Ahrefs Review 2025

Ahrefs is dedicated to SEO, so most of its features cluster around search optimization. The dashboard gives you a high-level view of all your projects and their SEO performance and progress. Here, you’ll find a navigation bar with tabs for its main features.

Site Explorer

This feature gives you an in-depth look at the organic search traffic and backlink profile of any website or URL. One way is through Organic Traffic Performance. See what keywords your competitors are ranking for and which pages bring the most search engine traffic. Ahrefs monitors hundreds of millions of keywords in 189 locations, so you can trust the estimations to be reliable. You can analyze site structure, outgoing links, and linking authors.

Another way is through the Backlink Profile, which shows the websites linked to your competitors’ sites and gauges the quality of their backlinks. Ahrefs boasts the world’s most extensive index of live backlinks (over 14 trillion) with access to years of historical data.

You can learn whether your competitors are doing paid search advertising and where they funnel their paid traffic in the Paid Traffic Performance section. Here, you can go back in time and see how long competitors have been bidding on a specific keyword through the ad position history chart.

Rank Tracker

This gives you a high-level view of ranking progress so you can monitor your rankings and SERP relevance over time. Track how your SEO efforts are paying off via

• Share of Voice (SOV)—what percentage of clicks from organic search traffic land on your website?
• Average position and traffic.

You can also compare your keyword rankings against those of your competitors, giving you a clear picture of your competitive standing. These can be compared in scheduled reports delivered straight to your inbox.

These give you regular and vital updates on your tracked keywords and your position changes in SERPs. The Competitors Traffic Share report, for example, uses data from the top 100 search results for each of your tracked keywords across 190 countries.

Site Audit

The Site Audit feature runs an SEO audit to find out exactly what’s holding your website back from ranking. It shows you a Health Score, which provides an overall scoring system for your site based on 160+ predefined SEO issues, from problems with imaging to oversized CSS or HTML. These issues will be categorized by severity, and recommendations will be offered to fix them. You can also schedule regular audits for your projects.

If you’re a skilled SEO guy who wants to go deeper than pre-defined issues, the Data Explorer puts you in complete control of all the SEO metrics that you care about as you audit your website.

Content Explorer

Ahrefs Content Explorer tool thoroughly analyzes the performance of content across your site and the web, providing tips on popular topics, audience preferences, and valuable backlink opportunities.

You can monitor your competitors’ publishing frequency, ensuring you stay ahead of the curve and don’t get outpaced in content production. Drawing inspiration from content that has already garnered numerous backlinks can guide your strategy for creating similar high-impact pieces.

Keyword explorer

Ahrefs allows you to generate thousands of keyword ideas and instantly cluster them (with the Parent Topic tool), using reliable metrics to pick the best ones. You can see how much traffic the top-ranking page receives for your keyword, the difficulty, and the potential traffic you could gain by outranking it. With up-to-date search volumes and 12-month average search volume forecasts, you can analyze trends and plan your strategy effectively.

With the Keyword Explorer, you can also analyze keyword clusters and get SERP updates.

Using the Keyword Difficulty (KD) metric, you can determine how challenging it will be to rank in the top 10 organic search results for a keyword; the lower the score, the easier it is to rank.

• Dashboard – cross-project KPIs and saved SEO reports widgets.

• Site Explorer – deep backlinks, referring domains, anchors, link intersect, broken backlinks, outgoing links, SERP history, top pages/subfolders/subdomains, paid keywords, and more. Extras include Domain Comparison, Batch Analysis, Content Gap, and Email Alerts. Great for competitor analysis.

• Keywords Explorer – search volumes, keyword difficulty, SERP overview/history, ideas, AI suggestions, keyword clusters, search intents, and translations (Standard+).

• Rank Tracker – track by country/device, competitors, visibility/share-of-voice; weekly by default, daily with Project Boost.

• Site Audit – cloud crawler with 170+ issues, JS rendering, Core Web Vitals/Lighthouse/CRuX views, indexability/duplication/internal linking analysis, and always-on audits/IndexNow/Patches. Does not use credits.

• Content Explorer – “search engine for marketers”: 17B+ pages, filters by DR, traffic, language, author, etc.; unlinked mentions and broken-link building via unique 404 index.

• Web Analytics – privacy-friendly, cookieless traffic analytics for verified sites.

• Brand Radar – track brand and AI Overview visibility; Brand Radar AI add-on expands coverage to multiple AI platforms.

• GBP Monitor – manage Google Business Profiles at scale (local SEO).

Reporting & integrations

• Looker Studio (Google Data Studio) connectors – official connectors for Site Audit, Site Explorer, Rank Tracker; Advanced+ required; SE connector consumes credits; SA/RT do not.

• Report Builder – create Ahrefs reports with share/schedule; available as an add-on (see pricing note above).

• Exports/Rows – generous export limits scale by plan (see limits above).

AI & content

• AI Content Helper – content editor with intent detection, competitor-based grading, topical gap finder, and an integrated AI chat tied to your draft.

• Social Media Manager (new) – plan, schedule, and manage posts across major networks from Ahrefs.

Utilities & extras

• Alerts (email) – new/lost backlinks, keywords, mentions.

• Ahrefs SEO Toolbar (Chrome/Firefox) & WordPress plugin.

• API & AhrefsBot – Enterprise plan includes API access; separate API subscriptions exist for large-scale data pulls.

Key metrics

• Domain Rating (DR) – Ahrefs’ 0–100 log-scaled metric for domain-level backlink strength. You’ll see DR across many reports.

Integrations

• Google Analytics:
  Integrating Ahrefs with Google Analytics enables users to combine their site’s traffic data with Ahrefs’ SEO metrics, providing deeper insights into user behavior and traffic sources. ​
• Google Search Console:
  If integrated, Google Search Console users can access additional data on their website’s search performance, including impressions, clicks, and keyword rankings, directly within the Ahrefs dashboard. ​
• Locker Studio:
  Ahrefs can be integrated with Google Data (Locker) Studio to create custom dashboards and visualizations. This allows for more comprehensive, visually appealing reports. ​
• Slack:
  Users can set up integrations with Slack to receive real-time alerts and notifications about important changes in their SEO metrics, such as new backlinks, ranking fluctuations, and site audit issues. ​
• Zapier:
  Workflow Automation: Ahrefs integrates with Zapier, allowing users to automate workflows by connecting Ahrefs with over 2,000 other applications.