--- title: "Ahrefs Reviews, Pros and Cons - 2026 Software Advice" description: "Reviews of Ahrefs. Learn how real users rate this software's ease-of-use, functionality, overall quality and customer support. Talk to our advisors to see if Ahrefs is a good fit for you!" source_url: "https://www.softwareadvice.com/marketing/ahrefs-profile/reviews/" page_type: "reviews" language: "en" --- 1 million+ businesses helped. Get advice Get Free Advice [Home](https://www.softwareadvice.com/) / [SEO Software](https://www.softwareadvice.com/marketing/seo-platform-comparison/) / [Ahrefs](https://www.softwareadvice.com/marketing/ahrefs-profile/) / Ahrefs Reviews Software Advice offers objective insights based on verified user reviews and independent product and market research. When our advisors match you to a software provider, we may earn a referral fee. [Overview](https://www.softwareadvice.com/marketing/ahrefs-profile/) Reviews [Alternatives](https://www.softwareadvice.com/marketing/ahrefs-profile/alternatives/) # Ahrefs User Reviews ## Reviews summary - Overall rating: 4.7/5 - Total reviews: 585 ### Secondary ratings - Ease of use: 4.5/5 - Customer support: 4.5/5 - Value for money: 4.2/5 - Functionality: 4.7/5 ### Rating distribution - 5 stars: 447 reviews (76%) - 4 stars: 119 reviews (20%) - 3 stars: 13 reviews (2%) - 2 stars: 1 reviews (0%) - 1 star: 5 reviews (1%) ### Most mentioned pros - Ahrefs is a solid tool that provided us with good rank tracking, results, and strategic advice - The graphics, the colors, and the visual layout make understanding a lot of data feel effortless. - It provides invaluable insights into keywords, search volume and other metrics concerning both my own websites as well as those of my competitors. ### Most mentioned cons - Overall the traffic estimates Ahrefs show are extremely misleading my opinion is that marketing agencies should no longer use this tool as a point of reference about traffic levels on a website. - They quit tracking niche keywords in like 2023, probably because of the server cost. - The biggest concern is value for money, especially for freelancers and small teams, because the pricing is high. ## Ahrefs customer reviews Showing reviews 1-25 of 585 (page 1). ### Powerful SEO Tool - Overall rating: 5/5 - Reviewer: Roman G. - Verified reviewer: Yes - Industry: Marketing and Advertising - Company size: 11-50 employees - Product usage: Used daily for less than 2 years - Reviewed: July 2025 - Review source details: This review was submitted organically. No incentive was offered Ahrefs has been invaluable for tracking SEO performance and finding keyword opportunities, making it a must-have for digital marketing. #### Ratings breakdown - Ease of use: 5/5 - Value for money: 5/5 - Customer support: 5/5 - Functionality: 5/5 #### Pros Comprehensive SEO tools, accurate keyword data, and easy-to-use core interface. Great product marketing too! #### Cons Pricing might be a bit too high for small businesses (especially new GEO tools), and some features have a learning curve. --- ### Great but could be a tad bit more affordable. - Overall rating: 4/5 - Reviewer: Safia M. - Verified reviewer: Yes - Industry: Marketing and Advertising - Company size: 2-10 employees - Product usage: Used weekly for less than 2 years - Reviewed: January 2025 - Review source details: This reviewer was invited by us to submit an honest review and offered a nominal incentive as a thank you. My experience has be good. I like how responseive support is and to be honest Ahref is easily in the Top 3 SEO tools of all time. #### Ratings breakdown - Ease of use: 4/5 - Value for money: 3/5 - Customer support: 4/5 - Functionality: 4/5 #### Pros The weekly Youtube trainings and Q and A's that they hold. I've honestly learned how to use the tool via those. Also, has the best backlink tracking tool in the industry. #### Cons If you compare it to other industry leading tools, they seem to vastly under report the amount of traffic a keyword receives. #### Reasons for switching to Ahrefs SEMRush, although an amazing tool, it lacked in backlink analysis. #### Vendor response Hi Safia, Thanks for taking the time to leave your thoughts! We are so happy to hear you've been joining in our YouTube webinars and are getting a lot of insights from them. Our Product Marketing team will be thrilled! We'll see you at the next one! :-) Replied February 2025 --- ### The best of its kind, but costly. - Overall rating: 5/5 - Reviewer: Sean A. - Verified reviewer: Yes - Industry: Marketing and Advertising - Company size: Self-Employed - Product usage: Used daily for less than 6 months - Reviewed: June 2020 - Review source details: This reviewer was invited by us to submit an honest review and offered a nominal incentive as a thank you. Ahrefs helped me plan out content with low competition that would actually be seen. However, due to the price I wasn't able to afford it for too long. #### Ratings breakdown - Ease of use: 5/5 - Value for money: 3/5 - Customer support: 5/5 - Functionality: 5/5 #### Pros Ahrefs allows you to do so much to help SEO campaigns. You can see what articles in your niche have high search volume and low competition so you can help your blog/website get found, you can see what your competitors are ranking for and use filters like search volume and competition to see which you can use to plan similar content and get more search traffic, and so much more. #### Cons It is pricy. It is not easily accessible to the average person starting a website, however, if you have a decent budget for SEO, Ahrefs is one of the best investments you can make. #### Reasons for switching to Ahrefs Ahrefs just works better for me. --- ### Best Keyword Research Tool - Overall rating: 5/5 - Reviewer: Vikash M. - Verified reviewer: Yes - Industry: Marketing and Advertising - Company size: 2-10 employees - Product usage: Used daily for less than 6 months - Reviewed: October 2024 - Review source details: This review was submitted organically. No incentive was offered THe Best seo tool i have ever used, their features like website keywords checker, keyword explorer make me find my relavant keywords easily without spending so much time on the internet searching #### Ratings breakdown - Ease of use: 5/5 - Value for money: 5/5 - Customer support: 4/5 - Functionality: 5/5 #### Pros Their Keyword explorer feature is best for me, I am able to find the best keywords without spending so much time on Google keyword planner or search engines. #### Cons They Do no provide Wbesite traffic outside search engine #### Reasons for switching to Ahrefs Semrush Limited me on keyword research and ahrefs solved it for me #### Vendor response Hi Vikash, Thanks so much for taking the time to leave us a review! We're so happy to hear you think we're the best SEO tool. As we continue to evolve, we hope to have some amazing new features for you to take your digital marketing to the next level. Thanks again! Replied November 2024 --- ### If you can afford this tool, do not spare the money - Overall rating: 5/5 - Reviewer: Paweł J. - Verified reviewer: Yes - Industry: Marketing and Advertising - Company size: Self-Employed - Product usage: Used daily for more than 2 years - Reviewed: July 2023 - Review source details: This review was submitted organically. No incentive was offered 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. #### Ratings breakdown - Ease of use: 5/5 - Value for money: 4/5 - Customer support: 5/5 - Functionality: 5/5 #### 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. #### Reasons for switching to Ahrefs I couldn't understand the metrics of backlinks, and i felt that database isn't enough big. #### Vendor response 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/ Replied July 2023 --- ### The best tool for Backlinking and one of the best SEO tools of all the times - Overall rating: 5/5 - Reviewer: Marco Genaro P. - Verified reviewer: Yes - Industry: Marketing and Advertising - Company size: 2-10 employees - Product usage: Used daily for less than 2 years - Reviewed: December 2023 - Review source details: This review was submitted organically. No incentive was offered Is definitely one of the big SEO tools in the market. Although it is pricy, Ahrefs is definitely a must if you're into backlinking campaings. They have unique features that are very useful to perform outreach campaigns. #### Ratings breakdown - Ease of use: 4/5 - Value for money: 4/5 - Functionality: 5/5 #### Pros Although I'm a big fan of the audits and traffic estimations, which are very useful for competitor analysis, what I like the most about Ahrefs are their features related to backlinking. Many of these features provide all the information you need to create various types of outreach campaigns and advance your SEO techniques, such as detecting backlinks pointing to 404 pages or identifying unlinked mentions. #### Cons I found it a bit expensive. That's probably why is only for SEO Pros. Also, it's a bit hard to use at the very beginning. #### Reasons for choosing Ahrefs Technically, I didn't choose Ahrefs over Semrush. I took both. I think they're very valuable for those working actively on SEO. #### Reasons for switching to Ahrefs I was curious and I wanted to try Ahrefs too. #### Vendor response Hi Marco, Thanks for taking the time to leave us a review! We're big fans of our backlink capabilities, and we're glad to hear you are, too! We'd love more insight into what you found difficult to use at the beginning. We have onboarding webinars and workshops for our customers, and we'd like to know how we can improve these in the future. :) Again, thanks for the kind words, and thanks for choosing Ahrefs! Replied December 2023 --- ### Once a great tool, now a charge oriented garbage - Overall rating: 1/5 - Reviewer: Narek S. - Verified reviewer: Yes - Industry: Design - Company size: 51-200 employees - Product usage: Used weekly for more than 2 years - Reviewed: April 2024 - Review source details: This review was submitted organically. No incentive was offered #### Ratings breakdown - Ease of use: 1/5 - Value for money: 1/5 - Customer support: 1/5 - Functionality: 2/5 #### Pros Good competitor keyword analysis tools, good quality site health monitoring #### Cons Once one of the greatest SEO tools, it became a tool that confused customers with complicated pricing schemes and tried to charge as much as possible. We have been AHREFS customers for almost five years, and their recent changes have made us wonder how far this company can go in terms of customer service, customer respect, and pricing schemes. The new scheme is so complicated that your credit card can suddenly charge $1000s without your knowledge. When we contacted to customer support, they told us that beside the $2000 annual fee we pay, we also need to pay $3500 for additional keyword tracking (which we never signed up for, it was migrated from our old account, where usage was free) without our knowing. We decided to stop partnering with ahrefs due its complicated pricing model which scams users and surprisingly charges you and we're moving to different platform now. Usage is not recommended due to the high scam and confusion rate. Recommendation from a company with over 1 million organic monthly traffic and 22 million visitors. #### Reasons for choosing Ahrefs We are switching back to Semrush, as Ahrefs currently is more about manipulating and charging you, rather than providing a good service. #### Vendor response Hi Narek, Thanks for taking the time to leave a review. Sincere apologies for any confusion caused by migrating your subscription to a new plan. Looking over your conversation with support, it sounds like this was an unfortunate misunderstanding that has since been resolved. Just to clarify, you were previously on an Advanced subscription, which allowed 5,000 tracked terms in Rank Tracker. When you switched to a Standard plan in 2022, those limits were reduced to 2,000. Please don't hesitate to contact customer support again in the future if you need further clarification on plan limits. Thank you. Replied April 2024 --- ### Ahrefs is the best but recent pricing updates make it hard to continue justifying - Overall rating: 5/5 - Reviewer: Maddy O. - Verified reviewer: Yes - Industry: Writing and Editing - Company size: 2-10 employees - Product usage: Used daily for more than 2 years - Reviewed: January 2023 - Review source details: This reviewer was invited by us to submit an honest review and offered a nominal incentive as a thank you. Overall, I think it's a robust tool. I think they do a great job on their blog and other educational material that shows people how to use the tool to the fullest. Writing this review in anticipation of a recession (where clients have already started churning and cutting budget), I can no longer afford this tool — especially because there's an alternative that has all the same functionality and results my company needs, for about a third of the price I'm paying now. #### Ratings breakdown - Ease of use: 4/5 - Value for money: 3/5 - Customer support: 4/5 - Functionality: 4/5 #### Pros I love everything about Ahrefs except their new pricing and plans. We primarily use the keyword research functionality and other functionality associated with it (like competitor research via content gap analysis). I also love their website audit tool and their backlink tracker. Their rank tracker is also great. There is no question that this is one of the best in the industry for all-in-one SEO needs. #### Cons Recent plan changes have made Ahrefs almost 3x more expensive for my company to use for the same features we've previously used it for. That's my biggest complaint, that the price hike wasn't gradual or sustainable. We're in the process of switching over to Semrush, whose plans are a lot more reasonable. I've always personally considered Semrush as being better for paid search and Ahrefs as better for organic search (especially when it comes to keyword research and backlink tracking) but Semrush has made many strides since I've last been in a position to compare the two and I feel confident that Semrush can handle our most important keyword research needs and the other all-in-one SEO features I mentioned in terms of what I like about Ahrefs. #### Reasons for choosing Ahrefs At the time, the pricing and overall value were optimal. That's no longer the case as I write this review. #### Vendor response We're sorry to see you disappointed, Maddy :( To bring some context, the pricing change was not made this year, but in March 2022. We took this decision to counter group buyers. But also to maintain the costs of our infrastructure (collecting, processing, and storing data for 7+ years waiting for you to request it) & continue building new tools and features. The change might come off as abrupt but we've gone to great lengths to communicate it on as many channels as possible (pricing page and billing page, welcome message, credit counter next to your account's name, and a dedicated area under Account Settings called Limits & Usage > Set limits). Grandfathered users can still keep their legacy subscriptions, provided they don't interrupt them. If you've upgraded by mistake just recently and feel that you've been wronged, please reach out to our support and seek help. If you still decide to go with Semrush, we respect that decision. However, please note that while they did make some improvements, they're still behind us in terms of infrastructure and the features you're looking after. Here are some unique features that you can find only in Ahrefs: KEYWORD RESEARCH - Traffic Potential - Parent Topic - History & ad charts - SERP comparison - 9 different keyword ideas reports BACKLINKS - Detailed statuses to new/lost backlinks - Internal backlinks report - Comparison mode SEO AUDIT - Segmentation - Customizable issue statuses - Internal link opportunities report - HTML code & text comparison These are but just a few, I didn't touch upon the infrastructure that makes us the most beloved toolset by the SEO community. Our support team (or myself) can provide more info on all these features should you need further help! Replied January 2023 --- ### Powerful SEO tools that I have ever used - Overall rating: 4/5 - Reviewer: Dedit Hery S. - Verified reviewer: Yes - Industry: Computer Software - Company size: 2-10 employees - Product usage: Used weekly for less than 6 months - Reviewed: April 2026 - Review source details: This review was submitted organically. No incentive was offered Ahrefs helps me analyze SEO problems on my website. I use free SEO analysis tools, and it's amazing that they provide feedback and highlight what should be improved. The tool also gives me keyword suggestions that people also search for. This is very useful. I also love Keyword Researcher. We just input a keyword, and then Ahrefs will give more related keywords, including their scores. So we can decide which keyword we will use on our website, easily. #### Ratings breakdown - Ease of use: 5/5 - Value for money: 5/5 - Customer support: 5/5 - Functionality: 5/5 #### Pros I really like all the free tools. Analyze and highlight a website's SEO issues, including keyword research and suggestions, a keyword generator, and more. Really like it. #### Cons I want to use the paid features, but the subscription price is too high for me. For now, I'll stick with the free features until I'm ready to pay the full price. --- ### Great Chrome extension - Overall rating: 5/5 - Reviewer: Nicole C. - Verified reviewer: Yes - Industry: Information Technology and Services - Company size: 51-200 employees - Product usage: Used daily for less than 2 years - Reviewed: June 2025 - Review source details: This reviewer was invited by us to submit an honest review and offered a nominal incentive as a thank you. In general, I love to work with my Ahrefs Chrome extension. I have it pinned and always active. It helps me get all the information from websites and keywords. #### Ratings breakdown - Ease of use: 5/5 - Value for money: 5/5 - Customer support: 5/5 - Functionality: 5/5 #### Pros I like that the platform is easy to use, and you can understand every feature the app has to offer. In general is super user-friendly. And I love the Chrome extension to get the information of each site. #### Cons At the moment, I like all the features I have been using of Ahrefs, and I don't have any cons to give you. --- ### A whole toolbox of tools - Overall rating: 5/5 - Reviewer: Bryan H. - Verified reviewer: Yes - Industry: Marketing and Advertising - Company size: 11-50 employees - Product usage: Used weekly for more than 2 years - Reviewed: September 2024 - Review source details: This reviewer was invited by us to submit an honest review and offered a nominal incentive as a thank you. Good suite of tools that cover all of the most common SEO-related tasks. #### Ratings breakdown - Ease of use: 4/5 - Value for money: 5/5 - Customer support: 5/5 - Functionality: 5/5 #### Pros They are constantly improving the product and they listen to user requests for features. Most of the metrics you're interested can be seen on a single screen and if you want, you can dive into them to get more detail. #### Cons There's a LOT of tools available and sometimes it can become difficult to know which ones are going to be best for you task/ask. #### Reasons for choosing Ahrefs We use it in different capacities than SEMrush, but we carry both products as some of our staff have preferences of one over the other, but we dumped Moz. #### Vendor response Hi Bryan, Thank you so much for taking the time to leave us your thoughts! We appreciate you highlighting our willingness to listen to and incorporate customer feedback. And thanks for bringing up how we can improve platform education. We'll pass that info to the rest of the team! Replied November 2024 --- ### Ahrefs review - Overall rating: 4/5 - Reviewer: Deyan G. - Verified reviewer: Yes - Industry: Internet - Company size: 11-50 employees - Product usage: Used daily for more than 2 years - Reviewed: March 2022 - Review source details: This reviewer was invited by us to submit an honest review and offered a nominal incentive as a thank you. Overall, we are happy with Ahrefs, despite its flaws. #### Ratings breakdown - Ease of use: 3/5 - Value for money: 5/5 - Customer support: 5/5 - Functionality: 5/5 #### Pros What I like most about Ahrefs is that it's an all-in-one tool. We mostly use it for keyword research, competitor analysis, and the technical health of our websites. It also serves as a starting point for our outreach campaigns. Customer support is also responsive and helpful. #### Cons It's a bit complicated, and although their team tried to do the UI as intuitive as possible, the sheer amount of features make it difficult to use. Training new employees to use its full potential takes too much time. Additionally, it updates slowly, so the data you see on your dashboard is outdated. For example - I managed to remove over a million backlinks from a spammy website. It took ahrefs well over 3 months to "realize" they are gone. #### Reasons for choosing Ahrefs Better for linking strategies and better at find technical problems. #### Vendor response Thank you for your feedback, Deyan! As an all-in-one toolset, the platform can be difficult for first-time users. Besides the UI tooltips, you can also reference our Academy (https://ahrefs.com/academy) and Help page (https://help.ahrefs.com/en/) to speed up the onboarding process. Our support team is also reachable in-app or at support@ahrefs.com in case you have further questions. As for the spammy backlinks, and backlinks in general, our crawler indexes some pages faster and more often than others. The speed of crawling and updating specific pages also depends on their URL Rating (UR). Pages with lower UR have a lower chance of getting indexed and updated more often, as compared to pages with a high rating. In the meantime, you can disavow the spammy backlinks so that they are hidden. The disavow function is available on the dashboard, to the right of each project. You can then export the disavow file from Ahrefs and upload it to GSC. Hope this helps! Replied July 2022 --- ### All In One SEO/ SEM Research and Optimization Tool - Overall rating: 5/5 - Reviewer: Verified Reviewer - Verified reviewer: Yes - Industry: Real Estate - Company size: 1001-5000 employees - Product usage: Used daily for more than 2 years - Reviewed: November 2022 - Review source details: This review was submitted organically. No incentive was offered As a digital marketer that manages SEO and PPC campaigns for clients, Ahrefs is an essential tool for providing value and good results for my clients. The amount of keyword data provided within Ahrefs is unmatched by similar tools. We have improved all of our clients "website score" and they have seen the results with more traffic and better leads. #### Ratings breakdown - Ease of use: 5/5 - Value for money: 3/5 - Customer support: 4/5 - Functionality: 5/5 #### Pros The software contains so many features for keyword research, website optimization, link building, competitor tracking and so much more. The best part about the software is that the more I use it, the better the results are that I can provide my clients. My favorite tool is the "content gap" functionality which provides us with the websites where our competitors are linked so we are able to go after those websites or similar websites. #### Cons There is a huge learning curve because the software contains so many features and ways to use the software. Additionally, the software can get very expensive because of the number of licenses our business requires. #### Reasons for choosing Ahrefs More features, better data and more overall functionality than any of the competitors. #### Vendor response "The best part about the software is that the more I use it, the better the results are that I can provide my clients." This made our day - thank you! ^^ About your concerns, we heard you Abby. In fact, we're in the process of updating all of our How to Ahrefs documentation for all new Site Explorer 2.0 reports. So stay tuned! You can also follow our social channels where we're posting short explainer videos about each new functionality. For any questions you might have, don't hesitate to ping us at support@ahrefs.com. We're always happy to help out :) Replied November 2022 --- ### A really comprehensive SEO tool with plenty of features - Overall rating: 5/5 - Reviewer: Christopher C. - Verified reviewer: Yes - Industry: Package/ Freight Delivery - Company size: 5001-10000 employees - Product usage: Used monthly for more than 2 years - Reviewed: February 2023 - Review source details: This reviewer was invited by us to submit an honest review and offered a nominal incentive as a thank you. Overall Ahrefs is an excellent tool, it covers all bases and has something for part of an SEO strategy. #### Ratings breakdown - Ease of use: 5/5 - Value for money: 4/5 - Customer support: 4/5 - Functionality: 5/5 #### Pros I love the backlinks insights, it offers the most reliable and up to date statistics for number of links and the measures of quality and trust are really unique to this tool. #### Cons Its overall very good, the interface does not visually look the best. As such with so many features it can be easy to get lost. #### Reasons for switching to Ahrefs Looking for an alternative that was easier to use. #### Vendor response Thank you, Christopher! Since you've mentioned backlinks, be sure to check out our new Outgoing links reports: - Linked Domains 2.0 - Anchors 2.0 - Outgoing Links 2.0 Each of them come with easy-to-follow "how-to" tutorials. Access them in-app or under our Academy: https://ahrefs.com/academy/how-to-use-ahrefs This goes for each report in the app, not just the ones mentioned above. Hope this helps! -Andrei Replied February 2023 --- ### 10 tools in 1. Great value & Highly versatile - Overall rating: 5/5 - Reviewer: Max P. - Verified reviewer: Yes - Industry: Marketing and Advertising - Company size: 11-50 employees - Product usage: Used daily for more than 2 years - Reviewed: August 2023 - Review source details: This reviewer was invited by us to submit an honest review and offered a nominal incentive as a thank you. 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. #### Ratings breakdown - Ease of use: 4/5 - Value for money: 5/5 - Customer support: 5/5 - Functionality: 5/5 #### 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. #### Reasons for choosing Ahrefs BrightEdge was too expensive. It was also a new user interface for too many people at my company. Not enough familiarity. #### Reasons for switching to Ahrefs Simple: not as much depth to their products. Features were lacking. I also felt like their KW volume measurements were not as accurate. #### Vendor response 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! Replied August 2023 --- ### SEO powerful software - Overall rating: 5/5 - Reviewer: Andrew W. - Verified reviewer: Yes - Industry: Marketing and Advertising - Company size: 2-10 employees - Product usage: Used weekly for less than 2 years - Reviewed: April 2025 - Review source details: This review was submitted organically. No incentive was offered #### Ratings breakdown - Ease of use: 5/5 - Value for money: 4/5 - Customer support: 5/5 - Functionality: 5/5 #### Pros It’s a complete SEO, user-friendly tool for marketing research #### Cons It feels a bit pricier of all those credits needed for keyword finding or website audit --- ### Amazing SEO tool for Content SEO - Overall rating: 5/5 - Reviewer: Kalei W. - Verified reviewer: Yes - Industry: Financial Services - Company size: 51-200 employees - Product usage: Used weekly for less than 12 months - Reviewed: February 2025 - Review source details: This review was submitted organically. No incentive was offered #### Ratings breakdown - Ease of use: 5/5 - Value for money: 5/5 - Customer support: 5/5 - Functionality: 5/5 #### Pros They make amazing content! They are also constantly adding more useful features. They really understand content marketers, not just SEO. #### Cons It's not always obvious exactly what you need to do to get started. #### Vendor response Hi Kalei! Thanks for your kind words about Ahrefs! If you're struggling with where to begin, we highly recommend checking out our Academy section (with certification!) or joining one of our live webinars, where we go over both general quick wins and specific tools. It's a great place to learn how to maximize your subscription and get amazing insights. Replied February 2025 --- ### Comprehensive SEO Powerhouse - Overall rating: 5/5 - Reviewer: Anastasia B. - Verified reviewer: Yes - Industry: Financial Services - Company size: 11-50 employees - Product usage: Used daily for more than 2 years - Reviewed: July 2024 - Review source details: This review was submitted organically. No incentive was offered Ahrefs offers incredible amounts of SEO data and analytics tools, which are essential for the planning and execution of our marketing strategy. You can get up-to-date health stats of your website, SEO optimisation suggestions, site audits of competitors, an extensive database of keywords and backlinks - all in one place. #### Ratings breakdown - Ease of use: 5/5 - Value for money: 5/5 - Functionality: 5/5 #### Pros This is a highly comprehensive and powerful tool, providing access to data that is essential for establishing and improving your domain's SEO authority. It has an intuitive interface and allows you to quickly analyse websites, keywords and backlinks. They also have an informative YouTube channel, which can be useful to beginners. #### Cons If you use Ahrefs very actively, as we do, costs stack up quickly. Some of the functionalities are behind extra paywalls, which is understandable, but every plan allows you only 500 credits per user for viewing any individual keyword, website audit, etc., regardless of your pricing plan. You have to pay separately to buy more credit packages. #### Vendor response Hi Anastasia, Thanks so much for taking the time to leave a review! We're so happy tohear you're getting a lot of value out of our tool suite. Re: credits, we hear you! In fact, the latest version of our plans come with no credits for Standard and above. If you'd like more information, please don't hesitate to reach out to support via live chat or support@ahrefs.com. Thanks again for sharing your thoughts, and thank you for choosing Ahrefs! Replied July 2024 --- ### Ahrefs terminated our Legacy Plan - Overall rating: 4/5 - Reviewer: Shahin F. - Verified reviewer: Yes - Industry: Marketing and Advertising - Company size: 2-10 employees - Product usage: Used daily for more than 2 years - Reviewed: November 2023 - Review source details: This review was submitted organically. No incentive was offered #### Ratings breakdown - Ease of use: 4/5 - Value for money: 1/5 - Customer support: 3/5 - Functionality: 4/5 #### Pros Ahrefs has been a reliable tool for us, particularly when it comes to backlink data and keyword research tools. The user experience is intuitive and user-friendly, making it easy for us to navigate and gather valuable insights. Over the years, we have consistently recommended Ahrefs to our clients, and it has been instrumental in helping us analyze trends in the digital landscape. However, we've recently encountered a significant drawback with their new credit system. This change in pricing and usage structure has made it untenable for us to continue using and recommending Ahrefs to our clients. As a result, both our clients and ourselves are in the process of transitioning to alternative solutions that better align with our needs and budget constraints. While Ahrefs has served us well in the past, this recent change has unfortunately prompted us to seek alternatives. #### Cons Until just a few days ago, I had been a loyal user of Ahrefs for over a decade. However, I recently encountered a sudden and unexpected issue with the platform. Out of the blue, we received a message notifying us that our legacy plan was being terminated due to excessive usage. What made this situation even more frustrating was the absence of any prior usage warnings. It felt like a sudden and unpleasant surprise, and the lack of proactive communication from Ahrefs didn't help. Setting aside the cost implications, I believe that if someone from the Ahrefs team had taken the time to reach out and guide us through transitioning to a new plan, we might have been more willing to cooperate. Instead, all we received was an email informing us of the termination of our plan. In addition to this disappointing experience, there were a few other issues that we had encountered while using Ahrefs: The traffic numbers and estimates provided by the platform often proved to be wildly inaccurate. Backlink data was inconsistent, sometimes showing lost links and found links without a clear pattern. Ranking data obtained from scraped SERPs consistently diverged from the data in Google Search Console (GSC) or real live Google searches. Overall, our experience with Ahrefs left much to be desired, primarily due to the abrupt termination of our plan and the lack of reliable data accuracy. We hope that Ahrefs can improve its customer service and data quality in the future. #### Reasons for choosing Ahrefs At the time, we felt the backlink data was better. This was a long time ago, however we're looking to switch based on the new Ahrefs Credit system which would be cost prohibitive for a power user. #### Vendor response Hi Shahin, We're sorry that we had to discontinue your Legacy plan. Please believe that this decision was not taken lightly. We have not updated our pricing for Legacy users in 9 years. During that time, we have added significant functionality to our product, technological costs have increased, and the internet has become significantly larger, requiring more resources to crawl. Unfortunately, all of this means we can no longer support the pricing and limits of Legacy accounts with significant usage. But we fully agree we could have communicated all of this in a better way. We sincerely apologize for making you feel like you haven't been a valued customer. Please don't hesitate to reach out via our private community or at support@ahrefs.com if you have additional questions or would like further clarification. Thank you for being a long-term Ahrefs user, and again, we sincerely apologize that we can't continue with your Legacy account and for the misstep in communication. Replied November 2023 --- ### Best Tools to Grow Fast on Digital Fields - Overall rating: 5/5 - Reviewer: Bed Prakash B. - Verified reviewer: Yes - Industry: Electrical/ Electronic Manufacturing - Company size: 11-50 employees - Product usage: Used daily for more than 2 years - Reviewed: December 2021 - Review source details: This reviewer was invited by us to submit an honest review and offered a nominal incentive as a thank you. Initially, while I am starting my blogs, I have no money to pay for SEO tools. At that time I use free SEO tools but after some time I manage my funds and buy the Ahrefs Lite plan at $99. After using Ahrefs I get the unbelievable result and continue using it. #### Ratings breakdown - Ease of use: 5/5 - Value for money: 5/5 - Customer support: 5/5 - Functionality: 5/5 #### Pros There are various things that I like about Ahrefs. I usually use Ahrefs to track my websites and blogs ranks. Analyze ranked keywords and current position. I do a competitor analysis and check the link profiles of my websites and competitors' websites. Which gives clear knowledge of the content gap between me and my competitor. #### Cons Though it is the best tool for publishers I found it is a little bit expensive for the new publishers but it deserves it according to its services. Site explorer data is not in real-time and needs time to update and at the same time, Keyword explorer data is also not up to the mark, sometime we need to update to get current data. --- ### Dig DEEPER into Google Data & Find SEO Gold! - Overall rating: 5/5 - Reviewer: Kyle B. - Verified reviewer: Yes - Industry: Marketing and Advertising - Company size: 2-10 employees - Product usage: Used daily for more than 2 years - Reviewed: July 2022 - Review source details: This reviewer was invited by us to submit an honest review and offered a nominal incentive as a thank you. I absolutely LOVE it, and the YouTube content is the best! #### Ratings breakdown - Ease of use: 5/5 - Value for money: 5/5 - Customer support: 5/5 - Functionality: 5/5 #### Pros I live for finding low difficulty high traffic potential keywords and building blog posts with them. Even more so, I have a long list of related terms to complement the focused keyword. This software is the best! Oh, and I really LOVE parent topic reporting. I could NOT find this in SEMRush. #### Cons I wish there was a feature where it would suggest better keywords. For example, if I typed in a variety of keywords and the most I found was 10 searches a month, it would be great if it analyzed my unpopular searches and recommend similar more popular searches. #### Reasons for choosing Ahrefs I love parent topics! #### Reasons for switching to Ahrefs More feature rich #### Vendor response Thank you for your feedback, Kyle! We do have a feature like you're already asking called Parent Topic. It determines if you can rank for your target keyword while targeting a more general topic on your page instead. Learn more about the best practices when doing keyword research in Ahrefs here: https://help.ahrefs.com/en/articles/735464-what-are-the-best-practices-for-doing-keyword-research-with-the-help-of-ahrefs For any feature suggestions that you might have, please write them down on our canny page: https://ahrefs.canny.io/ The more upvotes a feature suggestion gets, the likelier will it further be considered by our product team when reviewing the product roadmap. Hope this helps! Replied July 2022 --- ### Good, but the new Price Model is to criticize - Overall rating: 4/5 - Reviewer: Markus G. - Verified reviewer: Yes - Industry: Financial Services - Company size: 2-10 employees - Product usage: Used daily for less than 2 years - Reviewed: July 2022 - Review source details: This review was submitted organically. No incentive was offered Finally I am satisfied with the Tool and its features itself, but in the last Weeks for several Times some Bugs and also the "new" Pricing Model satisfy me not really. #### Ratings breakdown - Ease of use: 5/5 - Value for money: 3/5 - Customer support: 4/5 - Functionality: 5/5 #### Pros Ahrefs deliver finally all necessary Elements to set up a good and efficient SEO Strategy. If it is about Tools to analyze and / or Tools for Improvement - everything is available #### Cons Biggest Point of Critic is - the Pricing Model. Every Modul cost extra, what can make this Tool finally extremely expensive. 2nd Point of Critic ist this Payment Rule of "used" Rows per Month. Here you have within your "Pack" a Limit and if you pass this Limit you have to pay with the next Invoice more as maybe expected. Ok - you can set in the Settings a Limit, but this is something you have to know. If not >> Trap! #### Vendor response Thank you for your feedback, Markus :) And apologies for the inconveniences caused by downtimes. However, when reports do not load successfully (during downtimes), no reports per month are consumed. This is a failsafe we put in regarding the usage of your subscription. As for the "Pay as you go" pricing, we're sorry it's not working for you. For Ahrefs, in general, it allows us to keep prices lower for light users while people who use and benefit from service more pay more. We have listed all our additional fees on our Pricing page (https://ahrefs.com/pricing) so users are fully aware of what would cost additional pay-as-you-go charges. Apart from that, we also have a special page under Account Settings > Limits and Usage, where you can monitor your account's limits and data usage at any time. Besides, you are also able to check your report usage in real-time from our Report Usage counter (at the top of the page next to the Account's name). Hope this helps! Replied July 2022 --- ### Best Seo tool to start with - Overall rating: 5/5 - Reviewer: Verified Reviewer - Verified reviewer: Yes - Industry: Broadcast Media - Company size: 501-1000 employees - Product usage: Used daily for more than 2 years - Reviewed: October 2022 - Review source details: This reviewer was invited by us to submit an honest review and offered a nominal incentive as a thank you. #### Ratings breakdown - Ease of use: 5/5 - Value for money: 5/5 - Customer support: 5/5 - Functionality: 5/5 #### Pros I like it's simple way of handling and also easy to understand how to use and fetch the data you require. Although it has certain limitations in terms of scrapping data which you have to choose as per plan and requirements. Though they are many tools in the market nothing will come closer to this one. I recommend everyone to go for it and make your business standout. #### Cons I think cost should be little bit less, and also trail period offered should be more #### Vendor response Much appreciated, thank you! ^^ Thank you for the suggestion as well. We do not have a trial period at the moment, but you can use our free plan which acts as a "soft trial". Through it, you can use 2/5 core tools (Site Explorer & Site Audit) for an unlimited number of verified websites. Sign up for it here: https://admin.ahrefs.com/admin/support If you have any further questions, please write us in the support chat and one of our colleagues will be happy to help :) Replied October 2022 --- ### Best in class keyword analyser and backlinking tool for startups - Overall rating: 5/5 - Reviewer: Devyani S. - Verified reviewer: Yes - Industry: Banking - Company size: 501-1000 employees - Product usage: Used daily for less than 12 months - Reviewed: July 2022 - Review source details: This review was submitted organically. No incentive was offered Entirely, its a feature riched & precise domain auditing tool which includes keyword analysis, backlink analyser and keyword tracker that ultimately helps to increase seo of website and make it rank higher. Its a best tool for marketers working in a startup. #### Ratings breakdown - Ease of use: 5/5 - Value for money: 4/5 - Customer support: 4/5 - Functionality: 5/5 #### Pros Its really good tool for analysing and increasing proper backlinks by following competitor's keywords. I can easily customize KPI to get precise results from ahrefs dashboard. Its an excellent site audit feature, that provides monthly reports on mail regarding websites and keyword status. #### Cons There's nothing much bothering in ahref. There should be local seo tool to analyse keywords against near me google keyword. They should provide details about local offlibe business listed for same keyword. its very expensive but features worth it. #### Vendor response Devyani, we've just released the local pack filter to see where you or your competitors are ranking in SERP. Check out all the latest updates on our product blog: https://ahrefs.com/blog/whats-new-at-ahrefs-aug-sept-2022/ Replied October 2022 --- ### The best tool for daily seo work - Overall rating: 5/5 - Reviewer: Verified Reviewer - Verified reviewer: Yes - Industry: Marketing and Advertising - Company size: 2-10 employees - Product usage: Used daily for more than 2 years - Reviewed: October 2022 - Review source details: This review was submitted organically. No incentive was offered It's one of the best Seo tools in the market, but the pricing model is too expensive for small businesses. #### Ratings breakdown - Ease of use: 5/5 - Value for money: 5/5 - Functionality: 5/5 #### Pros Best tool for checking competitors baclinks, and historical visibility in serps. The free features after verifications are priceless #### Cons The new price list is unacceptable. The monthly domain limit is lower than the weekly limit in the previous billing model. It would be great to add #### Reasons for switching to Ahrefs it's different league of tools. #### Vendor response Thank you for the reviews! And sorry to hear about your disappointment at the same time :( Indeed, the old pricing model had tool-based limits. With the new pricing, we've removed them and added a global limit called credits. Those are modeled after average usage data. Prior to this, we studied the usage patterns of our paying customers and designed it in such a way that 80%+ of them were barely affected. While the remaining 20% were affected to a varying degree, based on how much they use the platform. It looks like you're in the latter batch. We also didn't force any of our grandfathered users to change to the new pricing plans, as long as they keep them live. Not sure why you changed to the new plans, but if you feel that you've been wronged, please write to us at support@ahrefs.com. Thank you! Replied October 2022 ## More reviews [Next reviews](https://www.softwareadvice.com/marketing/ahrefs-profile/reviews/?page=2) --- Ahrefs Reviews, Pros and Cons - 2026 Software Advice