Ahrefs: free tier, reports, pricing and real tasks

This guide is for people who know what SEO is and now want to use Ahrefs properly. That means freelancers deciding whether a plan pays for itself, in-house marketers who inherited an Ahrefs login, and business owners who want the free tier without paying for anything they won't open. If you're new to SEO, read SEO for beginners first; this guide assumes you know what a backlink and a keyword are.

By the end you'll be able to set up Ahrefs Free on your own site and read the numbers that matter (DR, UR, KD, traffic potential, referring domains) without being fooled by them. You'll also run five real jobs: find link prospects, find a competitor's content gap, find pages that lost traffic, research keywords for India, and turn a Site Audit into a fix list. You'll also know what each plan costs, how credits run out, and when a free tool (including ours) does the same job.

The chapters run in the order you'd meet the tool. First what it is and how to set it up, then Site Explorer, Keywords Explorer, the rest of the toolset, and Brand Radar for AI visibility. Then come the step-by-step tasks, and finally pricing, pros and cons and alternatives. There's a 10-question quiz and an FAQ at the end. Every price comes from Ahrefs' own pricing page, checked 16 October 2026.^[1] Ahrefs lists prices in US dollars only, before tax, even when you open the page from India, so we give rupee figures as estimates.

Ahrefs started as a backlink checker, and links are still what most people buy it for. It crawls the web with its own bot and stores what it finds: which pages link to which, and which pages rank for which searches. Every report in the tool is built from that data, plus estimates on top of it.

Ahrefs says its backlink index is "updated with fresh data every 15–30 minutes" and that a full refresh of the whole database takes about two months.^[2] Those are its own figures, and so are the ones below. Treat them as the vendor describing its product, not as an independent test.

The tools inside Ahrefs

The menu has grown a lot. These are the parts an SEO uses week to week, and the chapter of this guide that covers each.

There's more on the menu (GBP Monitor, Social Media Manager, Report Builder, an AI Content Helper, an API and an MCP server).^[1] We leave those out. They're either in beta, sold separately, or not why anyone picks Ahrefs.

Who it's for

• Freelancers and agencies who research competitors' links and keywords for clients every week. This is the core user, and the Standard plan's pitch on the pricing page is "Perfect for freelance SEOs and marketing consultants."^[1]
• In-house SEO and content teams who plan content from keyword data and need to see what competitors publish and earn links for.
• Site owners who want a second opinion on their own site for free. Ahrefs Free covers that at no cost.

When you don't need it

For a 20-page local site, such as a Delhi dental clinic or a Kanpur sweet shop, you don't need a paid suite. Your customers search a few dozen phrases, your competitors are the five clinics on the map, and Search Console already shows the searches you appear for. Google's Links report shows who links to you, from a sample of links.^[5] Add Ahrefs Free for a proper audit and a fuller link list on your own site, and you're covered at no cost.

Pay when one of these is true:

• You need to see a competitor's links, keywords or top pages, and the free tier only shows sites you own.^[6]
• You plan content at scale and need volumes, difficulty and traffic potential for hundreds of keywords at once.
• A client pays you enough that the plan is a small share of the fee. Our career guide gives the same advice: learn a paid suite when a job or client pays for it, not before.

Ahrefs and the rest of this path

Ahrefs and Semrush are the two big suites, and they overlap a lot. Our Semrush guide covers the other one, and Ahrefs vs Semrush compares them job by job. For your own site's real Google data, start with Google Search Console; nothing in Ahrefs replaces it.

Next, set up the free tier on your own site. It takes about 15 minutes if your site is already in Search Console.

Ahrefs Free: what the free tier gives you

Ahrefs Webmaster Tools, the old name you'll still see in older guides, is now called Ahrefs Free.^[6] It works only on sites you prove you own. Here's what you get on each verified site:

Sources: Ahrefs' Free page and its help article on free features.^[6] The toolbar row is from the help article.^[8]

Two details make the free tier more generous than it looks. Crawl credits are only used on HTML pages that return status 200, so redirects, broken URLs and images don't count.^[6] And "1,000 at once" is a view limit: Ahrefs says you can sort and filter the list to pull out the links and keywords that matter. It also says the tools and data are the same as in the paid product; paid plans add higher limits, the premium tools, and the ability to look at sites you don't own.^[6]

What you can't do for free: look at a competitor, use Keywords Explorer, or track rankings. Starter ($29 a month) is the first plan that adds those.^[9] Chapter 8 compares every plan.

Step 1: create the account and add your site

Sign up from the Ahrefs Free page. On first login, or later from the Dashboard with "+ Create", you get two ways to add a project: import from Google Search Console, or add it manually.^[10]

• Import from GSC (our pick). Connect your Google account, select all permissions, tick the sites you want, set Site Audit options, and click Import. Every site already verified in Search Console comes in verified. It also puts your Search Console performance on the Ahrefs Dashboard.
• Add manually. Enter the domain, then choose the protocol and the mode (the whole domain, one subdomain, a folder or a single URL). Ahrefs warns that the wrong mode can give "very different results", so for a normal business site pick the whole domain with subdomains.

Step 2: verify ownership

Verification is what unlocks the free tools. There are four methods:^[11]

If your site isn't in Search Console yet, fix that first; our Search Console guide walks through it. On WordPress, the HTML tag method is usually quickest after that. Paste the tag, then view the page source and search for it to confirm it's there.

One more thing to check if verification or crawling fails: Ahrefs asks you to make sure your site isn't blocking it in any way.^[11] Open yoursite.com/robots.txt and look for a group that starts "User-agent: AhrefsBot" with a Disallow line, and ask your host whether a firewall blocks crawlers.

Step 3: the settings to change on day one

1. Site Audit schedule. The project set-up asks for a schedule, the URL sources the crawl starts from, and crawl settings.^[10] A weekly crawl is plenty for a small site and stays well inside 5,000 credits. If your site runs on JavaScript, turn on the "Execute JavaScript" toggle in the crawl settings. Site Audit can run JavaScript,^[12] but the toggle is off by default.^[13]
2. Rank Tracker location (paid plans). When you add keywords, pick India and, for a local business, the city. Rank Tracker can go from country to city to ZIP code (a PIN code, for us).^[14]
3. Competitors (paid plans). The last set-up step adds competitors to Rank Tracker. Add the three to five sites you actually lose customers to, not the biggest names in your industry.
4. Web Analytics. Paste the script into your site's <head>, or use Google Tag Manager. Ahrefs detects GTM and gives you a matching snippet.^[15] It uses no cookies and stores no IP addresses with analytics data,^[15] and it shows traffic from AI assistants.^[8] It's a decent second opinion next to GA4, not a replacement for your GA4 setup.
5. Credit limits (Starter and Lite). These plans run on monthly credits (chapter 8). Workspace admins can set each user's limit in Account settings, Limits and usage. Pay-as-you-go extra credits are off by default.^[16] Leave them off until you know your monthly use.

If you bought a paid plan

Everything above still applies, and verified projects stay free to add on every plan: the limits only count unverified projects (1 on Starter,^[17] 5 on Lite, 20 on Standard, 50 on Advanced).^[1] So verify every site you own, and keep the unverified slots for clients' and competitors' sites. Verified projects also get extra allowances, including 5,000 more crawl credits each and 500 credits that can only be spent inside verified projects.^[18]

Each plan includes one user. Don't share one login across a team: Ahrefs' help centre says shared access breaks its terms and can get the account blocked, and asks you to buy extra seats instead.^[19]

With the project verified, open Site Explorer on your own domain. That's the next chapter.

Type a domain, a folder or a single URL into Site Explorer and pick the scope. The Overview gives you the headline numbers; the left menu lists the reports. On Ahrefs Free you get these reports for your own verified sites: Overview, Backlinks, Referring domains, Anchors, Organic keywords, Organic positions, Top pages, Organic competitors, the paid search reports, Best by links, Crawled pages and the internal link reports.^[8] Paid plans open the same reports for any site, and Standard adds a few more, such as Broken backlinks, Outgoing links and Linking authors.^[1]

Domain Rating (DR)

DR is the strength of a whole site's backlink profile compared with every other site in Ahrefs' database, on a 0 to 100 scale.^[20] Two details explain most of the confusion around it:

• Links are shared out. A linking domain splits its rating equally among all the domains it links to. So a DR 10 site that links to three sites can move your DR more than a DR 80 site that links to a million.
• It's relative. When big sites gain links, everyone else gets pushed down the scale. Your DR can drop without you losing a single link.

Ahrefs itself says you can't call a DR of 30, 50 or 70 "good" in absolute terms; it's good if it's comparable to similar sites.^[20] We'd go further. DR isn't a Google metric, and as Guide 1's myths chapter explains, no third-party authority score is the number Google uses. Use DR to compare a few sites in the same niche and to shortlist link prospects. Never use it as a client's KPI, and never buy a link because of it.

URL Rating (UR)

UR is the same idea for a single page: the strength of that page's link profile, 0 to 100.^[21] It counts internal and external links, respects nofollow, and follows the basic PageRank principles. The scale is logarithmic, so going from UR 20 to 30 is much easier than from 70 to 80. If you put a domain into Site Explorer, the UR you see belongs to the homepage only.

Ahrefs says UR tracks Google rankings better than DR does.^[20] That makes sense: Google ranks pages, not domains. When you compare your page with the pages above it, look at UR and referring domains to that page, not DR.

Backlinks and referring domains

A backlink is one link from another site. A referring domain is a site that links to you at least once.^[22] Ten links from one newspaper count as ten backlinks but one referring domain. Watch referring domains. Backlink totals jump around with sitewide links in footers and sidebars, and they tell you little.

Ahrefs' own research, cited in its help centre, found that the vast majority of pages without any referring domains get no traffic from Google. More referring domains went with more search traffic.^[22] That's a vendor study showing a correlation, not proof that links cause traffic. Our link building chapter covers which links are worth earning.

The reports you'll use most:

• Referring domains: who links to the site, sortable by DR and traffic. Start every link review here.
• Backlinks: each link, with anchor text and type (dofollow, nofollow, UGC, sponsored). Switch on "one link per domain" to cut the noise; it costs one extra credit on credit-based plans.^[23]
• Best by links: the site's pages ordered by links. On a competitor this is a list of content that earns links.
• Anchors: the words other sites use to link. A natural profile is mostly brand names and URLs. A profile full of exact-match anchors like "best dentist in Delhi" is a warning sign.

Organic keywords and organic traffic

An organic keyword is a search where the site shows up in Google's results.^[24] Ahrefs fills this report itself, from the keywords in its database. Three limits matter:

• It undercounts. Ahrefs says the number is almost always smaller than the real one, because its database doesn't hold every search.^[24]
• It's desktop data, by country. The Organic keywords report shows desktop rankings only, and locations only at country level.^[25] A local business cares about phone searches in one city. For that, you need Rank Tracker (chapter 5) or Search Console.
• Positions update at different speeds. Popular keywords are rechecked often, sometimes several times a day; low-volume ones as rarely as once in one or two months.^[26]

Organic traffic is built on top of that: for each keyword, Ahrefs takes the site's position, the search volume and its estimated click rate for that position, and adds it all up.^[7] Ahrefs says to treat it as "precisely that: estimations", and that it works best for comparison. India matters here too. Ahrefs' traffic index covers about 30 million keywords for India against 140 million for the United States,^[3] so estimates for Indian sites rest on a smaller sample.

Traffic value is the cost of that estimated traffic if you bought it through Google Ads, worked out from each keyword's CPC.^[27] It's a quick way to show a client that their "boring" service pages bring the valuable visits. It isn't revenue.

Top pages and organic competitors

Top pages lists a site's pages in order of the estimated organic traffic they bring.^[28] On a competitor, it's the quickest view of what's working for them. Since a 2020 update it has also had a comparison mode: pick a previous month or year and you see traffic, keyword and position changes for each page.^[29] Chapter 7 uses this to find pages that lost traffic.

Organic competitors lists sites that rank for many of the same keywords. Expect surprises: for an Indian coaching centre, the "competitors" can turn out to be education portals and news sites, not the other institute on your street. Those portals are worth studying for content ideas, but they aren't who you pitch against.

What each number tells you, and what to do

Next: Keywords Explorer, where the same data is turned around so you start from a search instead of a site.

Keywords Explorer starts on the Starter plan; the free tier doesn't include it.^[9] Type one or more seed keywords, pick a country and a search engine, and you get an Overview of each keyword plus reports full of ideas. Our keyword research chapter explains the method (intent, traffic potential, difficulty and business potential). This chapter is about reading Ahrefs' version of those numbers.

Set the country to India, every time

Volumes, KD and the results Ahrefs reads are all per country. Ahrefs covers 217 locations, and its India keyword database holds about 1.4 billion keywords, fourth in its list after the US, Brazil and the UK.^[3] If you research in the default United States database, you'll plan content around American searches.

Indian searches mix English with Hindi and other languages, often typed in Latin script. How India searches covers why that splits demand across many spellings. In Ahrefs, that means checking the variants one by one, or as a batch: you can paste up to 10,000 keywords at once, and on credit-based plans that costs a single credit.^[23]

Search volume

Volume is how many times a month, on average over the last 12 months, people in the chosen country search the keyword.^[26] Hover over the trend chart to see single months, which matters for anything seasonal (sweets before Diwali, coaching before exam season).

Every tool's volume is an estimate. Ahrefs builds its numbers from Google Keyword Planner, Google Trends data and other third-party sources.^[30] In its own study, comparing estimates with Search Console impressions, Ahrefs found its volumes roughly accurate for 60% of the keywords studied, against 45% for Keyword Planner. That's a vendor testing itself, so read it as "directionally accurate", which is how Ahrefs describes it. Volume and CPC are refreshed at least once a month.^[26]

Keyword Difficulty (KD)

KD estimates how hard it is to reach Google's top 10 for a keyword, from 0 to 100. Ahrefs calculates it from the number of referring domains pointing at the current top 10 organic results, and it ignores on-page factors.^[31] So KD is a link-difficulty score. It can't see that the top results are thin, out of date, or the wrong format for the search.

• Use it, as Ahrefs suggests, as a "first filter" to drop keywords that are out of reach and to order the rest.
• A grey KD is a cached score: the results haven't been rechecked for 20 days or more.^[31] For a keyword you're about to write for, refresh it. On paid plans the Update button uses your monthly SERP updates.
• Look at the actual results before you trust a low KD. When the top 10 for a local search is full of directories such as Justdial, KD reflects the directories' links. It can read "hard" for a search where a good local page with reviews might still break in.

Traffic potential and parent topic

These two are why many people pick Ahrefs over cheaper keyword tools.

Parent topic answers "can I rank for this keyword with a broader page?" Ahrefs takes the page ranking first for your keyword and finds the search that sends that page the most traffic. That search is the parent topic.^[32] If "jee coaching fees in pune" has the parent topic "jee coaching in pune", Google is happy to answer both with one page. Write one strong page, not two thin ones.

Traffic potential is the estimated organic traffic of the page currently ranking first for the parent topic.^[33] It's usually bigger than the keyword's own volume, because a top page ranks for hundreds of related searches. Ahrefs shows it only for the parent topic, not for every keyword in a list.

Two limits. Only keywords whose results Ahrefs updates regularly have a parent topic. And grouping a list by parent topic (keyword clusters) needs the Standard plan or higher.^[32] On Lite or Starter you can still add the Parent topic column and sort by it.

The ideas reports

Ahrefs says Keywords Explorer has six report types for finding ideas.^[34] Its help centre groups them into three reports: Matching terms (with Terms match, Phrase match and a Questions toggle), Related terms (Also rank for and Also talk about) and Search suggestions.^[35] The free Keyword Generator on ahrefs.com uses its own labels, such as "Having same terms".^[36] For a local business, the Questions toggle is the useful one: it's a ready list of FAQ and blog topics. "Also rank for" shows what the top pages rank for, which is often the best guide to what a page should cover.

Search intent labels, AI keyword suggestions and translations are on Standard and above.^[1] You can judge intent yourself by looking at the results, as our keyword chapter shows.

Content Gap: keywords your competitors have and you don't

Content Gap sits under Competitive Analysis. Choose the Keywords option, enter your domain (or one URL with "Exact URL"), add up to 10 competitors, and click "Show keyword opportunities".^[37] You get the keywords they rank for that you don't, with filters for country, KD, traffic and positions. Competitive Analysis needs Lite or higher; Starter doesn't include it.^[9] Chapter 7 runs a full Content Gap for a D2C brand.

Next: the tools that look after your own site, and the one that searches everyone else's content.

Site Audit

Site Audit crawls your pages and flags technical and on-page problems: slow pages and Core Web Vitals, titles and meta descriptions, H1s, duplicates, indexability, redirects, links, images, JavaScript and CSS, robots.txt, sitemaps, structured data, localization (hreflang) and more. Ahrefs counts 170+ issues, grouped as errors, warnings and notices, each with fixing instructions.^[12] It can execute JavaScript, pulls Chrome UX Report and Lighthouse speed data, and suggests internal links. You can export every issue as a CSV or ZIP to hand to a developer.

How much it crawls depends on the plan. Only internal HTML pages that return 200 use crawl credits.^[18]

Sources: pricing page for paid plans,^[1] Ahrefs Free page for the free tier.^[6] Verified projects get their own 5,000 credits on every plan, on top of these.

How we'd read a Site Audit:

1. Start with errors that affect indexing: 4xx pages that still have internal links, noindex on pages that should rank, broken redirects, canonicals pointing at the wrong URL.
2. Then the issues that touch many pages at once, usually a template problem (missing H1 on every product page, a duplicate title pattern). One theme fix clears hundreds of rows.
3. Leave most notices. They're information, not problems.

Don't chase a Health Score of 100. It's Ahrefs' summary, not Google's, and the last few points are often notices that make no difference to rankings. Our full SEO audit chapter covers the order of work in detail, and our own tools check single URLs fast when you want to confirm a fix:

It checks up to 10 URLs at once and shows the full redirect chain and response headers, so you can confirm a redirect or 404 fix without waiting for the next crawl.

Rank Tracker

Rank Tracker checks where your pages rank for a keyword list you choose. It isn't on the free tier. Starter tracks 50 keywords, Lite 750, Standard 2,000 and Advanced 5,000.^[17] The pricing page lists those three paid tiers too.^[1]

• Updates are weekly on every plan by default.^[38] We think that's fine for SEO; in our view, daily checks mostly show Google's normal day-to-day wobble.
• Location goes down to a city or ZIP code, on mobile and desktop.^[14] This is the fix for Site Explorer's desktop-only, country-level view (chapter 3).
• It records 19 SERP features, including AI Overviews, local packs and People also ask, so you can see when an AI Overview appears above your result.
• Competitors: compare with up to 10, with share of voice and position groups (1-3, 4-10, 11-20 and so on).
• History: you can import past rankings from Site Explorer when you add keywords. Those come from desktop data in your main location only.^[25]

Rank Tracker and Search Console answer different questions. Search Console's average position is an average across every search you appeared for. A tracker gives one position, for one keyword, in one place, once a week. Our measuring chapter explains how to use both without mixing them up.

Content Explorer

Content Explorer is a search engine for marketers: type a topic, and it searches Ahrefs' content index of about 22.6 billion pages, with filters for traffic, Domain Rating, referring domains, language, author, word count, publication date and page status.^[4] It's on Standard and above, not Lite.^[1]

It has two modes. All pages searches the whole index and suits content ideas and link prospects. News searches a list of approved news sites and adds a pages-over-time chart, which suits PR and tracking brand mentions.^[39]

Three jobs it does well:

• Unlinked mentions. Search your brand name, then check which pages mention you without linking. A polite email asking for a link is an easier conversation than cold outreach, because they already know you.
• Low-competition topics. Filter for pages with good organic traffic and few referring domains. Those topics can rank without many links.
• Broken link building by topic. Ahrefs keeps an index of 404 pages, so you can find dead pages in your niche that still have links, then offer your page as the replacement.^[4]

Next: Brand Radar, Ahrefs' tool for AI answers, and what it costs.

Brand Radar is Ahrefs' answer to "does ChatGPT recommend us?" It runs prompts through AI platforms, stores the answers, and counts which brands and pages appear. Our GEO guide's measuring chapter sets out the free ways to measure AI visibility; this chapter covers what Ahrefs adds and what it charges.

What it covers

The platforms are Google AI Overviews and AI Mode, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Copilot. Grok is listed, but Ahrefs says it currently can't collect new Grok data. Claude can be tracked with custom prompts only, and each Claude check uses 8 checks.^[40] Brand Radar also reports search demand, web mentions, and, in beta, YouTube, Reddit and TikTok.

It works in two ways:

Sources: Brand Radar page and help centre.^[41] The per-platform and all-platform prices are from the help article.^[40]

The plan allowance is counted in checks. One check is one prompt, run once, on one AI platform, in one location. Lite includes 150 checks a month, Standard 300, Advanced 600.^[42] Five prompts checked daily on one platform use 150 checks, so Lite's allowance is used up by that. Check weekly instead of daily and the same allowance covers more prompts. Starter gets no custom prompts.

If you need more, there are prompt packages: Basic at $50 a month for 2,500 checks, Growth at $100 for 7,000, and Scale at $250 for 25,000. Extra checks cost 2, 1.5 and 1 US cent each.^[1]

The metrics, and how much to trust them

Brand Radar reports four main numbers: mentions (your brand named in the answer text), citations (a link to your pages), AI share of voice (your share of mentions and citations against competitors within a topic set), and estimated impressions.^[41]

The index prompts aren't real chats people typed. Ahrefs takes keywords from its database, expands them into questions using People also ask and "semantic fanout", runs them on each platform, and re-tests question sets monthly on a 90-day window.^[41] The prompts run without a logged-in user or past context. Real users, with chat history and personal settings, may see different answers.^[40]

The demand figure is modelled too. Since 31 August 2026, "AI adjusted volume" has been the Google search volume of the prompt's parent keyword multiplied by a ratio for each platform, which Ahrefs derives from AI-referred traffic across sites it measures.^[43] No AI company publishes prompt volumes. These are Ahrefs' estimates, as our GEO guide warns about all such numbers.

In Ahrefs' own worked example, a ChatGPT prompt shows a volume of 150 because its parent keyword had 1,296 Google searches in a month, times 0.115.^[43] That's useful for ranking prompts against each other. It isn't a count of anything.

Who should pay for it

Ahrefs says the index "may have limited coverage for brands with little or no search volume".^[41] That describes most Indian small businesses. A Kanpur sweet shop or a Delhi dental clinic is likely to find little about itself there, and $199 a month (about ₹19,104) would buy a mostly empty report.

Our order:

1. Free first. Search Console's generative AI report, Bing's AI Performance report, AI referrals in GA4, and a monthly manual prompt log, all set out in our GEO guide. Ahrefs' Web Analytics also shows traffic from AI assistants free, and its Bot Analytics shows AI crawlers, free while in beta.^[41]
2. The free AI Visibility Checker on ahrefs.com gives a limited preview: total AI mentions, mentions by platform, and the top 5 topics, cited domains and cited pages for a brand.^[44] Run it once for your brand and two competitors.
3. If you already pay for Lite, use the included custom prompts on your five most important buyer questions, checked weekly across several platforms.
4. Buy the index only for a brand with real search demand, or for a client paying for monthly AI visibility reporting.

Before you measure anything, check that AI crawlers can reach your site. Our checker tests GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and more than 100 other bots against your robots.txt. A site that blocks the search crawlers won't be cited, and no tracker will tell you why.

Next: five real jobs, step by step.

The businesses below are examples, and the steps use Ahrefs' menu names from its help centre. Menus change, so if a label has moved, search the help centre for the report name.

1. Find link prospects for a Delhi dental clinic

Sites that link to two or three of your competitors are the most likely to link to you: they already cover your topic. Link Intersect finds them. It's under Competitive Analysis and is on Lite and every higher plan,^[1] so not on Starter.^[9]

Our link building chapter covers what to send and what gets you penalised. When you write the outreach email and want to show a site owner the exact link you're suggesting, our Hyperlink Generator makes the HTML for them.

2. Run a content gap for a D2C brand

Say you sell handmade block-print kurtas online from Jaipur. Three competing D2C brands get far more search traffic than you. Content Gap shows the searches they rank for and you don't.

3. Find the pages that lost traffic

For your own site, Search Console has the real clicks, so start there. Ahrefs adds the "why": which keywords dropped and who took the spot. This works on Ahrefs Free for a verified site.

For a competitor, the same Top pages comparison tells you which of their pages are slipping, which can be the topics worth attacking now. On Standard and above, Site Explorer also has a Calendar view of day-by-day changes.^[1]

4. Keyword research for a Pune coaching centre

A JEE and NEET coaching centre in Pune wants a page for each course and a few blog posts parents and students will actually search for.

When the page is written, check that the main phrase and its variants appear naturally, without stuffing. Our free checker counts it for you:

5. Turn a Site Audit into a fix list for a Kanpur sweet shop

A 40-page WordPress site on shared hosting, with product pages for kaju katli, laddoos and gift boxes. Everything here is free on a verified site.

Want a second opinion without any account? Our Free Website Audit runs 50+ checks across 25 pages, covering SEO, speed, security and AI visibility, and gives a points-ranked action plan and a PDF.

The last chapter puts prices on all of this, so you can see which plan these jobs need.

The plans, checked 16 October 2026

Ahrefs' pricing page shows prices in US dollars only. We opened it from India and saw no rupee prices and no mention of tax.^[1] Ahrefs' help centre fills the gap: listed prices don't include tax, India is one of the countries where it charges GST, and a business that gives its GST number can ask for that tax back.^[47] You can also choose to pay in rupees, at an exchange rate Ahrefs sets.^[48] The rupee column below is our estimate at ₹96 to the dollar, the X-Rates monthly average for 1 to 16 October 2026.^[49] Your card statement will differ with your bank's rate and any foreign transaction fee.

Sources: pricing page for Lite to Enterprise; Starter's limits are from Ahrefs' help article on the plan.^[17] Every plan includes one user; Enterprise starts from three. Paying yearly saves "up to 17%", according to the pricing page.^[1]

What changes as you move up, apart from the numbers:

• Starter adds Keywords Explorer, Rank Tracker and a look at any website in Site Explorer, within 200 credits.^[9] No exports, 250 rows per report (25 in Top pages), no extra users, and it renews monthly only.^[17]
• Lite adds Competitive Analysis (Content Gap and Link Intersect), exports of 500,000 rows a month, 2,500 rows per report, alerts, 5 custom AI prompts, and API and MCP access.^[9]
• Standard removes the credit limit and adds Content Explorer, Portfolios, keyword clusters, search intents, Broken backlinks and the Calendar view.^[1]
• Advanced adds a Looker Studio integration, more projects, crawl credits and history.

How credits work (Starter and Lite)

Credits are the part people get wrong. On Starter and Lite, every tool except Site Audit, Rank Tracker and Brand Radar uses them.^[23]

• 1 credit each time you open a report, including all its charts.
• 1 more each time you apply filters and click "Show results", change dates, open the SERP or position history, switch modes such as "one link per domain", or add competitors to a chart.
• Free: reopening the same report with the same settings within 30 minutes, moving between pages of results, and sorting.
• Bulk is cheap: up to 10,000 keywords in Keywords Explorer, or 200 URLs in Batch Analysis, for 1 credit.

Starter has 200 credits a month and you can't buy more.^[16] On Lite, each user is charged by how much they use. A user who uses 0 to 5 credits in a month is free, 6 to 100 is a "Casual" user at $20 a month, and above that a "Power" user at $40. The plan includes one Power user with 1,000 credits. Extra credits, if you switch on pay-as-you-go, cost $50 per 500. Ahrefs says only 20% of its paid users needed extra credits.

What does 1,000 credits feel like? About 45 a working day. A competitor review that opens ten reports and filters each twice uses about 30. That's fine for one person working a few clients. Two people sharing research every day on Lite is when Standard's unlimited use starts to make sense, at $120 a month more.

Add-ons

Sources: pricing page,^[1] and the Brand Radar help article for the per-platform prices.^[40]

Trials, refunds and payment

Ahrefs' FAQ on its pricing page is blunt: "We never run discounts." Asked about free trials, it points you to Ahrefs Free instead. It doesn't issue refunds in general; on a monthly plan you can ask for one if you haven't used the service, and it may decline if it sees "material activity". It accepts Visa, Mastercard, American Express and UnionPay cards, and wire transfers for Enterprise. There's no contract or set-up fee, and when you cancel you keep access until the period ends, then drop to Ahrefs Free.^[1]

So test everything you can on Ahrefs Free and the free tools before you pay, and start on a monthly plan.

The free tools on ahrefs.com

Separate from Ahrefs Free, the site has free tools that work without verification.^[50] They're deliberately limited, but fine for a quick look:

• Backlink Checker: the top 20 backlinks to any site or page.
• Website Authority Checker: any site's DR.
• Keyword Generator (Google, Bing, YouTube, Amazon) and Keyword Difficulty Checker.
• SERP Checker: the top 10 for any keyword in any country. Website Traffic Checker: estimated search traffic for a site or page.
• Broken Link Checker, Keyword Rank Checker, XML Sitemap Generator and Website Change Monitor.
• AI Visibility Checker, plus AI Overviews and AI Mode trackers.
• SEO Toolbar for Chrome and Firefox.

Our intermediate guide already sends readers to the free Backlink Checker for broken link building, until our own backlink tool is ready.

Pros and cons

Alternatives, starting with ours

Our free tools cover the site-health side of Ahrefs without an account. They don't do backlinks or search volumes; for those, use the free options from Google and Bing below, or a paid suite.

The closest paid rival is Semrush. Its SEO plan is $139 a month (about ₹13,344), and it has a free plan with 10 reports a day.^[53] Our Semrush guide covers it, and Ahrefs vs Semrush compares the two job by job. For the cheaper suites, see our guides to SE Ranking, Moz Pro, Mangools and Ubersuggest. For a full list of free options, see Best free SEO tools.

Which one when

If you'd rather hand the work over, our SEO service runs this research for you, and you can get a quote in a couple of minutes. Otherwise, start with Ahrefs Free on your own site this week and run the Site Audit in chapter 7.

Test yourself

Ten questions on the whole guide. Pick an answer, check it, and see your score at the end.

Frequently asked questions

Sources