17 years helping Australian businesses
choose better software
About Ahrefs
Ahrefs is an all-in-one SEO toolset that helps boost the organic search growth of your website.
Other than that, I would say, they also have almost everything you need out of an SEO software suite. Their user experience is also pretty good.
I don't think there is anything missing from the ahrefs tool.
Filter reviews (570)
Usage
Sort by
Filter reviews (570)
If you can afford this tool, do not spare the money
Comments: It's very powerful tool, which is very worth to use. Occasionally you can expect some issues with updates but from few months it's very rarely.
Pros:
Ahrefs has a very large database containing all the required elements for effective website positioning.
Cons:
I would like to say, that there is not a function that i like least. I love all, at least from functions which I use most often.
Ahrefs Response
last year
Much appreciated, Pawel!! We give our ebst to ship between 10-15 small and big updates each month. For the latest ones, please be sure to read our product blog: https://ahrefs.com/blog/whats-new-at-ahrefs-june-2023/
Alternatives Considered:
It has an outstanding capacity to crawl the entire internet and target sites.
Comments:
It provides better recommendations for keywords.
It has basic control over keywords.
Pros:
It is capable of thorough monitoring and comparison of domains. Based on how much organic traffic a website receives, that is. Compared to Alexa rank, it is superior. Based on the quantity of backlinks going to a URL, URL (URL ratings) calculates the potential influence of the URL. In terms of metrics returned, the keyword results page was at first the most plain and straightforward of all the tools I examined. However, Ahrefs has significantly improved its Keyword Explorer tool with a responsive page of interactive data visualizations.
Cons:
Costly for small companies perhaps. Technical SEO and on-page optimization are included in the "Domain Health" tool, which is presently unavailable. Had the experience of having some tool parts return no results.
Ahrefs Response
last year
Hello! Thanks for taking the time to leave a thorough review. We appreciate your feedback. We're glad to hear that you're getting good value from our tools and metrics. If you're having trouble with Site Audit, please do contact [email protected]. We want you to be able to have the full functionality of tools included in your plan. Again, thank you for your thorough and honest feedback and thank you for choosing Ahrefs!
Used to be the best.
Pros:
Was a great tool, used it daily. Their credit system and legacy plans makes it too costly and frankly just gets annoying. Moving to se rankings which makes me sad.
Cons:
The credit system. It ruined the brand especially as AI rises.
Ahrefs Response
last year
Hi there, Thanks for taking the time to leave a review. I think there might be some confusion about the credit system, which only applies to new plans, not Legacy plans. Please don't hesitate to reach out to [email protected] if you would like additonal clarification about your previous Legacy plan.
Great tool for SEOs
Comments: Overall, it's a great tool. It helps me a lot with my SEO Strategies. It makes my work easy and saves time.
Pros:
It's a great tool for SEO Professionals. It helps you with everything from your own site audit to competitors' research. I personally use it for Site Audits; It gives quality insights on On-page, Off-page, and Technical errors. Rest, it's a great tool for competitors' research, as it checks their backlinks, keyword research, and overall SEO strategies.
Cons:
If they can introduce AI in keyword research like SEMrush, then keyword research will become simple.
Ahrefs Response
3 months ago
Hi there! Thanks for taking the time to leave a review. We're glad to hear that you're getting a lot of value out of our tool. Re: AI, we do have that functionality in Keywords Explorer! :) Not only can you get AI prompted suggestions for keywords, but you can also use it to translate keywords across multiple languages.
Alternatives Considered:
10 tools in 1. Great value & Highly versatile
Comments: It's cutting edge, it's affordable, and it offers so many gizmos and gadgets you could never feel like you're extracting more value than it's offering.
Pros:
Ahrefs is a very-near-complete expert SEO tool suite. For the price you pay and the value you get, you have to be fairly bad at SEO to not get an ROI on your investment. I think one of the great struggles with these tools is an intuitive user experience, and despite how clunky their interface might look, I think they have drawn a very nice balance between functionality and useability.
Cons:
Local SEO. In my opinion, it's it's biggest and most relevant weakness. Tools like bright local massively outperform it's local KW reporting (being able to create radius-based map pack KW ranking reports), and tools like SEMrush generally outperform it here. Ahrefs still does not have a way to track map pack rankings, in any capacity. It's a huge capabilities gap in my opinion. One that can make or break a use case for the tool. I also think ScreamingFrog outperforms their crawler by having a centralized user interface and more in-depth features, however, given that the site audit and web crawler feature was not their primary function to begin with, I am very impressed with what they offer.
Ahrefs Response
last year
Hi Max! Thank you so much for taking the time to leave a review. And thank you for the kind words about the balance between functionality and usability on our interface. We hear you loud and clear about our local SEO capabilities. We're working hard behind the scenes to see how we can improve this experience for our users in the future. Thanks again for taking the time to leave a review and for your honesty!
A thing no AHREFS affiliate will tell you
Comments: Even if this credit rule is listed on the Pricing page, it is unclear what those credits are consumed for. I could never expect that they melt out with EVERY click... So I got disappointed / this is not what I call customer-friendly. The app is very expensive already, and this credit situation doesn't improve the app's usage. But it brings the company much more money, I understand. Tja, that's capitalism, bro.
Pros:
Of course, we all know it's a fantastic tool that provides many information and tools. I haven't used it for a long time, but I decided to use it because many people on youtube were praising how good it is.
Cons:
Here's what no Youtuber/ahrefs-affiliate will tell you: after you pay, you will realize that EACH LITTLE click you make on the platform consumes a credit, and for 100 EURO per month, you have only 500 of those. Literally. Just 500 credits. I started my keyword research, and schwupps - almost 100 credits gone. EACH STEP you need while looking for keywords/related topics consumes credits.
Ahrefs Response
last year
Hi Kirill, Good to see you back! Indeed, our pricing has changed since last year (March 2022, to be more specific). With the old plans, the main features were available to everyone—regardless of the plan they were on. This meant large agencies paid the same subscription price as a one-person SEO (often a beginner). The best way to differentiate usage was by how many "data requests" each user was pulling. Hence "credits" were born. Credits get consumed when accessing reports and requesting new data from all our core tools, Dashboard, Alerts, and standalone tools (like Batch Analysis). Site Audit and Rank Tracker DO NOT consume credits. However, we are very transparent about them. The monthly subscription, plus the plan additions are all listed on our: - Pricing page - Billing page - In-app welcome message - Visual live counter (in the header, next to your account name) - Limits & usage page under Admin Settings If you want to save on credits while doing kw research, I recommend searching them in bulk. For more info on how credits work, please read our help page article: https://help.ahrefs.com/en/articles/6061658-about-credits-and-export-rows As for the pricing pain point, we're improving our product and our ability to crawl the entire web: https://ahrefs.com/big-data. Hence prices need to follow along to make our business sustainable. To give you a greater understanding of the costs involved, our data center costs in Singapore alone have run over $400M in the past 3 years (https://tech.ahrefs.com/how-ahrefs-saved-us-400m-in-3-years-by-not-going-to-the-cloud-8939dd930af8). Despite this, we still get that the new system might not be working for everybody (including yourself), hence we apologize for that. Happy to answer any further questions. Andrei
Alternatives Considered:
Helps Make SEO More Manageable
Pros:
I've tried a few SEO tools and Ahrefs is one of my favorites! The site is pretty easy to understand and there are lots of free tools that help me to understand how to improve my SEO ranking. I'd encourage people to use the free trial to check it out.
Cons:
I don't really find a down side to the plaform. I'm satisfied with how it works.
Ahrefs Response
last year
Hi there, Thanks for taking the time to leave a review! We're thrilled to hear that you're enjoying the platform, and we hope you continue to get value out of our tools in the future. Just to clarify, we don't have a free trial, but we do have a forever-free limited version of Site Explorer and Site Audit with our Ahrefs Webmaster Tools plan. Again, thanks for your feedback, and we're happy to count you among our customer base!
Best on the market but not for everyone
Comments: Really good software but not for everyone, for big companies it's really good but for smaller companies with less budget I don't think it worth it.
Pros:
The most complete software for SEO competitors research and market research.
Cons:
The price was too much, the cheaper plan is more expensive than some premium tier plans on competitors and still lack features.
Ahrefs Response
last year
Thank your for your thoughts, Nathan! Would you mind sharing the competitors that you compared our lowest tier plan, please?
Ahrefs review
Comments: I used Ahrefs as my daily keyword research tool and it's the main tool i use for backlink analysis
Pros:
Very easy to use Helpful backlink analysis insights (even has basic insights on a free account) Splits search volume by country but also gives global figures too Easy to see what your competitors are doing
Cons:
You just have to keep an eye out on your credit usage. I think that part could be clearer
Ahrefs Response
3 months ago
Hi Ryan! Thanks so much for taking the time to leave a review. We really appreciate the feedback. While we're thrilled that you're getting a lot of value out of your plan, if you have suggestions for how we can improve the clarity around our credit system, we'd love to hear it!
I like some features
Comments: It's good for those people who want all their tools in one place and I can see why it is the industry leader. For me though, I'm kind of covered with other tools that I use.
Pros:
It seems to cover all the bases within its paid packages
Cons:
I can get most of the reports for free using other tools
Ahrefs Response
7 months ago
Hi Elle, Thanks for taking the time to leave a review and provide honest feedback. We can appreciate that there are other tools on the market that are less expensive than we are, but we hope that our robust, first-in-class data is a differentiator. :)
Ahrefs Review
Comments: Ahrefs is a part of my day to day life. Without this tool its impossible for me to move forward with my SEO strategies.
Pros:
The best features I like about this tool is its keywords rank tracking and backlinks tracking. I get a tons of new backlinks opportunity using Ahrefs. It is best for finding new keywords and backlinks using competitor analysis.
Cons:
Its pricing. This toll is still a lot costlier to afford on monthly basis.
Ahrefs Response
2 years ago
Thank you for your trust in us, Rohit! Be sure to check our latest updates, you might find some new features that can help with your daily SEO tasks: https://ahrefs.com/blog/whats-new-at-ahrefs-jan-2023/
Alternatives Considered:
No respect to long-term clients and testers
Comments: As I explained, the overall experience is good, however their pricing model (where you must pay for tools that you will never use) is terrible.
Pros:
Ahrefs was always a great tool, that I personally recommended to many colleagues and partners in the SEO industry.
Cons:
Their pricing model and customer support is terrible. I was somehow involved into what ahrefs is right now, by providing a lot of feedback/feature requests in the early days of ahrefs (same I did for other now well-known SEO platforms). However, this month they just disabled my current plan that I was using for a long period of time, forcing me to switch to more expensive and less functional package. We never exceeded the usage of credits, but they decided that we need to pay more, and pay more for tools that we never used and never will use.
Ahrefs Response
11 months ago
Hi Dmitry, We're sorry to hear that you're not happy with the usage-based pricing, and we're sorry that we can no longer support Legacy accounts that exceed the current usage-based pricing limits. As a long-time user, you're aware that we haven't raised prices on our product in a long time. Unfortunately, the previous Legacy limits and pricing don't reflect the value users get from our current products, making a pricing adjustment necessary. We hope you'll continue to get value from Ahrefs, and we hope to count you among our users in the years to come.
Alternatives Considered:
Great tool for all aspects of SEO
Comments: Great experience overall, AHrefs really boosted our organic traffic and revenue growth.
Pros:
Very easy to use with a user-friendly interface. Great technical SEO audit features and keyword position tracking monitoring and reporting.
Cons:
Internal linking recommendations and data visualization could be further improved.
Ahrefs Response
last year
Hi, Thanks for taking the time to leave a review! We're happy to hear you've gotten a lot of value from our tools. We're continually improving our product offering, and hope to expand our internal linking tool in the future. If you'd like to provide more insight into how we can improve our data visualization, please don't hesitate to reach out to [email protected]. Thanks!
The best SEO tool in terms of data insights
Comments: Overall, Ahrefs is arguably the best SEO software out there for keyword research and competitor analysis as well as backlinks tracking. However, its credits limits could be better and can be a blocker for power users.
Pros:
I believe that the force of Ahrefs resides in the accuracy of their data, especially related to backlinks over competitors. That's probably my favorite part of the software.
Cons:
I don't like their limits very much. For a SEO software, it's quite costly and the limits in the base plan is very low. They should re-structure pricing around other limits than keywords search or change how credits are deducted because it's a very bad designed system that is unfair when you just refresh your page for example.
Ahrefs Response
last year
Hi Arnaud, Thank you for taking the time to leave your thoughts and feedback! We're proud of our backlink database, and we're thrilled to hear that you're a fan, too! The credit system has been a bit of an adjustment for some of our users, so that is fair criticism. We've restructured how credits are counted (no credits for sorting, for example), and we're in the process of making additional changes that should make things better for our users. Again, thank you for taking the time to write out a thoughtful review, and thank you for choosing Ahrefs!
Best SEO Tool Ever!
Comments: Mind-blowing experience from Ahref! Highly Recommended!
Pros:
- Backlink Report- SEO Audits- Keyword Research- Topic research- competition analysis
Cons:
There is no negative feedback or any downside to this awesome SEO Tool. Highly Recommended!
Ahrefs Response
2 years ago
Thank you for your vote of confidence, Ambar! :) We've just recently launched a one-of-a-kind SEO tool: Web Explorer. With it: - You can literally search across 500 billion pages, domains, and links indexed by Yep.com (our search engine) - Including pages by the anchor and URLs of their backlinks and outlinks This tool is available for Advanced and Enterprise plans. Be sure to check it out! And if you have questions or feature suggestions, let us know in the support chat :)
One of the Top Tools for SEO Performance
Comments: Overall have had a pleasant experience with Ahrefs and will continue to use it long term for our SEO efforts.
Pros:
The abundance of information, tools at your disposable which gives you a clear path to put plans into action.
Cons:
UI/UX of the site could be improved a bit but overall still fine.
Ahrefs Response
last year
Hi Andrew, Thanks for taking the time to leave a review of Ahrefs! We're glad to hear you're getting a lot of value out of our platform. If you'd like to expand on what you think could be improved from a UX/UI perspective, please don't hesitate to contact [email protected]. Thanks again!
Best backlink monitoring tool
Comments: I use Ahrefs on a daily basis and can't imagine continuing to work without it. If it were cheaper, it would be the best SEO tool
Pros:
The user interface is really clear. Link monitoring works flawlessly, ahrefs has its own indicator called DOMAIN Rating, which allows you to pre-assess the power of the linking domain
Cons:
Price. Ahrefs is expensive tool for freelancers. If ahrefs will be a little cheaper, there will be no cons.
Ahrefs Response
2 years ago
Grzegorz, looks like link-monitoring and link-building wise you are covered! ;) Freelancers can sign up for our Ahrefs Webmaster Tools, connect their personal websites, and run a free site and backlink audit: https://ahrefs.com/webmaster-tools Or use one of our free tools on a daily basis: https://ahrefs.com/free-seo-tools Hope these tools help!
Essential for any SEO service provider
Comments: Great overall experience. For anyone supplying SEO or wanting to improve the SEO on their website, AHrefs provides you with multiple, in depth insights that would otherwise be unknown.
Pros:
Great layout to easily understand the domain rating, organic traffic numbers and keyword rankings in just a few clicks.
Cons:
Reported traffic levels on AHrefs are sometimes highly inaccurate compared to the data reported on Google Search Console.
Ahrefs Response
last year
Hi Ollie! Thanks for taking the time to leave a review. We're thrilled that you're happy with the interface. As for the traffic levels, we conducted a study, and it's off by up to 50% on average, partially thanks to anonymized queries (up to 50% of clicks are anonymized queries). If you notice something really off, please do contact [email protected] so they can pass it onto our data science team. Again, thank you for your honest feedback, and thanks for being an Ahrefs customer!
All-in-one tool for Digital Marketers
Pros:
The software comprises of many great tools that are almost necessary for all digital marketers. You can perform keyword research, check link profile, get content ideas and many more in the same platform. And the interface is simple but easy to use.
Cons:
There are updates but very few and to be frank, most feel like a minor tweak. The keywords explorer isn't always working and could be great to see more features like keyword categorisation by intent.
Ahrefs Response
last year
Hello Kathy! Happy to know we're helping you out with so many things :) About our updates, we mostly launch between 10-15 important updates/month (the minor ones aren't mentioned). Then announce them on our YouTube channel, product blog, and social media channels. Keyword clustering by parent topic is something similar to what you're looking for and can be viewed as a treemap chart. Read more about the update on our blog: https://ahrefs.com/blog/whats-new-at-ahrefs-feb-2023/ As for the Keywords Explorer issue, please write us at [email protected] whenever you encounter it. Might be a temporary glitch.
Must Have Digital Marketing Tool for Digital Marketer
Comments: It help my business and project to run smother, Ahrefs also has rank tracker and backlinks features that important for SEO.
Pros:
Simple keyword research, backink monitoring, rank tracker and site audit. Keyword tracker of ahrefs is also easy to manage.
Cons:
Not cheap compared to other tools, user management related cost is expensive too. You also need to get enterprise version to get API access.
Ahrefs Response
2 years ago
Appreciate the review, Ganjar! To clarify. With Ahrefs, you pay for the best-in-class SEO data in the industry. More specifically: > #1 SEO crawler worldwide > Largest live backlinks database (35 Trillion) > Largest US keyword database (4.9 Billion) More on this on our big data page: https://ahrefs.com/big-data Running such a complex infrastructure involves high costs for crawling, parsing, and indexing the Internet 24/7. But also operational costs for maintaining it. So in essence, the price is directly proportional to the amount of data you retrieve AND our own internal cost of storing data for 12+ years. On the same note, the API will remain only on the enterprise plan as it consumes computing resources. But we are in talks to allow users to test it for free websites - like wordcount.com. Thank you again for your kind thoughts! Andrei
Grate SEO tool
Pros:
Actual backlinking data base, intuitive UI/UX
Cons:
API limits very low, Not cheap services
Ahrefs Response
9 months ago
Hi Ivan, Thanks for taking the time to leave a review. We're happy to hear that you find our platform intuitive and that you're getting good use out of our backlink data. We hope to count you among our customers for years to come!
SEO tool which is very important
Comments: I use Ahrefs for my projects,
Pros:
Their batch analysis and keyword research section, which shows the top 10 SERP queries, greatly assist me in managing my time. The tool is easy to use and requires no technical knowledge, and can be used by agencies and individuals.
Cons:
There is no ability to search keyword by region
Ahrefs Response
2 years ago
Hrayr, thank you a bunch for your review! You can only research keywords at a country level indeed. If you want to track their rankings over time, you can do that via the Rank Tracker at a country, state, city, and ZIP code level.
Right words in the right place
Comments: Helps me to write articles on the complex subjects
Pros:
The accessibility of the service to the individual freelancers is making this product quite popular.
Cons:
There is a lot of information on how to use the keywords, but there is not that many articles on how to interpret the numbers behind the keywords.
Ahrefs Response
last year
Hi Germans, Thank you for taking the time to leave a review! You can learn more about our metrics here: https://ahrefs.com/blog/ahrefs-seo-metrics/ We also have workshops on keywords research in our subscriber-only community. https://community.ahrefs.com/c/general-talk/keywords-research-workshop-replay Hope to see you there!
Alternatives Considered:
An excellent all-round SEO tool
Comments: I love using it for keyword research and content planning. I'm not a technical SEO expert so I'm not using all the features.
Pros:
How much information is available around keyword research and content analysis. You can do excellent competitor analysis here.
Cons:
There's a lot going on. For someone not familiar with technical SEO it can be overwhelming. It would be nice if there was a simpler view for someone just doing casual SEO
Ahrefs Response
2 years ago
Thank you, Catherine! Could you define what is "technical SEO" from your perspective? Each report comes with additional learning materials in the form of how-to articles filled with relevant use cases. You can check them here: https://ahrefs.com/academy/how-to-use-ahrefs/site-explorer/
It gives exact information about the link strengths of my website and my competitors.
Comments: Ahrefs is an SEO tool that can be used for keyword research, link building, competitor research, and much more. I've been using this for over a year now and it's been one of the most useful and hard-to-replace tools in my arsenal. Their new features, such as Ahrefs Content Gap and Ahrefs Site Explorer, have made keyword research and competitor research even easier.
Pros:
Ahrefs is the SEO tool I've been looking for. My favorite part is that it lets me see the best backlinks for my competitors. It also provides detailed information about their backlinks and the links' strengths, as well as an overview of the site's social media activity.
Cons:
Ahrefs is an amazing tool for backlink research, keyword research, content research, and more. The tool is mostly used by SEO agencies and digital marketers. If we are serious about digital marketing and want to stay ahead of the competition, we can't be without Ahrefs.