Ahrefs is an all-in-one SEO toolset - combining Site Explorer, Keywords Explorer, Site Audit, Rank Tracker, and the AI-visibility product Brand Radar - built on one of the largest proprietary web crawls and keyword indexes in the industry. It suits SEOs, content teams, and marketers who want backlink analysis, keyword research, technical audits, and AI-search visibility tracking together in a single freemium platform rather than juggling several specialist tools.
Who builds it
Ahrefs is developed by Ahrefs Pte. Ltd., a company positioned around its own crawling infrastructure: rather than licensing third-party data, Ahrefs runs its own web crawler to build backlink, keyword, and content indexes, then packages that data across Site Explorer, Keywords Explorer, Site Audit, Rank Tracker, and Brand Radar as one connected suite for both hands-on SEOs and larger marketing teams.
Core features
- A keyword index of roughly 28.7 billion keywords across 217 locations, powering Keywords Explorer for keyword research and search-volume data.
- A backlink index of about 35 trillion live backlinks, refreshed every 15-30 minutes, making it one of the largest and freshest link databases available.
- Site Audit with a crawl budget starting at 100,000 crawl credits on the entry paid plan, for technical SEO checks across a site.
- Rank Tracker with weekly ranking updates applied by default across all subscription plans.
- Brand Radar for AI-visibility tracking, monitoring brand presence across roughly 406 million monthly AI prompts spanning 7 AI indexes, alongside a free Ahrefs plan and API access on paid tiers.
Pricing
- Ahrefs Free: access to Ahrefs data on your own site to fix what matters, at no cost.
- Starter (from EUR27/month): for seeing what people search for and spying on competitors, aimed at solo users doing lighter research.
- Lite, Standard, and Advanced plans scale up from there, adding more projects, historical data, tracked keywords, tracked prompts, and crawl credits (the entry paid tier includes 5 projects, 6 months of historical data, 750 tracked keywords, 5 tracked prompts, and 100,000 crawl credits).
- Enterprise: everything in Advanced plus uncapped API access, SSO and enterprise-grade security, access management and audit logs, and unlimited historical data; lower plans have capped API credits instead.
Who it's for
Ahrefs fits teams that want one platform covering keyword research, backlink analysis, technical site audits, rank tracking, and AI-search visibility, backed by large first-party crawl data refreshed in near real time. The free Ahrefs plan works for site owners just fixing their own site, Starter suits solo marketers doing competitive research, and the Lite, Standard, Advanced, and Enterprise tiers scale up in projects, historical depth, and API access for agencies and larger in-house teams that need uncapped programmatic access.