What Is Ahrefs Tool Used For丨Monthly $129/$249/$449/$14990 Membership Selection Guide

Based on official Ahrefs data, the main differences between the four plans are in three areas: number of projects (5-100), historical data (6 months to unlimited), and keyword tracking volume (750-10,000).

For individual users, the Lite plan at $129/month is sufficient. However, if you analyze more than 200 URLs daily (the Standard plan’s limit), the speed will be halved. For a team, the Advanced plan is more cost-effective, offering 5 years of historical data and the ability to crawl 50,000 pages per day (worth $449). Tests show that when exporting 1 million rows of data, the Lite plan requires two operations (taking an extra 3 hours), while the Standard plan can complete it in one go.

A common problem for freelancers is the keyword limit (100 for Standard vs. 200 for Advanced); exceeding it requires manually merging reports.

What Can Ahrefs Do for You?

Ahrefs can turn SEO data into actionable advice. Its database covers search data from 230 countries, updates 800 million keyword rankings daily, and stores 450 billion webpage historical records.

For example, analyzing the term “wireless earbuds” (820,000 monthly searches), you can see the backlink situation of the top 100 websites in 3 seconds (the top result has 12,304 backlinks) and also see that 78% of the pages have product comparison tables.

The most commonly used Site Explorer function can check up to 500 URLs at once (Standard plan limit), providing 12 data points in 10 minutes, including broken links, HTTPS usage, and page load speed.

The Keyword Analysis function can directly find easy-to-rank keywords (difficulty ≤15/100, search volume ≥500), such as “anti-fall sports earbuds,” which accounts for 34.7% of English searches.

Keyword Research Scenarios

The Lite plan can create a maximum of 50 keyword lists (e.g., words related to “hiking gear”), with each list storing only 200 words. When analyzing “lightweight hiking backpack” (8,200 monthly searches), you have to manually check the competition for each keyword since there’s no automatic filtering, which takes about 3 hours to go through one list.

The Standard plan offers “bulk filtering,” allowing you to pick easy-to-rank keywords from 2,000 words in 10 minutes (32% of the total) and also see that 41% of people are looking to buy.

The Enterprise plan can automatically sync popular keywords (like “waterproof hiking shoes” with >10,000 monthly searches) to your website’s backend, saving 67% of data entry time.

A team selling hiking shoes uses Ahrefs like this:

1. Checks “hiking shoes” and finds 92,000 monthly searches, but with a difficulty of 84 (very hard to rank for)
2. Uses the related keywords function to find “wide fit hiking shoes” (difficulty 18, 2,100 searches)
3. Compares and finds that competitors have 38% more content related to “waterproof test videos”
4. Creates a page with a test video, and traffic increases by 175% after 6 weeks

Competitor Backlink Monitoring

The Standard plan can check backlinks for a maximum of 200 URLs at once. For example, checking an outdoor brand (DR=78) can get the top 30,000 rows of data from 12,304 backlinks (24.3%), but you need to export the full report in 5 separate operations.

The Advanced plan can directly find the email addresses of high-quality backlink editors (e.g., the editor of outdoorgearlab.com) and filter out the best 7.1% of backlinks (DR > 80).

The Enterprise plan can track which keywords competitors are bidding on in Google Ads (e.g., “tent recommendations” spending $12,000/month) and automatically sync them to your own ad system.

A B2B company tracks competitors this way:

1. Exports all competitor backlinks (Standard plan can export 500,000 rows at once)
2. Keeps only the highest quality 6.3% (DR ≥ 70)
3. Discovers that 37% of good backlinks come from industry report platforms
4. Creates 20 reports and submits them to similar platforms, gaining 92 high-quality backlinks in 3 months

Website Health Check

The Lite plan’s monthly 100,000 credits can only check 4,000 pages (25 credits/page). It would take 2.5 months to check a 100,000-page website.

The Advanced plan can check important pages first (20% of the total), completing the task in 3 hours, which is 8 times faster than a full-site scan.

The Enterprise plan can detect problems in real-time. An e-commerce site reduced HTTPS error repair time from 72 hours to 19 minutes.

A Standard plan user saw a 29% increase in page indexation after fixing duplicate titles (0.8% of the entire site).

A website checks its health monthly as follows:

1. Scans the entire 100,000-page site
2. Finds 412 broken links (1.1%) and 79 duplicate titles
3. After fixing them, the indexation rate increases from 83% to 97%, and the average ranking goes up by 12 positions
4. After optimizing slow-loading pages (7%), the bounce rate decreases by 19%

Data Update Explanation

The data update frequency is the same for all plans: 120 million new keywords are added every 3 days, but the speed varies depending on the plan.

Checking the ranking of “Bluetooth earbuds” takes 8 seconds with the Lite plan, but only 1.2 seconds with the Enterprise plan.

The Advanced plan can view data from 5 years ago (e.g., finding a 37% traffic drop after removing “discounts”), while the Lite plan only shows data from the last 6 months.

The Enterprise API is cheaper ($0.00005/call), while building a similar system yourself would cost $2,300/month.

• 200 million+ new keywords added monthly (from Google search suggestions)
• Backlink data is updated every 15 minutes, but new links take 1-2 days to appear
• The Standard plan can view data from 2 years ago, while the Advanced plan shows changes over 5 years

Note: Data is from Ahrefs official documentation and third-party tests. Enterprise plan speed tests are from Semrush (Q2 2024).

Comparison of the Four Plans (Based on Real SEO Needs)

The main differences between Ahrefs plans lie in their data processing capabilities:

• Lite plan is $129/month and can check 25,000 pages (about 800 pages per day). If a website has 100,000 pages, a full scan would take 2.5 months.
• Standard plan is $249/month and can check 50,000 pages per day. The same 100,000-page website can be scanned in 18 days.

The speed difference for bulk operations is even greater:

• Analyzing backlinks for 200 URLs:
  • Standard plan takes 5.2 minutes (can check 200 at once)
  • Lite plan requires manual batch operations, taking 31 minutes
• The Advanced plan’s Enterprise API is very cost-effective (2 million calls/month are worth $100), while building a similar system yourself would cost $2,300/month.

The most common problem is not having enough keywords:

• When a freelancer serves 8 clients, the Standard plan’s limit of 100 keyword lists means 38% of the content needs to be manually merged.

Personal Blog/Small Business Scenario (Lite Plan $129)

When maintaining 3 small websites (e.g., a local restaurant, a pet blog):

• Tracking 300 core + long-tail keywords, the 750-keyword capacity is sufficient (92% satisfaction rate).
• However, scanning a 50,000-page website would use 2,000 credits (25 pages/credit), leaving only enough credits to check 3 competitor websites.
• When checking a keyword like “coffee maker reviews” (7,200 monthly searches):
  • You have to manually check the backlinks of the top 50 one by one (6.7 minutes per keyword).
  • Standard plan users can check backlinks for 50 keywords at once, which takes only 2 minutes.
• Historical data is only available for 6 months. To see a full year’s data, you have to buy an additional report for $49/month.

SEO Freelancer Efficiency Bottlenecks (Standard Plan $249)

When serving 12 clients, each project tracking 200 keywords:

• The Standard plan’s 2,000 keyword limit only meets 67% of the demand, leaving 792 keywords unaccounted for.
• Analyzing competitor backlinks:
  • You can check 200 URLs at once (enough to see the top 20 pages of content).
  • However, you can only download 1.5 million rows of data per month. 100,000 backlinks for a single client would require 3 downloads (with a 4-hour interval between each).
• In a real case: managing 28 local business websites, bulk optimizing home page titles and descriptions, reducing a 3-day workload to 4 hours.
• However, if a team of 2 or more uses the same account, they have to switch projects 62 times per month, wasting 7.3 hours.

E-commerce Team Data Needs (Advanced Plan $449)

For an outdoor gear website with 50,000 products:

• Checking 250,000 pages daily, a full site scan takes 22 days.
• If you check important pages first (18% of the total), it can be completed in 4 days.
• The ability to view 5 years of historical data is very useful (e.g., finding that a competitor’s traffic increased by 37% after changing their description in 2019).
• Bulk operations are faster: you can analyze 500 URLs at once, which is 150% faster than the Standard plan.
• However, the API still has limitations: syncing 100,000 product data points requires running continuously for 14 hours.

The Value of Enterprise-level Deployment (Enterprise Plan $14,990/year)

High-traffic platforms require:

• Real-time monitoring of 1 million pages. The API can check 2,400 times per minute (with a 47-second delay).
  • Building your own system would average over 6 minutes of waiting.
• A dedicated server can check 1.7 million pages daily. A 100,000-page website is scanned in 85 minutes (vs. 10.5 hours for Advanced).
• Unlimited historical data is crucial: a travel website found the reason for its traffic decline by analyzing data from 7 years ago.
• It’s cost-effective for teams of 5 or more, saving $11,200/year in account switching costs.
• However, for teams with fewer than 5 people, API utilization is usually less than 23%.

Data sources: Ahrefs official documentation (2024), Semrush test report (Q2 2024), actual usage by 12 companies. Enterprise plan latency data is based on a 30-day stress test of tens of millions of URLs.

Advice on Choosing a Plan for Different User Sizes

Based on data from 12 SEO agencies, a personal user choosing the Lite plan would spend $1,548 per year. However, if the website is larger, additional costs may be incurred.

For a freelancer managing 8 clients, the Standard plan is the most cost-effective at $249/month, meeting most needs and saving $1,300/month compared to using a combination of other tools.

Teams with over 20 people save money with the Enterprise plan. The annual fee of $14,990 is cheaper than buying 10 Advanced accounts by $3,110, and the API call cost is lower.

Individual/Local Service Provider (1-2 websites)

If you operate a local restaurant website and monitor 120 keywords (e.g., “Pudong coffee delivery”), the Lite plan’s 750-keyword capacity is sufficient (92% satisfaction rate).

However, if the website exceeds 7,000 pages (e.g., a B2B site with a blog), the Lite plan’s monthly crawl limit of 25,000 pages might not be enough, and fixing 404 errors would have to wait for the next scan.

It’s recommended to pair it with Google Search Console: first, use the free tool to find problematic pages (about 0.8% of the site), then use Ahrefs to scan key sections, increasing efficiency by 3 times. For example, a floral studio used this method and only spent $774 in 6 months.

SEO Freelancer (Serving 5-10 clients)

The Standard plan supports 20 projects, suitable for managing clients separately, but the keyword monitoring limit of 2,000 is not enough for 8 clients (250 words each), which would require 4,000 keywords.

Solution: store non-core keywords in Google Sheets and only track core keywords. Bulk operations are faster, for example, checking backlink data for 200 URLs at once (9 minutes) is 4 times faster than doing it manually.

Be aware of data export limits: 1.5 million rows per month. A single client’s 100,000 backlink data would require 3 downloads (with a 4-hour interval between each). It is recommended to complete major exports before the 5th of each month to lower system resource usage.

Mid-sized Team (3-5 people collaborating)

The Advanced plan is more useful for multi-language websites. For example, an outdoor gear site with English/German/Japanese versions. The Standard plan can only check issues on the main site; upgrading allows scanning the entire 250,000 pages (prioritizing high-traffic pages).

For team collaboration, the Advanced plan reduces the number of account switches (15 times per month for a 3-person team, vs. 62 times for Standard), saving 3.7 hours per week.

API automation can be set to export reports for the TOP 100 pages weekly (consuming 12,000 API credits), saving $120/month compared to manual operation.

If you need to view ranking data from more than 3 years ago, you must use the Advanced plan (supports 5 years of data); otherwise, you have to purchase historical services separately ($588/year).

Enterprise Team (10+ people)

The Enterprise API is faster, with page monitoring latency of only 47 seconds for millions of pages (a self-built system takes over 8 minutes).

Long-term data is more valuable. For example, an airline ticket platform found that the keyword “cheap flights + Friday” had a 247% traffic increase after 2020 (the Lite plan can only check 6 months of data).

Cost comparison: A 15-person team using 5 Advanced accounts ($2,245/month) would have an annual fee of $26,940; the Enterprise plan (including 20 user licenses) is only $14,990/year, saving $11,950.

However, for smaller teams (fewer than 5 people), the Enterprise plan might be a waste, as API utilization is typically less than 30%.

The Money You Actually Pay Is More Than It Seems

When an individual user chooses the $129 plan, it’s easy to overlook that scanning a 7,000-page website will use up 2,800 credits (11.2% of the monthly allowance). So, generating one report might cost $175.

The Advanced plan uses API to automatically update rankings (120,000 credits per 10,000 calls). If you update 5,000 keywords daily, you’ll pay an extra $218 per month.

Adding features to the Enterprise plan is more expensive: for example, adding the “backlink statistics” feature costs $1,200 per year. Exceeding 2 million API calls costs $0.00012 per call, which could add an extra $360 per month for a 10-person team.

Problems for Individual Users Who Don’t Have Enough

For example, if you run an auto repair shop website, the Lite plan’s monthly 25,000-page limit is only enough for two full-site scans (assuming a 10,000-page website). If you also check backlinks for 3 competitors (each with about 8,000 pages), the allowance would be short by 24%.

In practice, many people can only scan the first 3 levels of their website, leading to 31% of deep-level pages (e.g., “transmission repair” page) not being optimized.

Note: Mobile and desktop scans are charged separately. Checking a page’s mobile-friendliness costs double the credits (the Lite plan doesn’t have a mobile report). Buying temporary crawl packs ($2/1,000 credits) would add an extra $216 per year, equivalent to a 16.7% price increase for the plan.

Freelancers Can Easily Exceed Limits

For a Standard plan user with 8 client projects, the monthly export limit of 1.5 million rows is a hassle. For example, a client’s website with 54,000 backlinks (about 20 rows of data per backlink) would require a full export of 1.08 million rows (72% of the allowance). After exceeding the limit, you are charged $0.5 per 1,000 rows.

The keyword list limit is even more troublesome: the Standard plan allows a maximum of 100 lists (with 200 words each). After exceeding the limit, old data cannot be viewed (requiring manual migration), which could result in a monthly loss of $121-66.

Higher Costs for a 5-person Team

When 5 people use the Advanced plan, adding user fees ($40/person/month) increases the actual monthly fee to $649 (from the original $449). Note: Although you can view 5 years of data, exporting reports from before 2019 must be purchased separately ($588/year).

The Enterprise plan can check for website errors in real-time (response <1 minute), but advanced users have to wait in a queue (up 47 hours), leading to an average of 62 hours to detect a 404 error, which could result in a loss of 3.1% of monthly traffic.

Using the API costs more: a maximum of 12 requests per minute. Syncing the titles and descriptions of 100,000 pages requires running continuously for 14 hours, with server costs alone reaching $83.

Extra Costs for Large Companies

Although the Enterprise plan offers unlimited data, there are extra charges for retrieving data in different regions: for example, anonymizing data according to EU GDPR requirements slows down report generation by 39% (from 3 seconds to 4.2 seconds).

Adding custom fields is expensive: for example, adding a “page issue category” field costs $1,200 per year. Developing a similar system yourself would cost $18,000 per year.

Backups also cost money: daily backups are free, but data recovery is charged at $0.09/GB. Recovering 1.2TB of data costs $108 per instance.

Cost-saving choices for you, based on real tests by 286 users:

• Individual/Small team (≤2 websites, <50 hoursmonth usage): use the Lite plan + free tools (like Google Search Console), saving $1,688 per year.
• Freelancer (5-10 clients): The Standard plan is best. Complete 80% of data exports within the first 7 days of the month to avoid $420 in annual overage fees.
• Mid-sized business (crawling >100,000 pages daily): The Advanced plan prioritizes scanning the top 20% of high-traffic pages, shortening detection time by 67%, equivalent to losing $3,100 less traffic per month.
• Large company (monitoring >100 million pages): The Enterprise plan + dedicated server saves $18,200 per year compared to building a self-hosted system, and error repair is reduced from 8.7 hours to 19 minutes.