Ahrefs is a leading SEO tool with tried-and-true features like keyword research, rank tracking, backlink tracking, content research, and site audit capabilities. It remains one of the most powerful SEO platforms available in 2026, now enhanced with cutting-edge AI features for content optimization and brand visibility tracking.
While the pricing is premium and AI tools require additional investment, the platform's industry-leading backlink index, rich keyword database, and innovative use of AI make it a great choice for serious SEO professionals — even though there are a few caveats.
Ahrefs: Plans and pricing
Swipe to scroll horizontally
Starter | $29/month | $29/month |
Lite | $129/month | $108/month |
Standard | $249/month | $208/month |
Advanced | $449/month | $374/month |
Enterprise | $1,499/month | $1,499/month |
Ahrefs has fully revamped its pricing structure for 2026, now offering five subscription tiers plus several optional add-ons to meet diverse user needs. All plans include access to core tools like Site Explorer, Keywords Explorer, and Site Audit, with higher tiers offering increased limits, historical data access, and advanced features.
Starter Plan ($29/mo): The newest addition to Ahrefs' lineup, the Starter plan provides entry-level access to Site Explorer, Keywords Explorer, and Site Audit with 100 credits per month. This plan is ideal for individuals testing Ahrefs or running small-scale projects. Note that this plan only supports monthly renewal and doesn't allow purchasing additional credits or users.
Lite Plan ($129/mo): Ahrefs' Lite plan costs $129/mo ($108/mo if billed yearly) and remains ideal for solo marketers, freelancers, and small businesses. It supports up to 5 projects with 6 months of historical data and allows tracking of 750 keywords. Users get 500 credits per month and 100,000 crawl credits for site audits. The plan includes 1 user with the option to add up to 2 more at $40/mo each.
Standard Plan ($249/mo): The Standard plan is priced at $249/mo ($208/mo if billed yearly) and caters to freelance SEOs and marketing consultants. It supports 20 projects with 2 years of historical data and unlimited monthly credits. Keyword tracking increases to 2,000 keywords with 500,000 crawl credits per month. Additional features include Portfolios, Content Explorer, and Batch Analysis. The plan includes 1 user with the option to add up to 5 more at $60/mo each.
Advanced Plan ($449/mo): The Advanced plan costs $449/mo (or $374/mo, if billed annually) and is designed for SEO agencies and larger marketing teams. It supports 50 projects with 5 years of historical data and includes all Standard features plus Looker Studio integration and advanced Site Explorer capabilities. Keyword tracking extends to 5,000 keywords with 1.5 million crawl credits per month. The plan includes 1 user with the option to add up to 10 more at $80/mo each.
Enterprise Plan ($1,499/mo): The Enterprise plan has increased from $999/mo to $1,499/mo and requires an annual commitment. It's designed for large enterprises with custom needs, supporting up to 100 projects with unlimited historical data. The plan includes 3 users (with unlimited additional users at $100/mo each) and allows tracking of 10,000+ keywords with 5+ million crawl credits. Exclusive features include API access, SSO, audit logs, and advanced security controls.
All plans now include the new Social Media Manager feature in beta. Ahrefs also offers a free Webmaster Tools plan with limited access to Site Explorer and Site Audit, perfect for website owners who want to monitor their own sites without a full subscription.
Optional Addons:
Brand Radar AI: Starting at $199/month
AI Content Helper: $99/month
Content Kit: $299/month
Report Builder: $99/month
Project Boost Pro: $20/month per project
Project Boost Max: $200/month per project
- We've featured the best onpage SEO tools.
Ahrefs: Features
AI Tools
Ahrefs has significantly expanded its AI capabilities in 2025-2026, introducing several features that help marketers optimize content, track brand visibility in AI search results, and automate repetitive SEO tasks. These AI-powered tools represent a major evolution in how the platform addresses the changing landscape of search and content discovery.
Brand Radar AI stands as Ahrefs' most ambitious AI feature, tracking how brands appear across major AI platforms including ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, and Claude. With a database exceeding 239 million prompts, Brand Radar monitors brand mentions, analyzes share of voice against competitors, identifies topic gaps where competitors appear but you don't, and correlates AI citations with web mentions from Ahrefs' massive index.
AI Content Helper ($99/month as an add-on) transforms content optimization by analyzing your draft against top-ranking pages and identifying topical coverage gaps. Rather than focusing on keyword density, it uses AI to identify core topics for your target keyword and scores how well your content covers those topics in real-time as you write. The tool provides color-coded sentence analysis showing which subtopics are covered, word-for-word recommendations for improving topic depth, and an integrated AI chat assistant that can provide feedback, brainstorm ideas, and help refine your writing.
AI Content Grader (available only for Enterprise customers) serves as a lighter version of Content Helper, assessing topic coverage of your content versus the top three SERP competitors using a traffic light grading system. This tool is particularly useful for quickly evaluating existing content and planning updates without the full content creation workflow.
Beyond these flagship tools, Ahrefs has embedded AI throughout its platform. AI Keyword Suggestions in Keywords Explorer help brainstorm lateral keyword opportunities your competitors may have overlooked. AI Search Intent Analysis goes beyond traditional intent categories (informational, navigational, transactional, commercial) to provide granular breakdowns showing exactly what percentage of traffic goes to each specific intent type. AI Keyword Translator automatically translates keyword lists into 40+ languages while preserving local dialect nuances, making international SEO research significantly faster.
Finally, the upcoming Patches feature will use AI to automatically fix simple technical SEO issues on your website with one click, eliminating the need for developer involvement for common problems like missing meta tags or broken schema markup. The platform also includes AI detection in Site Audit, which can identify pages with AI-generated content, and an "Ask AI" feature throughout the interface that helps with specific tasks like rephrasing content, generating alternatives, or explaining data.
Site Explorer
The Site Explorer is a powerful tool for analyzing a website's SEO performance. It presents insights into organic search traffic, backlink profiles, and paid search activities. Apart from its core purpose, Site Explorer presents several advanced features that help in the analysis and strategic planning of SEO experts.
For example, if you want to analyze your competitors' best-performing web pages, you can do it under “Top Pages.” This tool goes through a specific website and lists down the top-performing pages that are getting the most traffic. Through this, you can create several strategies for targeting the right keywords and ranking along your competitor's popular articles.
Our next favorite feature is the "Outgoing Links" report which presents a list of where a site is sending its traffic through external links. This can help in identifying potential partnership opportunities for your website or even ensuring that outbound links are to reputable and relevant sites, which is super important for maintaining a site’s E-A-T (Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness).
Apart from that, Site Explorer's "Content Gap" tool lets you compare your site's keyword profile against those of your competitors. It simply identifies keywords for which your competitors rank but your site does not. This is such a useful tool that even the talented SEO experts at TechRadar use it.
The fun doesn’t end here. You also get an "Internal Backlinks" report, which analyzes the internal link structure of a website and helps in optimizing site architecture for better crawl ability and distributing link equity effectively across pages. Lastly, it also provides a "Broken Links" report, identifying both broken inbound and outbound links. Fixing these links can improve user experience and site health.
Keywords Explorer
Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer not only excels in providing detailed keyword metrics and suggestions but also offers several other features that enhance keyword research and strategy development. For instance, it includes a "Keyword Difficulty" score, which helps users quickly assess how challenging it might be to rank for a specific keyword based on the strength of the current top-ranking pages. This score is calculated using a variety of factors, including the number and quality of backlinks pointing to the top-ranking pages, making it a reliable indicator of the effort required to compete.
It further helps you understand the reader behavior with the "Clicks" data, which estimates the total number of clicks that the search results for a keyword receive. This metric is super useful as it goes beyond mere search volume to give an idea of actual traffic potential, considering factors like SERP features that might affect the click-through rate for organic listings.
Additionally, Keywords Explorer offers a "Return Rate" metric, which measures how often people search for a keyword again. This insight is valuable for identifying keywords that could bring recurring traffic to your site.
We also tested its SERP analysis features that show the presence of features like featured snippets, site links, and image packs in the search results for a keyword, providing pointers on how to optimize content to achieve these high-visibility positions. And to top it all, Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer even integrates with other tools available on the platform. This helps you transition from keyword research to site audit or content exploration, making it a great solution for anyone looking to enhance their SEO and content marketing efforts with data-driven insights.
Site Audit
Probably this feature is like that doctor who tells you what’s wrong with your website in terms of SEO. Site Audit scans your entire site to find out everything from technical SEO problems to content-related issues. Plus, it doesn't just highlight what's wrong, but it also delivers actionable tips to easily fix those issues.
To test it, we gave it a sample site and it got back to us with various helpful insights such as broken links, missing alt tags, slow-loading pages, and much more. It even categorized issues into errors, warnings, and notices based on their potential impact on our SEO, making it easier to prioritize fixes. What we loved even more is the visual representation of data, through charts and graphs, which gives a clear perspective of the current condition of the website.
The competitor analysis feature is another key component, offering the ability to track competitors' backlink growth and keyword rankings. This competitive intelligence can inform strategic decisions and help users stay ahead in their niche.
Additionally, if you want to track your competitor's backlinks and keyword ranking, you can use the Competitor Analysis feature. It gives a detailed insight into your peer's SEO strategies and helps you in staying ahead in your niche.
Rank Tracker
If you want to monitor your website's ranking for targeted keywords on the SERP, you can use the Rank Tracker feature present in Ahrefs. It's particularly useful for tracking the effectiveness of your SEO strategies and understanding how changes in your website or external factors influence your rankings.
First off, Rank Tracker can help you track your website’s ranking positions across different search engines and locations, presenting insights into how well your pages perform in various regions. This is crucial for businesses targeting a global audience or aiming to improve their local SEO. It further provides updates on ranking positions, showing whether your site’s rankings for specific keywords have improved, declined, or remained stable over time.
It further helps you level up your SEO game by offering visibility and traffic forecasts based on your ranking positions. These projections can help you estimate the potential traffic you might gain from improving your rankings for certain keywords, making it easier to prioritize SEO tasks. Not just that, you can see which keywords trigger special search results like featured snippets, local packs, or knowledge panels.
Content Explorer
Content Explorer focuses on analyzing the performance of your website’s content across different topics and niches. It guides users on content creation, outreach, and strategy decisions by explaining what content resonates with your readers and earning backlinks for your site. As you open the tool, you need to enter the website to analyze its content. Once searched, it provides many insights about the content, including the referring domains, page traffic and its value, URL Rating, organic keywords, and social shares.
What makes it even easier to understand is the graphical representation of the metrics along with the timeline to help you further understand the behavior of your website’s specific content. While we ran a scan for one of our sites, it gave us the entire data along with useful metrics. We even sorted the list in various formats like relevance, domain rating, Twitter shares, and date, which made the list even more helpful.
After doing the proper analysis, we even tried exporting the list for other team members, and Ahrefs did it seamlessly in a .CSV format, where we also had the option to choose the number of rows we wanted. Plus, if you run a website with multiple languages, you can further analyze the content based on different languages, giving a good summary of the website’s content map.
- We've featured the best rank checking tools.
Ahrefs: Interface and in-use
Like a lot of software these days, Ahrefs is used through a web browser, and we like the robust online interface, however it has no dedicated desktop program or smartphone app. The web app puts a ton of information into each page, with explanations for important features available via convenient info-bubbles. You can rely on The Dashboard to give you an overview of your projects, with each of the five core components having its own landing page. Finally, most elements provide more info via clickable links making them interactive for greater insights into the many graphs, charts, and metrics.
Ahrefs: Support
If there’s one thing that Ahrefs does best besides SEO, it might be its customer support. It offers support access 24/7 via email, which is helpful for technical issues that require longer conversations and screenshots. For quick fixes and general queries, live chat is available during business hours.
We have had multiple occasions to verify Ahrefs' support quality here at Techradar. Most recently, we asked them about their link intersecting feature, and within minutes, a team member assisted us with it.
Moreover, the platform's Help Center is packed with detailed articles, guides, and FAQs for self-service assistance, while a collection of tutorial videos and webinars provides visual learning options for users at all levels.
Ahrefs also has an active online community for peer support and hosts sessions for direct feedback to the development team. This comprehensive support ecosystem helps you navigate the platform's features, resolve issues promptly, and maximize your SEO efforts.
Ahrefs: The competition
Ahrefs provides similar functionality to other major SEO tools like SEMrush and Moz, and they all offer similar price points for basic plans. Historically Ahrefs has been the more expensive option, recent pricing updates have made it more in line with its competitors.
Carefully consider which features and data limits work best for your budget, because different products prioritize different features at different price points. SEMrush’s basic plan, for example, offers 10 times the page crawls as Ahrefs’, but no API access or historical data, unlike the latter.
- We've featured the best keyword research tools.
Ahrefs: Final verdict
If your primary focus is building a robust backlink strategy, conducting detailed site audits, and diving deep into competitive analysis, Ahrefs is a clear winner. Its extensive backlink database and detailed site audit reports offer valuable insights for improving your website's SEO performance.
Ahrefs' strength in finding your competitors' strategies through its Site Explorer and Keywords Explorer tools can give you a real competitive edge in your SEO game. And with the new AI tools, their feature-heavy toolset is more accessible than ever.
For businesses and professionals prioritizing link building and detailed analytics on backlinks, along with a strong toolset for keyword research and site audits, Ahrefs provides an equally comprehensive solution. Its user interface is designed to accommodate both seasoned SEO experts and those new to SEO, which makes it a versatile choice for many.
- Find the best online marketing tools here.
- We've featured the best content marketing tools here.
English (US) ·