. It connects to Google Search Console for a site's own data, to Looker Studio for dashboards, and to custom code and AI assistants through API v3, an MCP server and Ahrefs Connect. It sits beside a CMS, an analytics stack and a reporting tool rather than replacing any of them.