🕷️ Crawler Inspector

URL Lookup

Direct Parameter Lookup

Raw Queries and Responses

1. Shard Calculation

Query:

Response:

Calculated Shard: 109 (from laksa071)

2. Crawled Status Check

Query:

curl -X POST \
  'http://laksa109.int.ahrefs:8124/' \
  -H 'Content-Type: text/plain' \
  -H 'X-ClickHouse-Database: crawler3' \
  -H 'Authorization: Basic YXBpOg==' \
  -d 'SELECT getAhrefsURLFromUnparsed(src_unparsed) AS found_url, ifNull(toUnixTimestamp(download_stamp), 0) AS crawl_time, ifNull(toUnixTimestamp(props_url_first_seen), 0) AS first_indexed_time, download_http_code AS http_code, src_unparsed AS src_unparsed, src_root_hash AS src_root_hash, history_drop_reason AS history_drop_reason, meta_title AS meta_title, meta_descriptions AS meta_descriptions, attrs_boilerpipe_text AS attrs_boilerpipe_text, attrs_markdown AS attrs_markdown, attrs_readable_markdown AS attrs_readable_markdown, meta_canonical AS meta_canonical FROM crawler3.page_info_local FINAL PREWHERE (src_root_hash, src_unparsed) IN ((getAhrefsRootHashFromUnparsed(getAhrefsUnparsedNoserviceFromURL(\'https://uk.pcmag.com/cloud-services/85707/ahrefs\')), getAhrefsUnparsedNoserviceFromURL(\'https://uk.pcmag.com/cloud-services/85707/ahrefs\'))) FORMAT JSONEachRow'

Response:

{"found_url":"https:\/\/uk.pcmag.com\/cloud-services\/85707\/ahrefs","crawl_time":1771679589,"first_indexed_time":1548955421,"http_code":200,"src_unparsed":"com,pcmag!uk,\/cloud-services\/85707\/ahrefs s443","src_root_hash":"15303950204440063509","history_drop_reason":null,"meta_title":"Ahrefs - Review 2019 - PCMag UK","meta_descriptions":["Ahrefs is a professional-grade SEO tool with powerful features across everything from keyword management to competitive analysis. While its interface isn't geared for beginners, it's a solid choice for experienced digital marketers."],"attrs_boilerpipe_text":"If the name Ahrefs sounds more like a command line entry than a product name to you, you've got a handle on the product's philosphy. While this\nSEO tool\nis fairly full featured, we found that it didn't spend a whole lot of time on worry about end user niceties, especially an intuitive user interface. Starting at $82 per month for its Lite plan (when billed annually), this is a full featured tool aimed mainly at people who know what they're doing when it comes to SEO. For those folks, however, it's a solid choice. For example, Ahrefs maintains one of the largest indexes of\nbacklinks\non the web, currently with more than 12 trillion historical backlinks and 6 billion web pages crawled per day.\nIt also includes a number of other features and capabilities across ad-hoc keyword research, ongoing SEO monitoring and position tracking, content-specific research, and competitive domain comparison. Overall, Ahrefs can do a little bit of everything. While it lacks the keyword management and SEO reporting features of Editors' Choice\nMoz Pro\n(79.00 Per Month, Billed Annually at Moz)\n, and its bare-bones user experience (UX) can't match that of the much cleaner Editors' Choice,\nSpyFu\n(33.00 Per Month, Billed Annually at SpyFu)\n, Ahrefs does plenty beyond its signature crawling capabilities to warrant consideration and has invested in interface improvements, more advanced reporting, and better keyword management features since our initial review.\nAhref's pricing is a little on the hgih side, starting at $82 per month for its Lite plan ($99 if you opt for month-to-month billing). This plan gives you one user, five campaigns (the number of sites you can track in the Ahrefs dashboard), 300 tracked keywords per week, 25 domain crawls per day in the Site Explorer tool, and only three searches in the Keyword Explorer per day. There are also caps on the number of alerts, and the number of results you can export from Ahrefs' backlinks and rankings indexes. The $149 per month Standard plan ($179 month-to-month) is the more feasible option for SMBs, upping the platform's capacity to 10 campaigns, 1,000 tracked keywords updated every three days instead of weekly, 100 domains per day, and 50 keyword searches per day.\nThen there's the Advanced plan, priced at $332 per month billed annually ($399 month-to-month). This is where you start getting into premium features. The Advanced tier gives you 25 campaigns, daily updates on up to 4,000 tracked keywords, 200 keyword searches per day, more expansive access to the backlinks and rankings indexes as well as mobile ranking, and up to three user logins. Finally there's the Agency plan, priced at $832 per month billed annually ($999 month-to-month). This tier gives you real-time web mention tracking, hourly backlink reports, and far higher quotas across every Site Explorer, Content Explorer, and Keyword Explorer mention. For most SMBs, we'd recommend going with the Standard or Advanced plans depending on how much data you're looking to research and how frequently you need alerts.\nThe first thing you notice about the Ahrefs dashboard is that it's fairly sparse. Across the top of the screen is a navigation bar with tabs for Dashboard, Alerts, Site Explorer, Content Explorer, Keywords Explorer, and a Tools drop-down. This is where you can access the Ahrefs\napplication programming interface\n(API), the Ahrefs browser toolbar, and other tools like domain comparison and quick batch analysis of multiple backlinks. Below the tabs is a search bar to enter a domain, URL, topic, or keyword. The dashboard itself lists all your current campaigns, which you can click on to enter Site Explorer for that site's latest monitoring data.\nAd-hoc keyword research is what business users will find themselves using most often when identifying the best possible\nsearch engine results pages\n(SERP) to target with an optimization strategy that can help your pages rank higher. As such, I focused my testing largely on the Ahrefs Keyword Explorer tool.\nFor testing purposes, I used a common set of five keywords for every tool to see how SEO metrics, results, and related keyword recommendations would differ. The five keywords I tested with were: pcmag, digital marketing, online shopping, IT consultant, and small business accounting. This is a fairly typical sampling of terms an SMB might use, including a publishing outift like Ziff Davis. Together they let me see a snapshot of related search results and competitors' spots ripe for targeted optimization.\nI started in Keyword Explorer by entering all five of my test keywords into the search bar. Ahrefs lets you narrow the search by country, but unlike in\nKWFinder\nit doesn't include the ability to drill down by city. The keyword results page was initially the most basic and straightforward of all the tools I tested in terms of metrics returned, but Ahrefs has greatly enhanced its Keyword Explorer tool with a responsive page of interactive\ndata visualizations\n.\nWhere before there was a basic table with metrics on average monthly search volume, cost-per-click (CPC), how many total search results were on the page, and the keyword difficulty score, in the updated Keywords Explorer interface I got an overview page with interactive bar charts on total search volume and clicks, volume distribution, and difficulty distribution. Below that were tables and charts breaking down SERP features, volume-difficulty distribution, top countries by volume, keyword ideas, and traffic share by pages and domains.\nWhen you hit the Metrics tab next to Overview, Keywords Explorer also now uses clickstream data to provide users with more acccurate individual keyword metrics around search volume, clicks (and clicks per search), and return rate (how often people search for the same keyword). Google's Keyword Planner now groups keyword volumes for similar queries, and this is especially useful data in that regard. There is also a link to open the SERP breakdown, listing what URLs hold each positon in the search results with deeper metrics on the SEO strength of the page. Ahrefs has enhanced its SERP results as well, now populating a SERP position history chart to track rank changes over time, along with incorporating newer fields like Featured Snippets into the results page.\nFor my online shopping keyword, for instance, I found that it had the highest search volume and a difficulty score of 75. Conversely, digital marketing had a lower but still significant search volume with a keyword difficulty score of 59. For reference, a difficulty score is an all-in-one, 1-100 number used by all the tools I tested that factors Page Authority (PA) and Domain Authority (DA) SEO metrics together with other data, including keyword search volume, how heavily paid search ads are influencing the results, and how strong the competition is in each spot on the current search results page. Ziff Davis Senior SEO Director, Mike Levin, told me that the ideal difficulty score and PA\/DA target you're looking for is below 50, and that any score higher than 60 is typically a tough nut to crack.\nOn the SERP results page for digital marketing, I was able to identify several URLs with low scores in various\ncustom Ahrefs metrics\n. These include domain rating, URL rating, and the \"Ahrefs rank\" score, as well as how many links were coming from social media sources like Facebook and LinkedIn (potentially valuable data that you can import into any\nsocial media analytics\ntools you might be using). From here, you can take those target URLs and run a Site Explorer search to identify how your business can optimize its page to snag that SERP spot.\nOn the left-hand side of the Keywords Explorer interface is a small menu with a few other options, giving you a list of related keywords with the same metrics as well as a\nphrase match\nlist of longer search terms that match the keywords. Compared to the related keyword suggestions you'll find in Moz, KWFinder, and\nSEMrush\n(99.95 Per Month at SEMrush)\n, Ahrefs doesn't give the average user as much in terms of proactive help and targeted recommendations of the right keywords to target. That said, the platform has greatly improved what was the weakest standalone ad-hoc keyword querying in our initial reviews. Ahrefs has bolstered its keyword database from 300 million to 3.1 billion keywords, and as such the Keywords Explorer now returns 10 times more keyword ideas In \"Phrase Match\" and \"Having Same Terms\" reports. The platform has also added related keyword suggestion options such as \"Also rank for\" and \"Search suggestions\" sections to bring up more relevant keywords.\nAhrefs also finally offers basic keyword management to add keyword to a list. On the top right of the keyword results page, you can select a keyword to add to a new or existing keyword list to which you can return later. This is still fairly limited, as you can't take those keywords and add them to an SEO campaign or directly into a lead management module, but it's better than Ahrefs had before, where all you could do was export your keyword results as a CSV file. Moz Pro, SEMrush, SpyFu, and KWFinder all include bettergrouping and list-making capabilities to better organize and refine keyword lists, but Ahrefs is closing the gap.\nOf the three main categories of SEO—ad-hoc keyword research, ongoing search position monitoring, and crawling—Ahrefs is far stronger in the latter two. When typing a URL into the Site Explorer, I got a comprehensive breakdown of the PCMag.com domain spanning all of the Ahrefs custom metrics, a breakdown of organic keywords and traffic, organic and paid search, and a full index of all the crawled pages on the site. In terms of running quick, comprehensive site diagnostics, only Moz possesses the same level of capability of the tools I tested.\nScrolling down the Site Explorer page, I also found interactive data visualizations. These pull in live data on referring domains and pages, backlinks, and a worldwide map of where search traffic is coming from. Below that was also a word cloud of the search terms driving the most traffic. Then in the left-hand navigation column, there were deeper site breakdown options into search and backlinks, paid and organic search, and some new comparison features allowing me to identify competing domains and pages to PCMag. The comparison features broke down how many common and unique keywords my site shared in common with competing sites. Ahrefs and the Kombat comparison tool in SpyFu provided the deepest competitive comparison metrics of the SEO tools.\nFinally, Ahrefs lets you configure email alerts to track backlinks, new keywords, and site\/brand mentions. So when creating a new keyword alert, I simply clicked the add alert button on the top right of the Alerts dashboard, then entered the URL, country, the keyword volume I wanted (less than 1,000, 1,000-10,000, or above 10,000), the email addresses where I wanted the alerts sent, and how frequently those emails should go out. The alerting in Ahrefs is straightforward, easy to set up, and makes it simple to track a website's overall SEO health and monitor targeted keywords.\nIf you're looking for an SEO tool with exceptional crawling and domain analysis that covers all your bases in terms of basic keyword research and ongoing monitoring, Ahrefs is a solid choice. The user experience is nothing fancy and the keyword management and optimization recommendations leave a lot to be desired compared to Editors' Choices Moz Pro and SpyFu, but Ahrefs is on par with\nDeepCrawl\n(72.00 Per Month, Billed Annually at DeepCrawl)\nand\nMajestic\n(49.99 Per Month, Billed Quarterly at Majestic.com)\nas the best crawlers we tested, and includes the most backlink tracking tools of any product in this roundup next to\nLinkResearchTools\n(329.00 Per Month, Billed Annually at LinkResearchTools)\n. It can be a valuable addition to your business's SEO tool suite.\nBest SEO Tool Picks\nMore SEO Tool Reviews\nMore from AhrefsPte","attrs_markdown":"![](https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/tr?id=322220058389212&ev=PageView)\n\n![\\*](https:\/\/sb.scorecardresearch.com\/bs\/p?c1=2&c2=6036202&cv=2.0&cj=1)\n\n- [Best Picks](https:\/\/uk.pcmag.com\/article\/guide\/)\n- [Reviews](https:\/\/uk.pcmag.com\/article\/review)\n- [News](https:\/\/uk.pcmag.com\/article\/news\/)\/\n- [How-To](https:\/\/uk.pcmag.com\/how-to\/)\/\n\n- [Best Picks](https:\/\/uk.pcmag.com\/article\/guide\/)\n  - [Computer & Electronics](https:\/\/uk.pcmag.com\/electronics\/)\n    - [Best Video Streaming Services](https:\/\/uk.pcmag.com\/internet-products\/71265\/guide\/the-best-video-streaming-services-of-2018)\n    - [Best Wireless Speakers](https:\/\/uk.pcmag.com\/computer-speaker-reviews\/4122\/guide\/the-best-wireless-and-bluetooth-speakers-of-2018)\n    - [Best Wireless Routers](https:\/\/uk.pcmag.com\/wireless-networking-products\/8151\/guide\/the-best-wireless-routers-of-2018)\n    - 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If you buy through affiliate links, we may earn commissions, which help support our [testing](https:\/\/www.pcmag.com\/about\/how-we-test-everything-we-review).\n\n[PCMag UK](https:\/\/uk.pcmag.com\/)\n\n[Review](https:\/\/uk.pcmag.com\/article\/review)\n\n[Reviews](https:\/\/uk.pcmag.com\/reviews)\n\n[Software & Service](https:\/\/uk.pcmag.com\/software)\n\n# Ahrefs\nUpdated Aug 31, 2019\n\n[![Rob Marvin](https:\/\/i.pcmag.com\/imagery\/authors\/02H6VGDu3KHtKmdb9oPyY6J.jpg)](https:\/\/uk.pcmag.com\/u\/rob-marvin)\n\n& [Rob Marvin](https:\/\/uk.pcmag.com\/u\/rob-marvin) Former Associate Features Editor\n\nOur team tests, rates, and reviews more than 1,500 products each year to help you make better buying decisions and get more from technology.\n\nOur Expert\n\nLOOK INSIDE PC LABS [HOW WE TEST](https:\/\/www.pcmag.com\/about\/how-we-test-everything-we-review)\n\n65 EXPERTS\n\n43 YEARS\n\n41,500+ REVIEWS\n\n![Ahrefs is a professional-grade SEO tool with powerful features across everything from keyword management to competitive analysis. While its interface isn't geared for beginners, it's a solid choice for experienced digital marketers. - Online\/Cloud Backup Services](https:\/\/sm.pcmag.com\/t\/pcmag_uk\/review\/a\/ahrefs\/ahrefs_w8ju.1920.jpg)\n\n**3\\.5 Good**\n\n#### The Bottom Line\nAhrefs is a professional-grade SEO tool with powerful features across everything from keyword management to competitive analysis. While its interface isn't geared for beginners, it's a solid choice for experienced digital marketers.\n\n31 Aug 2019\n\n## Pros & Cons\n- - Exceptional site-specific and internet-wide crawling capability.\n  - Solid ad-hoc keyword research.\n  - Comprehensive domain monitoring and comparison.\n  - Improved keyword suggestions.\n  - In-depth SERP analysis.\n  - Basic keyword management.\n- - Limited SEO reporting.\n  - Bare-bones UX.\n\n## Ahrefs Specs\n|   |   |\n|---|---|\n| Advertising \/ Pay Per Click (PPC) Metrics |   |\n| Backlink Tracking |   |\n| Cost Per Click (CPC) Metrics |   |\n| Difficulty Scoring |   |\n| Domain Authority (DA) |   |\n| Keyword Management |   |\n| Page Authority (PA) |   |\n| Related Keyword Suggestions |   |\n| Search Position Monitoring |   |\n| Webpage Crawling |   |\n\n[All Specs]()\n\nPros & Cons\n\nAhrefs\n\n- [Pros & Cons]()\n- [Ahrefs Specs]()\n- [Pricing and Plans]()\n- [Keywords Explorer and User Experience]()\n- [Site Explorer and Alerts]()\n- [All the Basics Covered]()\n- [Final Thoughts]()\n\nIf the name Ahrefs sounds more like a command line entry than a product name to you, you've got a handle on the product's philosphy. While this [SEO tool](https:\/\/uk.pcmag.com\/cloud-services\/85704\/the-best-seo-tools) is fairly full featured, we found that it didn't spend a whole lot of time on worry about end user niceties, especially an intuitive user interface. Starting at \\$82 per month for its Lite plan (when billed annually), this is a full featured tool aimed mainly at people who know what they're doing when it comes to SEO. For those folks, however, it's a solid choice. For example, Ahrefs maintains one of the largest indexes of [backlinks](https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Backlink) on the web, currently with more than 12 trillion historical backlinks and 6 billion web pages crawled per day.\n\nIt also includes a number of other features and capabilities across ad-hoc keyword research, ongoing SEO monitoring and position tracking, content-specific research, and competitive domain comparison. Overall, Ahrefs can do a little bit of everything. While it lacks the keyword management and SEO reporting features of Editors' Choice [Moz Pro](https:\/\/uk.pcmag.com\/cloud-services\/85709\/moz-pro) [(79.00 Per Month, Billed Annually at Moz)](https:\/\/www.pcmag.com\/otc\/01r1WRIAJykbQgN4oGQ8FSi\/041qOZQol09O0MS1vwSb2MN?url=https%3A%2F%2Fmoz.com%2Fproducts) , and its bare-bones user experience (UX) can't match that of the much cleaner Editors' Choice, [SpyFu](https:\/\/uk.pcmag.com\/cloud-services\/85708\/spyfu) [(33.00 Per Month, Billed Annually at SpyFu)](https:\/\/www.pcmag.com\/otc\/01r1WRIAJykbQgN4oGQ8FSi\/018UFPATGYTzIQ4SuB47KbS?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.spyfu.com) , Ahrefs does plenty beyond its signature crawling capabilities to warrant consideration and has invested in interface improvements, more advanced reporting, and better keyword management features since our initial review.\n\n![Ahrefs--Site Explorer](https:\/\/i.pcmag.com\/imagery\/reviews\/03LH2OIsXFyeMgE8i9ynOOn-1.fit_lim.size_740x416.v_1569469943.jpg)![Ahrefs--Site Explorer](<data:image\/svg+xml,%3Csvg xmlns='http:\/\/www.w3.org\/2000\/svg' viewBox='0 0 16 9'%3E%3C\/svg%3E>)\n\n## Pricing and Plans\nAhref's pricing is a little on the hgih side, starting at \\$82 per month for its Lite plan (\\$99 if you opt for month-to-month billing). This plan gives you one user, five campaigns (the number of sites you can track in the Ahrefs dashboard), 300 tracked keywords per week, 25 domain crawls per day in the Site Explorer tool, and only three searches in the Keyword Explorer per day. There are also caps on the number of alerts, and the number of results you can export from Ahrefs' backlinks and rankings indexes. The \\$149 per month Standard plan (\\$179 month-to-month) is the more feasible option for SMBs, upping the platform's capacity to 10 campaigns, 1,000 tracked keywords updated every three days instead of weekly, 100 domains per day, and 50 keyword searches per day.\n\nThen there's the Advanced plan, priced at \\$332 per month billed annually (\\$399 month-to-month). This is where you start getting into premium features. The Advanced tier gives you 25 campaigns, daily updates on up to 4,000 tracked keywords, 200 keyword searches per day, more expansive access to the backlinks and rankings indexes as well as mobile ranking, and up to three user logins. Finally there's the Agency plan, priced at \\$832 per month billed annually (\\$999 month-to-month). This tier gives you real-time web mention tracking, hourly backlink reports, and far higher quotas across every Site Explorer, Content Explorer, and Keyword Explorer mention. For most SMBs, we'd recommend going with the Standard or Advanced plans depending on how much data you're looking to research and how frequently you need alerts.\n## Keywords Explorer and User Experience\nThe first thing you notice about the Ahrefs dashboard is that it's fairly sparse. Across the top of the screen is a navigation bar with tabs for Dashboard, Alerts, Site Explorer, Content Explorer, Keywords Explorer, and a Tools drop-down. This is where you can access the Ahrefs [application programming interface](https:\/\/www.pcmag.com\/encyclopedia\/term\/api) (API), the Ahrefs browser toolbar, and other tools like domain comparison and quick batch analysis of multiple backlinks. Below the tabs is a search bar to enter a domain, URL, topic, or keyword. The dashboard itself lists all your current campaigns, which you can click on to enter Site Explorer for that site's latest monitoring data.\n\nAd-hoc keyword research is what business users will find themselves using most often when identifying the best possible [search engine results pages](https:\/\/www.pcmag.com\/encyclopedia\/term\/serp) (SERP) to target with an optimization strategy that can help your pages rank higher. As such, I focused my testing largely on the Ahrefs Keyword Explorer tool.\n\n![Ahrefs--Updated Keyword Explorer](https:\/\/i.pcmag.com\/imagery\/reviews\/03LH2OIsXFyeMgE8i9ynOOn-2.fit_lim.size_740x416.v_1569469943.jpg)![Ahrefs--Updated Keyword Explorer](<data:image\/svg+xml,%3Csvg xmlns='http:\/\/www.w3.org\/2000\/svg' viewBox='0 0 16 9'%3E%3C\/svg%3E>)\n\nFor testing purposes, I used a common set of five keywords for every tool to see how SEO metrics, results, and related keyword recommendations would differ. The five keywords I tested with were: pcmag, digital marketing, online shopping, IT consultant, and small business accounting. This is a fairly typical sampling of terms an SMB might use, including a publishing outift like Ziff Davis. Together they let me see a snapshot of related search results and competitors' spots ripe for targeted optimization.\n\nI started in Keyword Explorer by entering all five of my test keywords into the search bar. Ahrefs lets you narrow the search by country, but unlike in [KWFinder](https:\/\/uk.pcmag.com\/cloud-services\/85705\/kwfindercom)  it doesn't include the ability to drill down by city. The keyword results page was initially the most basic and straightforward of all the tools I tested in terms of metrics returned, but Ahrefs has greatly enhanced its Keyword Explorer tool with a responsive page of interactive [data visualizations](https:\/\/uk.pcmag.com\/cloud-services\/83744\/the-best-data-visualization-tools) .\n\nWhere before there was a basic table with metrics on average monthly search volume, cost-per-click (CPC), how many total search results were on the page, and the keyword difficulty score, in the updated Keywords Explorer interface I got an overview page with interactive bar charts on total search volume and clicks, volume distribution, and difficulty distribution. Below that were tables and charts breaking down SERP features, volume-difficulty distribution, top countries by volume, keyword ideas, and traffic share by pages and domains.\n\nWhen you hit the Metrics tab next to Overview, Keywords Explorer also now uses clickstream data to provide users with more acccurate individual keyword metrics around search volume, clicks (and clicks per search), and return rate (how often people search for the same keyword). Google's Keyword Planner now groups keyword volumes for similar queries, and this is especially useful data in that regard. There is also a link to open the SERP breakdown, listing what URLs hold each positon in the search results with deeper metrics on the SEO strength of the page. Ahrefs has enhanced its SERP results as well, now populating a SERP position history chart to track rank changes over time, along with incorporating newer fields like Featured Snippets into the results page.\n\n#### Similar Products\n[Our Current Picks for The Best SEO Tools for 2020](https:\/\/uk.pcmag.com\/cloud-services\/85704\/the-best-seo-tools-for-2020)\n\nFor my online shopping keyword, for instance, I found that it had the highest search volume and a difficulty score of 75. Conversely, digital marketing had a lower but still significant search volume with a keyword difficulty score of 59. For reference, a difficulty score is an all-in-one, 1-100 number used by all the tools I tested that factors Page Authority (PA) and Domain Authority (DA) SEO metrics together with other data, including keyword search volume, how heavily paid search ads are influencing the results, and how strong the competition is in each spot on the current search results page. Ziff Davis Senior SEO Director, Mike Levin, told me that the ideal difficulty score and PA\/DA target you're looking for is below 50, and that any score higher than 60 is typically a tough nut to crack.\n\n![Ahrefs--Improved Keyword Suggestions](https:\/\/i.pcmag.com\/imagery\/reviews\/03LH2OIsXFyeMgE8i9ynOOn-3.fit_lim.size_740x416.v_1569469943.jpg)![Ahrefs--Improved Keyword Suggestions](<data:image\/svg+xml,%3Csvg xmlns='http:\/\/www.w3.org\/2000\/svg' viewBox='0 0 16 9'%3E%3C\/svg%3E>)\n\nOn the SERP results page for digital marketing, I was able to identify several URLs with low scores in various [custom Ahrefs metrics](https:\/\/ahrefs.com\/blog\/seo-metrics\/). These include domain rating, URL rating, and the \"Ahrefs rank\" score, as well as how many links were coming from social media sources like Facebook and LinkedIn (potentially valuable data that you can import into any [social media analytics](https:\/\/uk.pcmag.com\/cloud-services\/71221\/the-best-social-media-management-analytics-tools) tools you might be using). From here, you can take those target URLs and run a Site Explorer search to identify how your business can optimize its page to snag that SERP spot.\n\nOn the left-hand side of the Keywords Explorer interface is a small menu with a few other options, giving you a list of related keywords with the same metrics as well as a [phrase match](https:\/\/support.google.com\/adwords\/answer\/2407784?hl=en) list of longer search terms that match the keywords. Compared to the related keyword suggestions you'll find in Moz, KWFinder, and [SEMrush](https:\/\/uk.pcmag.com\/cloud-services\/85706\/semrush) [(99.95 Per Month at SEMrush)](https:\/\/www.pcmag.com\/otc\/01r1WRIAJykbQgN4oGQ8FSi\/01ft3gZQd80nrKtleEU4Ymi?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.semrush.com%2Fprices%2F%3Fref%3D2016103336%26refer_source%3D%26utm_source%3Dberush%26utm_medium%3Dpromo%26utm_campaign%3Dbanner) , Ahrefs doesn't give the average user as much in terms of proactive help and targeted recommendations of the right keywords to target. That said, the platform has greatly improved what was the weakest standalone ad-hoc keyword querying in our initial reviews. Ahrefs has bolstered its keyword database from 300 million to 3.1 billion keywords, and as such the Keywords Explorer now returns 10 times more keyword ideas In \"Phrase Match\" and \"Having Same Terms\" reports. The platform has also added related keyword suggestion options such as \"Also rank for\" and \"Search suggestions\" sections to bring up more relevant keywords.\n\nAhrefs also finally offers basic keyword management to add keyword to a list. On the top right of the keyword results page, you can select a keyword to add to a new or existing keyword list to which you can return later. This is still fairly limited, as you can't take those keywords and add them to an SEO campaign or directly into a lead management module, but it's better than Ahrefs had before, where all you could do was export your keyword results as a CSV file. Moz Pro, SEMrush, SpyFu, and KWFinder all include bettergrouping and list-making capabilities to better organize and refine keyword lists, but Ahrefs is closing the gap.\n\n![Ahrefs--SERP Overview](https:\/\/i.pcmag.com\/imagery\/reviews\/03LH2OIsXFyeMgE8i9ynOOn-4.fit_lim.size_740x416.v_1569469943.jpg)![Ahrefs--SERP Overview](<data:image\/svg+xml,%3Csvg xmlns='http:\/\/www.w3.org\/2000\/svg' viewBox='0 0 16 9'%3E%3C\/svg%3E>)\n## Site Explorer and Alerts\nOf the three main categories of SEO—ad-hoc keyword research, ongoing search position monitoring, and crawling—Ahrefs is far stronger in the latter two. When typing a URL into the Site Explorer, I got a comprehensive breakdown of the PCMag.com domain spanning all of the Ahrefs custom metrics, a breakdown of organic keywords and traffic, organic and paid search, and a full index of all the crawled pages on the site. In terms of running quick, comprehensive site diagnostics, only Moz possesses the same level of capability of the tools I tested.\n\nScrolling down the Site Explorer page, I also found interactive data visualizations. These pull in live data on referring domains and pages, backlinks, and a worldwide map of where search traffic is coming from. Below that was also a word cloud of the search terms driving the most traffic. Then in the left-hand navigation column, there were deeper site breakdown options into search and backlinks, paid and organic search, and some new comparison features allowing me to identify competing domains and pages to PCMag. The comparison features broke down how many common and unique keywords my site shared in common with competing sites. Ahrefs and the Kombat comparison tool in SpyFu provided the deepest competitive comparison metrics of the SEO tools.\n\n![Ahrefs--Add Alert](https:\/\/i.pcmag.com\/imagery\/reviews\/03LH2OIsXFyeMgE8i9ynOOn-5.fit_lim.size_740x416.v_1569469943.jpg)![Ahrefs--Add Alert](<data:image\/svg+xml,%3Csvg xmlns='http:\/\/www.w3.org\/2000\/svg' viewBox='0 0 16 9'%3E%3C\/svg%3E>)\n\nFinally, Ahrefs lets you configure email alerts to track backlinks, new keywords, and site\/brand mentions. So when creating a new keyword alert, I simply clicked the add alert button on the top right of the Alerts dashboard, then entered the URL, country, the keyword volume I wanted (less than 1,000, 1,000-10,000, or above 10,000), the email addresses where I wanted the alerts sent, and how frequently those emails should go out. The alerting in Ahrefs is straightforward, easy to set up, and makes it simple to track a website's overall SEO health and monitor targeted keywords.\n## All the Basics Covered\nIf you're looking for an SEO tool with exceptional crawling and domain analysis that covers all your bases in terms of basic keyword research and ongoing monitoring, Ahrefs is a solid choice. The user experience is nothing fancy and the keyword management and optimization recommendations leave a lot to be desired compared to Editors' Choices Moz Pro and SpyFu, but Ahrefs is on par with [DeepCrawl](https:\/\/uk.pcmag.com\/cloud-services\/86338\/deepcrawl) [(72.00 Per Month, Billed Annually at DeepCrawl)](https:\/\/www.pcmag.com\/otc\/01r1WRIAJykbQgN4oGQ8FSi\/037AcRCAKts3SoKjXjtVlp0?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.deepcrawl.com%2F) and [Majestic](https:\/\/uk.pcmag.com\/cloud-services\/86337\/majestic) [(49.99 Per Month, Billed Quarterly at Majestic.com)](https:\/\/www.pcmag.com\/otc\/01r1WRIAJykbQgN4oGQ8FSi\/00ykmWuHuPFIJuwKvvnjshX?url=https%3A%2F%2Fmajestic.com%2F) as the best crawlers we tested, and includes the most backlink tracking tools of any product in this roundup next to [LinkResearchTools](https:\/\/uk.pcmag.com\/cloud-services\/86340\/linkresearchtools) [(329.00 Per Month, Billed Annually at LinkResearchTools)](https:\/\/www.pcmag.com\/otc\/01r1WRIAJykbQgN4oGQ8FSi\/026fHAq4OFzel8rSaErwBMK?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.linkresearchtools.com%2F) . It can be a valuable addition to your business's SEO tool suite.\n\n![Ahrefs--Competing Domains](https:\/\/i.pcmag.com\/imagery\/reviews\/03LH2OIsXFyeMgE8i9ynOOn-6.fit_lim.size_740x416.v_1569469943.jpg)![Ahrefs--Competing Domains](<data:image\/svg+xml,%3Csvg xmlns='http:\/\/www.w3.org\/2000\/svg' viewBox='0 0 16 9'%3E%3C\/svg%3E>)\n\n### Best SEO Tool Picks\n- [More SEO Tool Reviews](https:\/\/uk.pcmag.com\/seo-tools)\n- [More from AhrefsPte](https:\/\/www.pcmag.com\/brands\/ahrefspte)\n\n## Final Thoughts\n![Ahrefs is a professional-grade SEO tool with powerful features across everything from keyword management to competitive analysis. While its interface isn't geared for beginners, it's a solid choice for experienced digital marketers. - Online\/Cloud Backup Services](https:\/\/sm.pcmag.com\/t\/pcmag_uk\/review\/a\/ahrefs\/ahrefs_w8ju.1920.jpg)\n\n# Ahrefs\n**3\\.5 Good**\n\nAhrefs is a professional-grade SEO tool with powerful features across everything from keyword management to competitive analysis. While its interface isn't geared for beginners, it's a solid choice for experienced digital marketers.\n\nWhat Our Ratings Mean\n\n- 5\\.0 - Exemplary: Near perfection, ground-breaking\n- 4\\.5 - Outstanding: Best in class, acts as a benchmark for measuring competitors\n- 4\\.0 - Excellent: A performance, feature, or value leader in its class, with few shortfalls\n- 3\\.5 - Good: Does what the product should do, and does so better than many competitors\n- 3\\.0 - Average: Does what the product should do, and sits in the middle of the pack\n- 2\\.5 - Fair: We have some reservations, buy with caution\n- 2\\.0 - Subpar: We do not recommend, buy with extreme caution\n- 1\\.5 - Poor: Do not buy this product\n- 1\\.0 - Dismal: Don't even think about buying this product\n\nRead Our [Editorial Mission Statement](https:\/\/uk.pcmag.com\/about\/pcmagcom-mission-statement) and [Testing Methodologies](https:\/\/uk.pcmag.com\/about\/how-we-test-everything-we-review).\n\n# About Our Expert\n![Rob Marvin](https:\/\/i.pcmag.com\/imagery\/authors\/02H6VGDu3KHtKmdb9oPyY6J.jpg)\n\n### Rob Marvin\n#### Former Associate Features Editor\n\nRob Marvin writes features, news, and trend stories on all manner of emerging technologies. Beats include: startups, business and venture capital, blockchain and cryptocurrencies, AI, augmented and virtual reality, IoT and automation, legal cannabis tech, social media, streaming, security, mobile commerce, M\\&A, and entertainment. Rob was previously Assistant Editor and Associate Editor in PCMag's Business section. Prior to that, he served as an editor at SD Times. He graduated from Syracuse University's S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications. You can also find his business and tech coverage on Entrepreneur and Fox Business. Rob is also an unabashed nerd who does occasional entertainment writing for Geek.com on movies, TV, and culture. Once a year you can find him on a couch with friends marathoning The Lord of the Rings trilogy--extended editions.\n\n### Read the latest from Rob Marvin\n- [Insightly CRM](https:\/\/uk.pcmag.com\/cloud-services\/2538\/insightly-crm)\n- [Social CRM: Where Social Media Meets Customer Engagement](https:\/\/uk.pcmag.com\/crm-software\/71279\/social-crm-where-social-media-meets-customer-engagement)\n- [37 Trippy Movies and TV Shows You Can Stream on 4\/20](https:\/\/uk.pcmag.com\/features\/94469\/39-trippy-movies-and-tv-shows-you-can-stream-on-420)\n- [The Biggest Tech Mergers and Acquisitions of All Time](https:\/\/uk.pcmag.com\/enterprise\/117931\/the-biggest-tech-mergers-and-acquisitions-of-all-time)\n- [Mitel MiCloud Connect](https:\/\/uk.pcmag.com\/internet-telephony-voip\/90970\/mitel-micloud-business)\n- [More from Rob Marvin](https:\/\/uk.pcmag.com\/u\/rob-marvin)\n\n[Read full bio](https:\/\/uk.pcmag.com\/u\/rob-marvin)\n##### Comments\nPlease enable JavaScript to view the comments.\n\n[PCMag Newsletters Our Best Stories in Your Inbox](https:\/\/www.pcmag.com\/newsletter_manage)\n\nFollow PCMag\n\n- [(Opens in a new window) facebook](https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/PCMag)\n- [(Opens in a new window) X](https:\/\/x.com\/pcmag)\n- [(Opens in a new window) flipboard](https:\/\/flipboard.com\/@PCMag)\n- [(Opens in a new window) google](https:\/\/news.google.com\/publications\/CAAqBggKMIClPDCEjQc?oc=3)\n- [(Opens in a new window) instagram](https:\/\/instagram.com\/pcmag\/)\n- [(Opens in a new window) pinterest](https:\/\/www.pinterest.com\/pcmag\/)\n\n## Honest, Objective, Lab-Tested Reviews\nPCMag.com is a leading authority on technology, delivering lab-based, independent reviews of the latest products and services. Our expert industry analysis and practical solutions help you make better buying decisions and get more from technology.\n\n[How We Test](https:\/\/uk.pcmag.com\/about\/how-we-test-everything-we-review) [Editorial Principles](https:\/\/uk.pcmag.com\/about\/pcmagcom-mission-statement)\n\n- [Best Picks](https:\/\/uk.pcmag.com\/article\/guide\/)\n- [Reviews](https:\/\/uk.pcmag.com\/article\/review)\n- [News](https:\/\/uk.pcmag.com\/article\/news\/)\/\n- [How-To](https:\/\/uk.pcmag.com\/how-to\/)\/\n\n- [About PCMagazine](http:\/\/uk.pcmag.com\/pc-mag-uk\/32814\/news\/welcome-to-pc-mag-uk)\n- [Privacy Policy](http:\/\/www.ziffdavis.com\/about\/privacy)\n- [Terms of Use](http:\/\/www.ziffdavis.com\/about\/terms)\n- [Advertise](http:\/\/www.ziffdavis.com\/advertise\/)\n- [![](https:\/\/c.evidon.com\/pub\/icong1.png) AdChoices](https:\/\/uk.pcmag.com\/cloud-services\/85707\/ahrefs)\n\nFor over 40 years, PCMag has been a trusted authority on technology, delivering independent, labs-based reviews of the latest products and services. With expert analysis and practical solutions across consumer electronics, software, security, and more, PCMag helps consumers make informed buying decisions and get the most from their tech. From in-depth reviews to the latest news and how-to guides, PCMag is the go-to source for staying ahead in the digital world.\n\n© 1996-2026 © 1996-2026 Ziff Davis, LLC., a Ziff Davis company. All Rights Reserved. PCMag, PCMag.com and PC Magazine are among the federally registered trademarks of Ziff Davis and may not be used by third parties without explicit permission. The display of third-party trademarks and trade names on this site does not necessarily indicate any affiliation or the endorsement of PCMag. If you click an affiliate link and buy a product or service, we may be paid a fee by that merchant.\n\nInternational Editions:\n\n- [PCMag USA](https:\/\/www.pcmag.com\/?setccpref=US)\n- [United Kingdom](https:\/\/uk.pcmag.com\/)\n- [Australia](https:\/\/au.pcmag.com\/)\n- [Greece](https:\/\/gr.pcmag.com\/)\n- [Israel](https:\/\/il.pcmag.com\/)\n- [Middle East](https:\/\/me.pcmag.com\/)\n\n![](https:\/\/secure-us.imrworldwide.com\/cgi-bin\/m?ci=us-806031h&cg=0&cc=1&ts=noscript)\n\n![](https:\/\/zdbb.net\/l\/z0WVjCBSEeGLoxIxOQVEwQ\/)","attrs_readable_markdown":"If the name Ahrefs sounds more like a command line entry than a product name to you, you've got a handle on the product's philosphy. While this [SEO tool](https:\/\/uk.pcmag.com\/cloud-services\/85704\/the-best-seo-tools) is fairly full featured, we found that it didn't spend a whole lot of time on worry about end user niceties, especially an intuitive user interface. Starting at \\$82 per month for its Lite plan (when billed annually), this is a full featured tool aimed mainly at people who know what they're doing when it comes to SEO. For those folks, however, it's a solid choice. For example, Ahrefs maintains one of the largest indexes of [backlinks](https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Backlink) on the web, currently with more than 12 trillion historical backlinks and 6 billion web pages crawled per day.\n\nIt also includes a number of other features and capabilities across ad-hoc keyword research, ongoing SEO monitoring and position tracking, content-specific research, and competitive domain comparison. Overall, Ahrefs can do a little bit of everything. While it lacks the keyword management and SEO reporting features of Editors' Choice [Moz Pro](https:\/\/uk.pcmag.com\/cloud-services\/85709\/moz-pro) [(79.00 Per Month, Billed Annually at Moz)](https:\/\/www.pcmag.com\/otc\/01r1WRIAJykbQgN4oGQ8FSi\/041qOZQol09O0MS1vwSb2MN?url=https%3A%2F%2Fmoz.com%2Fproducts) , and its bare-bones user experience (UX) can't match that of the much cleaner Editors' Choice, [SpyFu](https:\/\/uk.pcmag.com\/cloud-services\/85708\/spyfu) [(33.00 Per Month, Billed Annually at SpyFu)](https:\/\/www.pcmag.com\/otc\/01r1WRIAJykbQgN4oGQ8FSi\/018UFPATGYTzIQ4SuB47KbS?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.spyfu.com) , Ahrefs does plenty beyond its signature crawling capabilities to warrant consideration and has invested in interface improvements, more advanced reporting, and better keyword management features since our initial review.\n\n![Ahrefs--Site Explorer](https:\/\/i.pcmag.com\/imagery\/reviews\/03LH2OIsXFyeMgE8i9ynOOn-1.fit_lim.size_740x416.v_1569469943.jpg)\n\nAhref's pricing is a little on the hgih side, starting at \\$82 per month for its Lite plan (\\$99 if you opt for month-to-month billing). This plan gives you one user, five campaigns (the number of sites you can track in the Ahrefs dashboard), 300 tracked keywords per week, 25 domain crawls per day in the Site Explorer tool, and only three searches in the Keyword Explorer per day. There are also caps on the number of alerts, and the number of results you can export from Ahrefs' backlinks and rankings indexes. The \\$149 per month Standard plan (\\$179 month-to-month) is the more feasible option for SMBs, upping the platform's capacity to 10 campaigns, 1,000 tracked keywords updated every three days instead of weekly, 100 domains per day, and 50 keyword searches per day.\n\nThen there's the Advanced plan, priced at \\$332 per month billed annually (\\$399 month-to-month). This is where you start getting into premium features. The Advanced tier gives you 25 campaigns, daily updates on up to 4,000 tracked keywords, 200 keyword searches per day, more expansive access to the backlinks and rankings indexes as well as mobile ranking, and up to three user logins. Finally there's the Agency plan, priced at \\$832 per month billed annually (\\$999 month-to-month). This tier gives you real-time web mention tracking, hourly backlink reports, and far higher quotas across every Site Explorer, Content Explorer, and Keyword Explorer mention. For most SMBs, we'd recommend going with the Standard or Advanced plans depending on how much data you're looking to research and how frequently you need alerts.\n\nThe first thing you notice about the Ahrefs dashboard is that it's fairly sparse. Across the top of the screen is a navigation bar with tabs for Dashboard, Alerts, Site Explorer, Content Explorer, Keywords Explorer, and a Tools drop-down. This is where you can access the Ahrefs [application programming interface](https:\/\/www.pcmag.com\/encyclopedia\/term\/api) (API), the Ahrefs browser toolbar, and other tools like domain comparison and quick batch analysis of multiple backlinks. Below the tabs is a search bar to enter a domain, URL, topic, or keyword. The dashboard itself lists all your current campaigns, which you can click on to enter Site Explorer for that site's latest monitoring data.\n\nAd-hoc keyword research is what business users will find themselves using most often when identifying the best possible [search engine results pages](https:\/\/www.pcmag.com\/encyclopedia\/term\/serp) (SERP) to target with an optimization strategy that can help your pages rank higher. As such, I focused my testing largely on the Ahrefs Keyword Explorer tool.\n\n![Ahrefs--Updated Keyword Explorer](https:\/\/i.pcmag.com\/imagery\/reviews\/03LH2OIsXFyeMgE8i9ynOOn-2.fit_lim.size_740x416.v_1569469943.jpg)\n\nFor testing purposes, I used a common set of five keywords for every tool to see how SEO metrics, results, and related keyword recommendations would differ. The five keywords I tested with were: pcmag, digital marketing, online shopping, IT consultant, and small business accounting. This is a fairly typical sampling of terms an SMB might use, including a publishing outift like Ziff Davis. Together they let me see a snapshot of related search results and competitors' spots ripe for targeted optimization.\n\nI started in Keyword Explorer by entering all five of my test keywords into the search bar. Ahrefs lets you narrow the search by country, but unlike in [KWFinder](https:\/\/uk.pcmag.com\/cloud-services\/85705\/kwfindercom)  it doesn't include the ability to drill down by city. The keyword results page was initially the most basic and straightforward of all the tools I tested in terms of metrics returned, but Ahrefs has greatly enhanced its Keyword Explorer tool with a responsive page of interactive [data visualizations](https:\/\/uk.pcmag.com\/cloud-services\/83744\/the-best-data-visualization-tools) .\n\nWhere before there was a basic table with metrics on average monthly search volume, cost-per-click (CPC), how many total search results were on the page, and the keyword difficulty score, in the updated Keywords Explorer interface I got an overview page with interactive bar charts on total search volume and clicks, volume distribution, and difficulty distribution. Below that were tables and charts breaking down SERP features, volume-difficulty distribution, top countries by volume, keyword ideas, and traffic share by pages and domains.\n\nWhen you hit the Metrics tab next to Overview, Keywords Explorer also now uses clickstream data to provide users with more acccurate individual keyword metrics around search volume, clicks (and clicks per search), and return rate (how often people search for the same keyword). Google's Keyword Planner now groups keyword volumes for similar queries, and this is especially useful data in that regard. There is also a link to open the SERP breakdown, listing what URLs hold each positon in the search results with deeper metrics on the SEO strength of the page. Ahrefs has enhanced its SERP results as well, now populating a SERP position history chart to track rank changes over time, along with incorporating newer fields like Featured Snippets into the results page.\n\nFor my online shopping keyword, for instance, I found that it had the highest search volume and a difficulty score of 75. Conversely, digital marketing had a lower but still significant search volume with a keyword difficulty score of 59. For reference, a difficulty score is an all-in-one, 1-100 number used by all the tools I tested that factors Page Authority (PA) and Domain Authority (DA) SEO metrics together with other data, including keyword search volume, how heavily paid search ads are influencing the results, and how strong the competition is in each spot on the current search results page. Ziff Davis Senior SEO Director, Mike Levin, told me that the ideal difficulty score and PA\/DA target you're looking for is below 50, and that any score higher than 60 is typically a tough nut to crack.\n\n![Ahrefs--Improved Keyword Suggestions](https:\/\/i.pcmag.com\/imagery\/reviews\/03LH2OIsXFyeMgE8i9ynOOn-3.fit_lim.size_740x416.v_1569469943.jpg)\n\nOn the SERP results page for digital marketing, I was able to identify several URLs with low scores in various [custom Ahrefs metrics](https:\/\/ahrefs.com\/blog\/seo-metrics\/). These include domain rating, URL rating, and the \"Ahrefs rank\" score, as well as how many links were coming from social media sources like Facebook and LinkedIn (potentially valuable data that you can import into any [social media analytics](https:\/\/uk.pcmag.com\/cloud-services\/71221\/the-best-social-media-management-analytics-tools) tools you might be using). From here, you can take those target URLs and run a Site Explorer search to identify how your business can optimize its page to snag that SERP spot.\n\nOn the left-hand side of the Keywords Explorer interface is a small menu with a few other options, giving you a list of related keywords with the same metrics as well as a [phrase match](https:\/\/support.google.com\/adwords\/answer\/2407784?hl=en) list of longer search terms that match the keywords. Compared to the related keyword suggestions you'll find in Moz, KWFinder, and [SEMrush](https:\/\/uk.pcmag.com\/cloud-services\/85706\/semrush) [(99.95 Per Month at SEMrush)](https:\/\/www.pcmag.com\/otc\/01r1WRIAJykbQgN4oGQ8FSi\/01ft3gZQd80nrKtleEU4Ymi?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.semrush.com%2Fprices%2F%3Fref%3D2016103336%26refer_source%3D%26utm_source%3Dberush%26utm_medium%3Dpromo%26utm_campaign%3Dbanner) , Ahrefs doesn't give the average user as much in terms of proactive help and targeted recommendations of the right keywords to target. That said, the platform has greatly improved what was the weakest standalone ad-hoc keyword querying in our initial reviews. Ahrefs has bolstered its keyword database from 300 million to 3.1 billion keywords, and as such the Keywords Explorer now returns 10 times more keyword ideas In \"Phrase Match\" and \"Having Same Terms\" reports. The platform has also added related keyword suggestion options such as \"Also rank for\" and \"Search suggestions\" sections to bring up more relevant keywords.\n\nAhrefs also finally offers basic keyword management to add keyword to a list. On the top right of the keyword results page, you can select a keyword to add to a new or existing keyword list to which you can return later. This is still fairly limited, as you can't take those keywords and add them to an SEO campaign or directly into a lead management module, but it's better than Ahrefs had before, where all you could do was export your keyword results as a CSV file. Moz Pro, SEMrush, SpyFu, and KWFinder all include bettergrouping and list-making capabilities to better organize and refine keyword lists, but Ahrefs is closing the gap.\n\n![Ahrefs--SERP Overview](https:\/\/i.pcmag.com\/imagery\/reviews\/03LH2OIsXFyeMgE8i9ynOOn-4.fit_lim.size_740x416.v_1569469943.jpg)\n\nOf the three main categories of SEO—ad-hoc keyword research, ongoing search position monitoring, and crawling—Ahrefs is far stronger in the latter two. When typing a URL into the Site Explorer, I got a comprehensive breakdown of the PCMag.com domain spanning all of the Ahrefs custom metrics, a breakdown of organic keywords and traffic, organic and paid search, and a full index of all the crawled pages on the site. In terms of running quick, comprehensive site diagnostics, only Moz possesses the same level of capability of the tools I tested.\n\nScrolling down the Site Explorer page, I also found interactive data visualizations. These pull in live data on referring domains and pages, backlinks, and a worldwide map of where search traffic is coming from. Below that was also a word cloud of the search terms driving the most traffic. Then in the left-hand navigation column, there were deeper site breakdown options into search and backlinks, paid and organic search, and some new comparison features allowing me to identify competing domains and pages to PCMag. The comparison features broke down how many common and unique keywords my site shared in common with competing sites. Ahrefs and the Kombat comparison tool in SpyFu provided the deepest competitive comparison metrics of the SEO tools.\n\n![Ahrefs--Add Alert](https:\/\/i.pcmag.com\/imagery\/reviews\/03LH2OIsXFyeMgE8i9ynOOn-5.fit_lim.size_740x416.v_1569469943.jpg)\n\nFinally, Ahrefs lets you configure email alerts to track backlinks, new keywords, and site\/brand mentions. So when creating a new keyword alert, I simply clicked the add alert button on the top right of the Alerts dashboard, then entered the URL, country, the keyword volume I wanted (less than 1,000, 1,000-10,000, or above 10,000), the email addresses where I wanted the alerts sent, and how frequently those emails should go out. The alerting in Ahrefs is straightforward, easy to set up, and makes it simple to track a website's overall SEO health and monitor targeted keywords.\n\nIf you're looking for an SEO tool with exceptional crawling and domain analysis that covers all your bases in terms of basic keyword research and ongoing monitoring, Ahrefs is a solid choice. The user experience is nothing fancy and the keyword management and optimization recommendations leave a lot to be desired compared to Editors' Choices Moz Pro and SpyFu, but Ahrefs is on par with [DeepCrawl](https:\/\/uk.pcmag.com\/cloud-services\/86338\/deepcrawl) [(72.00 Per Month, Billed Annually at DeepCrawl)](https:\/\/www.pcmag.com\/otc\/01r1WRIAJykbQgN4oGQ8FSi\/037AcRCAKts3SoKjXjtVlp0?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.deepcrawl.com%2F) and [Majestic](https:\/\/uk.pcmag.com\/cloud-services\/86337\/majestic) [(49.99 Per Month, Billed Quarterly at Majestic.com)](https:\/\/www.pcmag.com\/otc\/01r1WRIAJykbQgN4oGQ8FSi\/00ykmWuHuPFIJuwKvvnjshX?url=https%3A%2F%2Fmajestic.com%2F) as the best crawlers we tested, and includes the most backlink tracking tools of any product in this roundup next to [LinkResearchTools](https:\/\/uk.pcmag.com\/cloud-services\/86340\/linkresearchtools) [(329.00 Per Month, Billed Annually at LinkResearchTools)](https:\/\/www.pcmag.com\/otc\/01r1WRIAJykbQgN4oGQ8FSi\/026fHAq4OFzel8rSaErwBMK?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.linkresearchtools.com%2F) . It can be a valuable addition to your business's SEO tool suite.\n\n![Ahrefs--Competing Domains](https:\/\/i.pcmag.com\/imagery\/reviews\/03LH2OIsXFyeMgE8i9ynOOn-6.fit_lim.size_740x416.v_1569469943.jpg)\n\n### Best SEO Tool Picks\n- [More SEO Tool Reviews](https:\/\/uk.pcmag.com\/seo-tools)\n- [More from AhrefsPte](https:\/\/www.pcmag.com\/brands\/ahrefspte)","meta_canonical":null}

3. Robots.txt Check

Query:

Response:

4. Spam/Ban Check

Query:

Response:

5. Seen Status Check

ℹ️ Skipped - page is already crawled

📄

INDEXABLE

✅

CRAWLED

1 month ago

🤖

ROBOTS ALLOWED

Page Info Filters

Filter	Status	Condition	Details
HTTP status	PASS	`download_http_code = 200`	HTTP 200
Age cutoff	PASS	`download_stamp > now() - 6 MONTH`	1.5 months ago
History drop	PASS	`isNull(history_drop_reason)`	No drop reason
Spam/ban	PASS	`fh_dont_index != 1 AND ml_spam_score = 0`	ml_spam_score=0
Canonical	PASS	`meta_canonical IS NULL OR = '' OR = src_unparsed`	Not set

Page Details

Property	Value
URL	https://uk.pcmag.com/cloud-services/85707/ahrefs
Last Crawled	2026-02-21 13:13:09 (1 month ago)
First Indexed	2019-01-31 17:23:41 (7 years ago)
HTTP Status Code	200
Meta Title	Ahrefs - Review 2019 - PCMag UK
Meta Description	Ahrefs is a professional-grade SEO tool with powerful features across everything from keyword management to competitive analysis. While its interface isn't geared for beginners, it's a solid choice for experienced digital marketers.
Meta Canonical	null
Boilerpipe Text	If the name Ahrefs sounds more like a command line entry than a product name to you, you've got a handle on the product's philosphy. While this SEO tool is fairly full featured, we found that it didn't spend a whole lot of time on worry about end user niceties, especially an intuitive user interface. Starting at $82 per month for its Lite plan (when billed annually), this is a full featured tool aimed mainly at people who know what they're doing when it comes to SEO. For those folks, however, it's a solid choice. For example, Ahrefs maintains one of the largest indexes of backlinks on the web, currently with more than 12 trillion historical backlinks and 6 billion web pages crawled per day. It also includes a number of other features and capabilities across ad-hoc keyword research, ongoing SEO monitoring and position tracking, content-specific research, and competitive domain comparison. Overall, Ahrefs can do a little bit of everything. While it lacks the keyword management and SEO reporting features of Editors' Choice Moz Pro (79.00 Per Month, Billed Annually at Moz) , and its bare-bones user experience (UX) can't match that of the much cleaner Editors' Choice, SpyFu (33.00 Per Month, Billed Annually at SpyFu) , Ahrefs does plenty beyond its signature crawling capabilities to warrant consideration and has invested in interface improvements, more advanced reporting, and better keyword management features since our initial review. Ahref's pricing is a little on the hgih side, starting at $82 per month for its Lite plan ($99 if you opt for month-to-month billing). This plan gives you one user, five campaigns (the number of sites you can track in the Ahrefs dashboard), 300 tracked keywords per week, 25 domain crawls per day in the Site Explorer tool, and only three searches in the Keyword Explorer per day. There are also caps on the number of alerts, and the number of results you can export from Ahrefs' backlinks and rankings indexes. The $149 per month Standard plan ($179 month-to-month) is the more feasible option for SMBs, upping the platform's capacity to 10 campaigns, 1,000 tracked keywords updated every three days instead of weekly, 100 domains per day, and 50 keyword searches per day. Then there's the Advanced plan, priced at $332 per month billed annually ($399 month-to-month). This is where you start getting into premium features. The Advanced tier gives you 25 campaigns, daily updates on up to 4,000 tracked keywords, 200 keyword searches per day, more expansive access to the backlinks and rankings indexes as well as mobile ranking, and up to three user logins. Finally there's the Agency plan, priced at $832 per month billed annually ($999 month-to-month). This tier gives you real-time web mention tracking, hourly backlink reports, and far higher quotas across every Site Explorer, Content Explorer, and Keyword Explorer mention. For most SMBs, we'd recommend going with the Standard or Advanced plans depending on how much data you're looking to research and how frequently you need alerts. The first thing you notice about the Ahrefs dashboard is that it's fairly sparse. Across the top of the screen is a navigation bar with tabs for Dashboard, Alerts, Site Explorer, Content Explorer, Keywords Explorer, and a Tools drop-down. This is where you can access the Ahrefs application programming interface (API), the Ahrefs browser toolbar, and other tools like domain comparison and quick batch analysis of multiple backlinks. Below the tabs is a search bar to enter a domain, URL, topic, or keyword. The dashboard itself lists all your current campaigns, which you can click on to enter Site Explorer for that site's latest monitoring data. Ad-hoc keyword research is what business users will find themselves using most often when identifying the best possible search engine results pages (SERP) to target with an optimization strategy that can help your pages rank higher. As such, I focused my testing largely on the Ahrefs Keyword Explorer tool. For testing purposes, I used a common set of five keywords for every tool to see how SEO metrics, results, and related keyword recommendations would differ. The five keywords I tested with were: pcmag, digital marketing, online shopping, IT consultant, and small business accounting. This is a fairly typical sampling of terms an SMB might use, including a publishing outift like Ziff Davis. Together they let me see a snapshot of related search results and competitors' spots ripe for targeted optimization. I started in Keyword Explorer by entering all five of my test keywords into the search bar. Ahrefs lets you narrow the search by country, but unlike in KWFinder it doesn't include the ability to drill down by city. The keyword results page was initially the most basic and straightforward of all the tools I tested in terms of metrics returned, but Ahrefs has greatly enhanced its Keyword Explorer tool with a responsive page of interactive data visualizations . Where before there was a basic table with metrics on average monthly search volume, cost-per-click (CPC), how many total search results were on the page, and the keyword difficulty score, in the updated Keywords Explorer interface I got an overview page with interactive bar charts on total search volume and clicks, volume distribution, and difficulty distribution. Below that were tables and charts breaking down SERP features, volume-difficulty distribution, top countries by volume, keyword ideas, and traffic share by pages and domains. When you hit the Metrics tab next to Overview, Keywords Explorer also now uses clickstream data to provide users with more acccurate individual keyword metrics around search volume, clicks (and clicks per search), and return rate (how often people search for the same keyword). Google's Keyword Planner now groups keyword volumes for similar queries, and this is especially useful data in that regard. There is also a link to open the SERP breakdown, listing what URLs hold each positon in the search results with deeper metrics on the SEO strength of the page. Ahrefs has enhanced its SERP results as well, now populating a SERP position history chart to track rank changes over time, along with incorporating newer fields like Featured Snippets into the results page. For my online shopping keyword, for instance, I found that it had the highest search volume and a difficulty score of 75. Conversely, digital marketing had a lower but still significant search volume with a keyword difficulty score of 59. For reference, a difficulty score is an all-in-one, 1-100 number used by all the tools I tested that factors Page Authority (PA) and Domain Authority (DA) SEO metrics together with other data, including keyword search volume, how heavily paid search ads are influencing the results, and how strong the competition is in each spot on the current search results page. Ziff Davis Senior SEO Director, Mike Levin, told me that the ideal difficulty score and PA/DA target you're looking for is below 50, and that any score higher than 60 is typically a tough nut to crack. On the SERP results page for digital marketing, I was able to identify several URLs with low scores in various custom Ahrefs metrics . These include domain rating, URL rating, and the "Ahrefs rank" score, as well as how many links were coming from social media sources like Facebook and LinkedIn (potentially valuable data that you can import into any social media analytics tools you might be using). From here, you can take those target URLs and run a Site Explorer search to identify how your business can optimize its page to snag that SERP spot. On the left-hand side of the Keywords Explorer interface is a small menu with a few other options, giving you a list of related keywords with the same metrics as well as a phrase match list of longer search terms that match the keywords. Compared to the related keyword suggestions you'll find in Moz, KWFinder, and SEMrush (99.95 Per Month at SEMrush) , Ahrefs doesn't give the average user as much in terms of proactive help and targeted recommendations of the right keywords to target. That said, the platform has greatly improved what was the weakest standalone ad-hoc keyword querying in our initial reviews. Ahrefs has bolstered its keyword database from 300 million to 3.1 billion keywords, and as such the Keywords Explorer now returns 10 times more keyword ideas In "Phrase Match" and "Having Same Terms" reports. The platform has also added related keyword suggestion options such as "Also rank for" and "Search suggestions" sections to bring up more relevant keywords. Ahrefs also finally offers basic keyword management to add keyword to a list. On the top right of the keyword results page, you can select a keyword to add to a new or existing keyword list to which you can return later. This is still fairly limited, as you can't take those keywords and add them to an SEO campaign or directly into a lead management module, but it's better than Ahrefs had before, where all you could do was export your keyword results as a CSV file. Moz Pro, SEMrush, SpyFu, and KWFinder all include bettergrouping and list-making capabilities to better organize and refine keyword lists, but Ahrefs is closing the gap. Of the three main categories of SEO—ad-hoc keyword research, ongoing search position monitoring, and crawling—Ahrefs is far stronger in the latter two. When typing a URL into the Site Explorer, I got a comprehensive breakdown of the PCMag.com domain spanning all of the Ahrefs custom metrics, a breakdown of organic keywords and traffic, organic and paid search, and a full index of all the crawled pages on the site. In terms of running quick, comprehensive site diagnostics, only Moz possesses the same level of capability of the tools I tested. Scrolling down the Site Explorer page, I also found interactive data visualizations. These pull in live data on referring domains and pages, backlinks, and a worldwide map of where search traffic is coming from. Below that was also a word cloud of the search terms driving the most traffic. Then in the left-hand navigation column, there were deeper site breakdown options into search and backlinks, paid and organic search, and some new comparison features allowing me to identify competing domains and pages to PCMag. The comparison features broke down how many common and unique keywords my site shared in common with competing sites. Ahrefs and the Kombat comparison tool in SpyFu provided the deepest competitive comparison metrics of the SEO tools. Finally, Ahrefs lets you configure email alerts to track backlinks, new keywords, and site/brand mentions. So when creating a new keyword alert, I simply clicked the add alert button on the top right of the Alerts dashboard, then entered the URL, country, the keyword volume I wanted (less than 1,000, 1,000-10,000, or above 10,000), the email addresses where I wanted the alerts sent, and how frequently those emails should go out. The alerting in Ahrefs is straightforward, easy to set up, and makes it simple to track a website's overall SEO health and monitor targeted keywords. If you're looking for an SEO tool with exceptional crawling and domain analysis that covers all your bases in terms of basic keyword research and ongoing monitoring, Ahrefs is a solid choice. The user experience is nothing fancy and the keyword management and optimization recommendations leave a lot to be desired compared to Editors' Choices Moz Pro and SpyFu, but Ahrefs is on par with DeepCrawl (72.00 Per Month, Billed Annually at DeepCrawl) and Majestic (49.99 Per Month, Billed Quarterly at Majestic.com) as the best crawlers we tested, and includes the most backlink tracking tools of any product in this roundup next to LinkResearchTools (329.00 Per Month, Billed Annually at LinkResearchTools) . It can be a valuable addition to your business's SEO tool suite. Best SEO Tool Picks More SEO Tool Reviews More from AhrefsPte
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If you buy through affiliate links, we may earn commissions, which help support our [testing](https://www.pcmag.com/about/how-we-test-everything-we-review). [PCMag UK](https://uk.pcmag.com/) [Review](https://uk.pcmag.com/article/review) [Reviews](https://uk.pcmag.com/reviews) [Software & Service](https://uk.pcmag.com/software) # Ahrefs Updated Aug 31, 2019 [![Rob Marvin](https://i.pcmag.com/imagery/authors/02H6VGDu3KHtKmdb9oPyY6J.jpg)](https://uk.pcmag.com/u/rob-marvin) & [Rob Marvin](https://uk.pcmag.com/u/rob-marvin) Former Associate Features Editor Our team tests, rates, and reviews more than 1,500 products each year to help you make better buying decisions and get more from technology. Our Expert LOOK INSIDE PC LABS [HOW WE TEST](https://www.pcmag.com/about/how-we-test-everything-we-review) 65 EXPERTS 43 YEARS 41,500+ REVIEWS ![Ahrefs is a professional-grade SEO tool with powerful features across everything from keyword management to competitive analysis. While its interface isn't geared for beginners, it's a solid choice for experienced digital marketers. - Online/Cloud Backup Services](https://sm.pcmag.com/t/pcmag_uk/review/a/ahrefs/ahrefs_w8ju.1920.jpg) 3\.5 Good* #### The Bottom Line Ahrefs is a professional-grade SEO tool with powerful features across everything from keyword management to competitive analysis. While its interface isn't geared for beginners, it's a solid choice for experienced digital marketers. 31 Aug 2019 ## Pros & Cons - - Exceptional site-specific and internet-wide crawling capability. - Solid ad-hoc keyword research. - Comprehensive domain monitoring and comparison. - Improved keyword suggestions. - In-depth SERP analysis. - Basic keyword management. - - Limited SEO reporting. - Bare-bones UX. ## Ahrefs Specs \| \| \| \|---\|---\| \| Advertising / Pay Per Click (PPC) Metrics \| \| \| Backlink Tracking \| \| \| Cost Per Click (CPC) Metrics \| \| \| Difficulty Scoring \| \| \| Domain Authority (DA) \| \| \| Keyword Management \| \| \| Page Authority (PA) \| \| \| Related Keyword Suggestions \| \| \| Search Position Monitoring \| \| \| Webpage Crawling \| \| [All Specs]() Pros & Cons Ahrefs - [Pros & Cons]() - [Ahrefs Specs]() - [Pricing and Plans]() - [Keywords Explorer and User Experience]() - [Site Explorer and Alerts]() - [All the Basics Covered]() - [Final Thoughts]() If the name Ahrefs sounds more like a command line entry than a product name to you, you've got a handle on the product's philosphy. While this [SEO tool](https://uk.pcmag.com/cloud-services/85704/the-best-seo-tools) is fairly full featured, we found that it didn't spend a whole lot of time on worry about end user niceties, especially an intuitive user interface. Starting at \$82 per month for its Lite plan (when billed annually), this is a full featured tool aimed mainly at people who know what they're doing when it comes to SEO. For those folks, however, it's a solid choice. For example, Ahrefs maintains one of the largest indexes of [backlinks](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backlink) on the web, currently with more than 12 trillion historical backlinks and 6 billion web pages crawled per day. It also includes a number of other features and capabilities across ad-hoc keyword research, ongoing SEO monitoring and position tracking, content-specific research, and competitive domain comparison. Overall, Ahrefs can do a little bit of everything. While it lacks the keyword management and SEO reporting features of Editors' Choice [Moz Pro](https://uk.pcmag.com/cloud-services/85709/moz-pro) [(79.00 Per Month, Billed Annually at Moz)](https://www.pcmag.com/otc/01r1WRIAJykbQgN4oGQ8FSi/041qOZQol09O0MS1vwSb2MN?url=https%3A%2F%2Fmoz.com%2Fproducts) , and its bare-bones user experience (UX) can't match that of the much cleaner Editors' Choice, [SpyFu](https://uk.pcmag.com/cloud-services/85708/spyfu) [(33.00 Per Month, Billed Annually at SpyFu)](https://www.pcmag.com/otc/01r1WRIAJykbQgN4oGQ8FSi/018UFPATGYTzIQ4SuB47KbS?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.spyfu.com) , Ahrefs does plenty beyond its signature crawling capabilities to warrant consideration and has invested in interface improvements, more advanced reporting, and better keyword management features since our initial review. ![Ahrefs--Site Explorer](https://i.pcmag.com/imagery/reviews/03LH2OIsXFyeMgE8i9ynOOn-1.fit_lim.size_740x416.v_1569469943.jpg)![Ahrefs--Site Explorer](<data:image/svg+xml,%3Csvg xmlns='http://www.w3.org/2000/svg' viewBox='0 0 16 9'%3E%3C/svg%3E>) ## Pricing and Plans Ahref's pricing is a little on the hgih side, starting at \$82 per month for its Lite plan (\$99 if you opt for month-to-month billing). This plan gives you one user, five campaigns (the number of sites you can track in the Ahrefs dashboard), 300 tracked keywords per week, 25 domain crawls per day in the Site Explorer tool, and only three searches in the Keyword Explorer per day. There are also caps on the number of alerts, and the number of results you can export from Ahrefs' backlinks and rankings indexes. The \$149 per month Standard plan (\$179 month-to-month) is the more feasible option for SMBs, upping the platform's capacity to 10 campaigns, 1,000 tracked keywords updated every three days instead of weekly, 100 domains per day, and 50 keyword searches per day. Then there's the Advanced plan, priced at \$332 per month billed annually (\$399 month-to-month). This is where you start getting into premium features. The Advanced tier gives you 25 campaigns, daily updates on up to 4,000 tracked keywords, 200 keyword searches per day, more expansive access to the backlinks and rankings indexes as well as mobile ranking, and up to three user logins. Finally there's the Agency plan, priced at \$832 per month billed annually (\$999 month-to-month). This tier gives you real-time web mention tracking, hourly backlink reports, and far higher quotas across every Site Explorer, Content Explorer, and Keyword Explorer mention. For most SMBs, we'd recommend going with the Standard or Advanced plans depending on how much data you're looking to research and how frequently you need alerts. ## Keywords Explorer and User Experience The first thing you notice about the Ahrefs dashboard is that it's fairly sparse. Across the top of the screen is a navigation bar with tabs for Dashboard, Alerts, Site Explorer, Content Explorer, Keywords Explorer, and a Tools drop-down. This is where you can access the Ahrefs [application programming interface](https://www.pcmag.com/encyclopedia/term/api) (API), the Ahrefs browser toolbar, and other tools like domain comparison and quick batch analysis of multiple backlinks. Below the tabs is a search bar to enter a domain, URL, topic, or keyword. The dashboard itself lists all your current campaigns, which you can click on to enter Site Explorer for that site's latest monitoring data. Ad-hoc keyword research is what business users will find themselves using most often when identifying the best possible [search engine results pages](https://www.pcmag.com/encyclopedia/term/serp) (SERP) to target with an optimization strategy that can help your pages rank higher. As such, I focused my testing largely on the Ahrefs Keyword Explorer tool. ![Ahrefs--Updated Keyword Explorer](https://i.pcmag.com/imagery/reviews/03LH2OIsXFyeMgE8i9ynOOn-2.fit_lim.size_740x416.v_1569469943.jpg)![Ahrefs--Updated Keyword Explorer](<data:image/svg+xml,%3Csvg xmlns='http://www.w3.org/2000/svg' viewBox='0 0 16 9'%3E%3C/svg%3E>) For testing purposes, I used a common set of five keywords for every tool to see how SEO metrics, results, and related keyword recommendations would differ. The five keywords I tested with were: pcmag, digital marketing, online shopping, IT consultant, and small business accounting. This is a fairly typical sampling of terms an SMB might use, including a publishing outift like Ziff Davis. Together they let me see a snapshot of related search results and competitors' spots ripe for targeted optimization. I started in Keyword Explorer by entering all five of my test keywords into the search bar. Ahrefs lets you narrow the search by country, but unlike in [KWFinder](https://uk.pcmag.com/cloud-services/85705/kwfindercom) it doesn't include the ability to drill down by city. The keyword results page was initially the most basic and straightforward of all the tools I tested in terms of metrics returned, but Ahrefs has greatly enhanced its Keyword Explorer tool with a responsive page of interactive [data visualizations](https://uk.pcmag.com/cloud-services/83744/the-best-data-visualization-tools) . Where before there was a basic table with metrics on average monthly search volume, cost-per-click (CPC), how many total search results were on the page, and the keyword difficulty score, in the updated Keywords Explorer interface I got an overview page with interactive bar charts on total search volume and clicks, volume distribution, and difficulty distribution. Below that were tables and charts breaking down SERP features, volume-difficulty distribution, top countries by volume, keyword ideas, and traffic share by pages and domains. When you hit the Metrics tab next to Overview, Keywords Explorer also now uses clickstream data to provide users with more acccurate individual keyword metrics around search volume, clicks (and clicks per search), and return rate (how often people search for the same keyword). Google's Keyword Planner now groups keyword volumes for similar queries, and this is especially useful data in that regard. There is also a link to open the SERP breakdown, listing what URLs hold each positon in the search results with deeper metrics on the SEO strength of the page. Ahrefs has enhanced its SERP results as well, now populating a SERP position history chart to track rank changes over time, along with incorporating newer fields like Featured Snippets into the results page. #### Similar Products [Our Current Picks for The Best SEO Tools for 2020](https://uk.pcmag.com/cloud-services/85704/the-best-seo-tools-for-2020) For my online shopping keyword, for instance, I found that it had the highest search volume and a difficulty score of 75. Conversely, digital marketing had a lower but still significant search volume with a keyword difficulty score of 59. For reference, a difficulty score is an all-in-one, 1-100 number used by all the tools I tested that factors Page Authority (PA) and Domain Authority (DA) SEO metrics together with other data, including keyword search volume, how heavily paid search ads are influencing the results, and how strong the competition is in each spot on the current search results page. Ziff Davis Senior SEO Director, Mike Levin, told me that the ideal difficulty score and PA/DA target you're looking for is below 50, and that any score higher than 60 is typically a tough nut to crack. ![Ahrefs--Improved Keyword Suggestions](https://i.pcmag.com/imagery/reviews/03LH2OIsXFyeMgE8i9ynOOn-3.fit_lim.size_740x416.v_1569469943.jpg)![Ahrefs--Improved Keyword Suggestions](<data:image/svg+xml,%3Csvg xmlns='http://www.w3.org/2000/svg' viewBox='0 0 16 9'%3E%3C/svg%3E>) On the SERP results page for digital marketing, I was able to identify several URLs with low scores in various [custom Ahrefs metrics](https://ahrefs.com/blog/seo-metrics/). These include domain rating, URL rating, and the "Ahrefs rank" score, as well as how many links were coming from social media sources like Facebook and LinkedIn (potentially valuable data that you can import into any [social media analytics](https://uk.pcmag.com/cloud-services/71221/the-best-social-media-management-analytics-tools) tools you might be using). From here, you can take those target URLs and run a Site Explorer search to identify how your business can optimize its page to snag that SERP spot. On the left-hand side of the Keywords Explorer interface is a small menu with a few other options, giving you a list of related keywords with the same metrics as well as a [phrase match](https://support.google.com/adwords/answer/2407784?hl=en) list of longer search terms that match the keywords. Compared to the related keyword suggestions you'll find in Moz, KWFinder, and [SEMrush](https://uk.pcmag.com/cloud-services/85706/semrush) [(99.95 Per Month at SEMrush)](https://www.pcmag.com/otc/01r1WRIAJykbQgN4oGQ8FSi/01ft3gZQd80nrKtleEU4Ymi?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.semrush.com%2Fprices%2F%3Fref%3D2016103336%26refer_source%3D%26utm_source%3Dberush%26utm_medium%3Dpromo%26utm_campaign%3Dbanner) , Ahrefs doesn't give the average user as much in terms of proactive help and targeted recommendations of the right keywords to target. That said, the platform has greatly improved what was the weakest standalone ad-hoc keyword querying in our initial reviews. Ahrefs has bolstered its keyword database from 300 million to 3.1 billion keywords, and as such the Keywords Explorer now returns 10 times more keyword ideas In "Phrase Match" and "Having Same Terms" reports. The platform has also added related keyword suggestion options such as "Also rank for" and "Search suggestions" sections to bring up more relevant keywords. Ahrefs also finally offers basic keyword management to add keyword to a list. On the top right of the keyword results page, you can select a keyword to add to a new or existing keyword list to which you can return later. This is still fairly limited, as you can't take those keywords and add them to an SEO campaign or directly into a lead management module, but it's better than Ahrefs had before, where all you could do was export your keyword results as a CSV file. Moz Pro, SEMrush, SpyFu, and KWFinder all include bettergrouping and list-making capabilities to better organize and refine keyword lists, but Ahrefs is closing the gap. ![Ahrefs--SERP Overview](https://i.pcmag.com/imagery/reviews/03LH2OIsXFyeMgE8i9ynOOn-4.fit_lim.size_740x416.v_1569469943.jpg)![Ahrefs--SERP Overview](<data:image/svg+xml,%3Csvg xmlns='http://www.w3.org/2000/svg' viewBox='0 0 16 9'%3E%3C/svg%3E>) ## Site Explorer and Alerts Of the three main categories of SEO—ad-hoc keyword research, ongoing search position monitoring, and crawling—Ahrefs is far stronger in the latter two. When typing a URL into the Site Explorer, I got a comprehensive breakdown of the PCMag.com domain spanning all of the Ahrefs custom metrics, a breakdown of organic keywords and traffic, organic and paid search, and a full index of all the crawled pages on the site. In terms of running quick, comprehensive site diagnostics, only Moz possesses the same level of capability of the tools I tested. Scrolling down the Site Explorer page, I also found interactive data visualizations. These pull in live data on referring domains and pages, backlinks, and a worldwide map of where search traffic is coming from. Below that was also a word cloud of the search terms driving the most traffic. Then in the left-hand navigation column, there were deeper site breakdown options into search and backlinks, paid and organic search, and some new comparison features allowing me to identify competing domains and pages to PCMag. The comparison features broke down how many common and unique keywords my site shared in common with competing sites. Ahrefs and the Kombat comparison tool in SpyFu provided the deepest competitive comparison metrics of the SEO tools. ![Ahrefs--Add Alert](https://i.pcmag.com/imagery/reviews/03LH2OIsXFyeMgE8i9ynOOn-5.fit_lim.size_740x416.v_1569469943.jpg)![Ahrefs--Add Alert](<data:image/svg+xml,%3Csvg xmlns='http://www.w3.org/2000/svg' viewBox='0 0 16 9'%3E%3C/svg%3E>) Finally, Ahrefs lets you configure email alerts to track backlinks, new keywords, and site/brand mentions. So when creating a new keyword alert, I simply clicked the add alert button on the top right of the Alerts dashboard, then entered the URL, country, the keyword volume I wanted (less than 1,000, 1,000-10,000, or above 10,000), the email addresses where I wanted the alerts sent, and how frequently those emails should go out. The alerting in Ahrefs is straightforward, easy to set up, and makes it simple to track a website's overall SEO health and monitor targeted keywords. ## All the Basics Covered If you're looking for an SEO tool with exceptional crawling and domain analysis that covers all your bases in terms of basic keyword research and ongoing monitoring, Ahrefs is a solid choice. The user experience is nothing fancy and the keyword management and optimization recommendations leave a lot to be desired compared to Editors' Choices Moz Pro and SpyFu, but Ahrefs is on par with [DeepCrawl](https://uk.pcmag.com/cloud-services/86338/deepcrawl) [(72.00 Per Month, Billed Annually at DeepCrawl)](https://www.pcmag.com/otc/01r1WRIAJykbQgN4oGQ8FSi/037AcRCAKts3SoKjXjtVlp0?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.deepcrawl.com%2F) and [Majestic](https://uk.pcmag.com/cloud-services/86337/majestic) [(49.99 Per Month, Billed Quarterly at Majestic.com)](https://www.pcmag.com/otc/01r1WRIAJykbQgN4oGQ8FSi/00ykmWuHuPFIJuwKvvnjshX?url=https%3A%2F%2Fmajestic.com%2F) as the best crawlers we tested, and includes the most backlink tracking tools of any product in this roundup next to [LinkResearchTools](https://uk.pcmag.com/cloud-services/86340/linkresearchtools) [(329.00 Per Month, Billed Annually at LinkResearchTools)](https://www.pcmag.com/otc/01r1WRIAJykbQgN4oGQ8FSi/026fHAq4OFzel8rSaErwBMK?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.linkresearchtools.com%2F) . It can be a valuable addition to your business's SEO tool suite. ![Ahrefs--Competing Domains](https://i.pcmag.com/imagery/reviews/03LH2OIsXFyeMgE8i9ynOOn-6.fit_lim.size_740x416.v_1569469943.jpg)![Ahrefs--Competing Domains](<data:image/svg+xml,%3Csvg xmlns='http://www.w3.org/2000/svg' viewBox='0 0 16 9'%3E%3C/svg%3E>) ### Best SEO Tool Picks - [More SEO Tool Reviews](https://uk.pcmag.com/seo-tools) - [More from AhrefsPte](https://www.pcmag.com/brands/ahrefspte) ## Final Thoughts ![Ahrefs is a professional-grade SEO tool with powerful features across everything from keyword management to competitive analysis. While its interface isn't geared for beginners, it's a solid choice for experienced digital marketers. - Online/Cloud Backup Services](https://sm.pcmag.com/t/pcmag_uk/review/a/ahrefs/ahrefs_w8ju.1920.jpg) # Ahrefs 3\.5 Good Ahrefs is a professional-grade SEO tool with powerful features across everything from keyword management to competitive analysis. While its interface isn't geared for beginners, it's a solid choice for experienced digital marketers. What Our Ratings Mean - 5\.0 - Exemplary: Near perfection, ground-breaking - 4\.5 - Outstanding: Best in class, acts as a benchmark for measuring competitors - 4\.0 - Excellent: A performance, feature, or value leader in its class, with few shortfalls - 3\.5 - Good: Does what the product should do, and does so better than many competitors - 3\.0 - Average: Does what the product should do, and sits in the middle of the pack - 2\.5 - Fair: We have some reservations, buy with caution - 2\.0 - Subpar: We do not recommend, buy with extreme caution - 1\.5 - Poor: Do not buy this product - 1\.0 - Dismal: Don't even think about buying this product Read Our [Editorial Mission Statement](https://uk.pcmag.com/about/pcmagcom-mission-statement) and [Testing Methodologies](https://uk.pcmag.com/about/how-we-test-everything-we-review). # About Our Expert ![Rob Marvin](https://i.pcmag.com/imagery/authors/02H6VGDu3KHtKmdb9oPyY6J.jpg) ### Rob Marvin #### Former Associate Features Editor Rob Marvin writes features, news, and trend stories on all manner of emerging technologies. Beats include: startups, business and venture capital, blockchain and cryptocurrencies, AI, augmented and virtual reality, IoT and automation, legal cannabis tech, social media, streaming, security, mobile commerce, M\&A, and entertainment. Rob was previously Assistant Editor and Associate Editor in PCMag's Business section. Prior to that, he served as an editor at SD Times. He graduated from Syracuse University's S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications. You can also find his business and tech coverage on Entrepreneur and Fox Business. Rob is also an unabashed nerd who does occasional entertainment writing for Geek.com on movies, TV, and culture. Once a year you can find him on a couch with friends marathoning The Lord of the Rings trilogy--extended editions. ### Read the latest from Rob Marvin - [Insightly CRM](https://uk.pcmag.com/cloud-services/2538/insightly-crm) - [Social CRM: Where Social Media Meets Customer Engagement](https://uk.pcmag.com/crm-software/71279/social-crm-where-social-media-meets-customer-engagement) - [37 Trippy Movies and TV Shows You Can Stream on 4/20](https://uk.pcmag.com/features/94469/39-trippy-movies-and-tv-shows-you-can-stream-on-420) - [The Biggest Tech Mergers and Acquisitions of All Time](https://uk.pcmag.com/enterprise/117931/the-biggest-tech-mergers-and-acquisitions-of-all-time) - [Mitel MiCloud Connect](https://uk.pcmag.com/internet-telephony-voip/90970/mitel-micloud-business) - [More from Rob Marvin](https://uk.pcmag.com/u/rob-marvin) [Read full bio](https://uk.pcmag.com/u/rob-marvin) ##### Comments Please enable JavaScript to view the comments. 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Readable Markdown	If the name Ahrefs sounds more like a command line entry than a product name to you, you've got a handle on the product's philosphy. While this [SEO tool](https://uk.pcmag.com/cloud-services/85704/the-best-seo-tools) is fairly full featured, we found that it didn't spend a whole lot of time on worry about end user niceties, especially an intuitive user interface. Starting at \$82 per month for its Lite plan (when billed annually), this is a full featured tool aimed mainly at people who know what they're doing when it comes to SEO. For those folks, however, it's a solid choice. For example, Ahrefs maintains one of the largest indexes of [backlinks](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backlink) on the web, currently with more than 12 trillion historical backlinks and 6 billion web pages crawled per day. It also includes a number of other features and capabilities across ad-hoc keyword research, ongoing SEO monitoring and position tracking, content-specific research, and competitive domain comparison. Overall, Ahrefs can do a little bit of everything. While it lacks the keyword management and SEO reporting features of Editors' Choice [Moz Pro](https://uk.pcmag.com/cloud-services/85709/moz-pro) [(79.00 Per Month, Billed Annually at Moz)](https://www.pcmag.com/otc/01r1WRIAJykbQgN4oGQ8FSi/041qOZQol09O0MS1vwSb2MN?url=https%3A%2F%2Fmoz.com%2Fproducts) , and its bare-bones user experience (UX) can't match that of the much cleaner Editors' Choice, [SpyFu](https://uk.pcmag.com/cloud-services/85708/spyfu) [(33.00 Per Month, Billed Annually at SpyFu)](https://www.pcmag.com/otc/01r1WRIAJykbQgN4oGQ8FSi/018UFPATGYTzIQ4SuB47KbS?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.spyfu.com) , Ahrefs does plenty beyond its signature crawling capabilities to warrant consideration and has invested in interface improvements, more advanced reporting, and better keyword management features since our initial review. ![Ahrefs--Site Explorer](https://i.pcmag.com/imagery/reviews/03LH2OIsXFyeMgE8i9ynOOn-1.fit_lim.size_740x416.v_1569469943.jpg) Ahref's pricing is a little on the hgih side, starting at \$82 per month for its Lite plan (\$99 if you opt for month-to-month billing). This plan gives you one user, five campaigns (the number of sites you can track in the Ahrefs dashboard), 300 tracked keywords per week, 25 domain crawls per day in the Site Explorer tool, and only three searches in the Keyword Explorer per day. There are also caps on the number of alerts, and the number of results you can export from Ahrefs' backlinks and rankings indexes. The \$149 per month Standard plan (\$179 month-to-month) is the more feasible option for SMBs, upping the platform's capacity to 10 campaigns, 1,000 tracked keywords updated every three days instead of weekly, 100 domains per day, and 50 keyword searches per day. Then there's the Advanced plan, priced at \$332 per month billed annually (\$399 month-to-month). This is where you start getting into premium features. The Advanced tier gives you 25 campaigns, daily updates on up to 4,000 tracked keywords, 200 keyword searches per day, more expansive access to the backlinks and rankings indexes as well as mobile ranking, and up to three user logins. Finally there's the Agency plan, priced at \$832 per month billed annually (\$999 month-to-month). This tier gives you real-time web mention tracking, hourly backlink reports, and far higher quotas across every Site Explorer, Content Explorer, and Keyword Explorer mention. For most SMBs, we'd recommend going with the Standard or Advanced plans depending on how much data you're looking to research and how frequently you need alerts. The first thing you notice about the Ahrefs dashboard is that it's fairly sparse. Across the top of the screen is a navigation bar with tabs for Dashboard, Alerts, Site Explorer, Content Explorer, Keywords Explorer, and a Tools drop-down. This is where you can access the Ahrefs [application programming interface](https://www.pcmag.com/encyclopedia/term/api) (API), the Ahrefs browser toolbar, and other tools like domain comparison and quick batch analysis of multiple backlinks. Below the tabs is a search bar to enter a domain, URL, topic, or keyword. The dashboard itself lists all your current campaigns, which you can click on to enter Site Explorer for that site's latest monitoring data. Ad-hoc keyword research is what business users will find themselves using most often when identifying the best possible [search engine results pages](https://www.pcmag.com/encyclopedia/term/serp) (SERP) to target with an optimization strategy that can help your pages rank higher. As such, I focused my testing largely on the Ahrefs Keyword Explorer tool. ![Ahrefs--Updated Keyword Explorer](https://i.pcmag.com/imagery/reviews/03LH2OIsXFyeMgE8i9ynOOn-2.fit_lim.size_740x416.v_1569469943.jpg) For testing purposes, I used a common set of five keywords for every tool to see how SEO metrics, results, and related keyword recommendations would differ. The five keywords I tested with were: pcmag, digital marketing, online shopping, IT consultant, and small business accounting. This is a fairly typical sampling of terms an SMB might use, including a publishing outift like Ziff Davis. Together they let me see a snapshot of related search results and competitors' spots ripe for targeted optimization. I started in Keyword Explorer by entering all five of my test keywords into the search bar. Ahrefs lets you narrow the search by country, but unlike in [KWFinder](https://uk.pcmag.com/cloud-services/85705/kwfindercom) it doesn't include the ability to drill down by city. The keyword results page was initially the most basic and straightforward of all the tools I tested in terms of metrics returned, but Ahrefs has greatly enhanced its Keyword Explorer tool with a responsive page of interactive [data visualizations](https://uk.pcmag.com/cloud-services/83744/the-best-data-visualization-tools) . Where before there was a basic table with metrics on average monthly search volume, cost-per-click (CPC), how many total search results were on the page, and the keyword difficulty score, in the updated Keywords Explorer interface I got an overview page with interactive bar charts on total search volume and clicks, volume distribution, and difficulty distribution. Below that were tables and charts breaking down SERP features, volume-difficulty distribution, top countries by volume, keyword ideas, and traffic share by pages and domains. When you hit the Metrics tab next to Overview, Keywords Explorer also now uses clickstream data to provide users with more acccurate individual keyword metrics around search volume, clicks (and clicks per search), and return rate (how often people search for the same keyword). Google's Keyword Planner now groups keyword volumes for similar queries, and this is especially useful data in that regard. There is also a link to open the SERP breakdown, listing what URLs hold each positon in the search results with deeper metrics on the SEO strength of the page. Ahrefs has enhanced its SERP results as well, now populating a SERP position history chart to track rank changes over time, along with incorporating newer fields like Featured Snippets into the results page. For my online shopping keyword, for instance, I found that it had the highest search volume and a difficulty score of 75. Conversely, digital marketing had a lower but still significant search volume with a keyword difficulty score of 59. For reference, a difficulty score is an all-in-one, 1-100 number used by all the tools I tested that factors Page Authority (PA) and Domain Authority (DA) SEO metrics together with other data, including keyword search volume, how heavily paid search ads are influencing the results, and how strong the competition is in each spot on the current search results page. Ziff Davis Senior SEO Director, Mike Levin, told me that the ideal difficulty score and PA/DA target you're looking for is below 50, and that any score higher than 60 is typically a tough nut to crack. ![Ahrefs--Improved Keyword Suggestions](https://i.pcmag.com/imagery/reviews/03LH2OIsXFyeMgE8i9ynOOn-3.fit_lim.size_740x416.v_1569469943.jpg) On the SERP results page for digital marketing, I was able to identify several URLs with low scores in various [custom Ahrefs metrics](https://ahrefs.com/blog/seo-metrics/). These include domain rating, URL rating, and the "Ahrefs rank" score, as well as how many links were coming from social media sources like Facebook and LinkedIn (potentially valuable data that you can import into any [social media analytics](https://uk.pcmag.com/cloud-services/71221/the-best-social-media-management-analytics-tools) tools you might be using). From here, you can take those target URLs and run a Site Explorer search to identify how your business can optimize its page to snag that SERP spot. On the left-hand side of the Keywords Explorer interface is a small menu with a few other options, giving you a list of related keywords with the same metrics as well as a [phrase match](https://support.google.com/adwords/answer/2407784?hl=en) list of longer search terms that match the keywords. Compared to the related keyword suggestions you'll find in Moz, KWFinder, and [SEMrush](https://uk.pcmag.com/cloud-services/85706/semrush) [(99.95 Per Month at SEMrush)](https://www.pcmag.com/otc/01r1WRIAJykbQgN4oGQ8FSi/01ft3gZQd80nrKtleEU4Ymi?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.semrush.com%2Fprices%2F%3Fref%3D2016103336%26refer_source%3D%26utm_source%3Dberush%26utm_medium%3Dpromo%26utm_campaign%3Dbanner) , Ahrefs doesn't give the average user as much in terms of proactive help and targeted recommendations of the right keywords to target. That said, the platform has greatly improved what was the weakest standalone ad-hoc keyword querying in our initial reviews. Ahrefs has bolstered its keyword database from 300 million to 3.1 billion keywords, and as such the Keywords Explorer now returns 10 times more keyword ideas In "Phrase Match" and "Having Same Terms" reports. The platform has also added related keyword suggestion options such as "Also rank for" and "Search suggestions" sections to bring up more relevant keywords. Ahrefs also finally offers basic keyword management to add keyword to a list. On the top right of the keyword results page, you can select a keyword to add to a new or existing keyword list to which you can return later. This is still fairly limited, as you can't take those keywords and add them to an SEO campaign or directly into a lead management module, but it's better than Ahrefs had before, where all you could do was export your keyword results as a CSV file. Moz Pro, SEMrush, SpyFu, and KWFinder all include bettergrouping and list-making capabilities to better organize and refine keyword lists, but Ahrefs is closing the gap. ![Ahrefs--SERP Overview](https://i.pcmag.com/imagery/reviews/03LH2OIsXFyeMgE8i9ynOOn-4.fit_lim.size_740x416.v_1569469943.jpg) Of the three main categories of SEO—ad-hoc keyword research, ongoing search position monitoring, and crawling—Ahrefs is far stronger in the latter two. When typing a URL into the Site Explorer, I got a comprehensive breakdown of the PCMag.com domain spanning all of the Ahrefs custom metrics, a breakdown of organic keywords and traffic, organic and paid search, and a full index of all the crawled pages on the site. In terms of running quick, comprehensive site diagnostics, only Moz possesses the same level of capability of the tools I tested. Scrolling down the Site Explorer page, I also found interactive data visualizations. These pull in live data on referring domains and pages, backlinks, and a worldwide map of where search traffic is coming from. Below that was also a word cloud of the search terms driving the most traffic. Then in the left-hand navigation column, there were deeper site breakdown options into search and backlinks, paid and organic search, and some new comparison features allowing me to identify competing domains and pages to PCMag. The comparison features broke down how many common and unique keywords my site shared in common with competing sites. Ahrefs and the Kombat comparison tool in SpyFu provided the deepest competitive comparison metrics of the SEO tools. ![Ahrefs--Add Alert](https://i.pcmag.com/imagery/reviews/03LH2OIsXFyeMgE8i9ynOOn-5.fit_lim.size_740x416.v_1569469943.jpg) Finally, Ahrefs lets you configure email alerts to track backlinks, new keywords, and site/brand mentions. So when creating a new keyword alert, I simply clicked the add alert button on the top right of the Alerts dashboard, then entered the URL, country, the keyword volume I wanted (less than 1,000, 1,000-10,000, or above 10,000), the email addresses where I wanted the alerts sent, and how frequently those emails should go out. The alerting in Ahrefs is straightforward, easy to set up, and makes it simple to track a website's overall SEO health and monitor targeted keywords. If you're looking for an SEO tool with exceptional crawling and domain analysis that covers all your bases in terms of basic keyword research and ongoing monitoring, Ahrefs is a solid choice. The user experience is nothing fancy and the keyword management and optimization recommendations leave a lot to be desired compared to Editors' Choices Moz Pro and SpyFu, but Ahrefs is on par with [DeepCrawl](https://uk.pcmag.com/cloud-services/86338/deepcrawl) [(72.00 Per Month, Billed Annually at DeepCrawl)](https://www.pcmag.com/otc/01r1WRIAJykbQgN4oGQ8FSi/037AcRCAKts3SoKjXjtVlp0?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.deepcrawl.com%2F) and [Majestic](https://uk.pcmag.com/cloud-services/86337/majestic) [(49.99 Per Month, Billed Quarterly at Majestic.com)](https://www.pcmag.com/otc/01r1WRIAJykbQgN4oGQ8FSi/00ykmWuHuPFIJuwKvvnjshX?url=https%3A%2F%2Fmajestic.com%2F) as the best crawlers we tested, and includes the most backlink tracking tools of any product in this roundup next to [LinkResearchTools](https://uk.pcmag.com/cloud-services/86340/linkresearchtools) [(329.00 Per Month, Billed Annually at LinkResearchTools)](https://www.pcmag.com/otc/01r1WRIAJykbQgN4oGQ8FSi/026fHAq4OFzel8rSaErwBMK?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.linkresearchtools.com%2F) . It can be a valuable addition to your business's SEO tool suite. ![Ahrefs--Competing Domains](https://i.pcmag.com/imagery/reviews/03LH2OIsXFyeMgE8i9ynOOn-6.fit_lim.size_740x416.v_1569469943.jpg) ### Best SEO Tool Picks - [More SEO Tool Reviews](https://uk.pcmag.com/seo-tools) - [More from AhrefsPte](https://www.pcmag.com/brands/ahrefspte)
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