Ahrefs Reviews 317

I signed up for Ahrefs hoping it could replace Semrush for my agency. After putting the platform through real-world testing, it became clear very quickly that it doesn’t meet the needs of professional SEOs who manage multiple clients and rely heavily on local data, competitive insights, and robust reporting.

Key limitations I experienced during evaluation:

Local SEO data is far less comprehensive than competitors

Keyword database coverage is noticeably thinner

Rank tracking lacks essential features for agencies

Competitive gap analysis is limited

Reporting options are not client-friendly or presentation-ready

These aren’t minor issues they’re core parts of an SEO workflow.

When I requested a refund within the same billing cycle, Ahrefs denied it due to a strict “non-use only” refund policy.

This means that the moment you actually use the product to evaluate it, you automatically lose the ability to get a refund even if the tool clearly does not meet your needs.

This policy is far behind current industry standards.
Semrush, Moz, SpyFu, Surfer, BrightLocal, and almost every serious SaaS in this space offer a 7–30 day refund window regardless of usage, because they understand something fundamental:

You cannot evaluate an SEO platform without actually using it.

Ahrefs’ policy essentially penalizes customers for doing responsible due diligence.

The support agent I spoke with was courteous, but repeatedly stressed that nothing could be done because of internal policy. Even after providing clear, detailed feedback on why the platform wasn’t suitable for my agency, the refund was still denied.

For any SEO professional considering Ahrefs, be aware:

There is effectively no meaningful trial period, and no real path to a refund once you begin evaluating the tool.

This experience left me with concerns not just about the product limitations, but about the customer experience philosophy behind the company. In a competitive industry where nearly all major platforms support fair evaluation windows, Ahrefs’ hardline refund stance feels out of touch with modern SaaS expectations.

I hope Ahrefs leadership will seriously reconsider this outdated policy. It’s not customer-friendly, not competitive, and ultimately discourages professionals from giving the platform a fair chance.

I paid $30 for the Starter plan. When using the service, I got “No results found” which means that they don't have any data on the topic I need in their database, and I technically can't get any benefit from this service. I wrote to support about my situation and requested a refund. They replied that I am “not qualified” for a refund because I had already used credits (read, tryed to use their service).

bought the plan, didnt see anything about credits, did some searchs for 20mins and voila, my subscription is over for one month. lack of transparency! at least you should send notifications or whatever to educate people in this trap business model

Quinn has been fantastic, really supportive and ensured we got the value we needed from the platform!

The data is accurate and the features are plenty, but the interface feels heavy — some reports are hard to understand without experience. The price is high, and it’s not always clear what you’re paying extra for. It works well, but isn’t the easiest or most intuitive tool. Good for experienced SEO users, but beginners may find it difficult to navigate.

I have thousands of domains. I have created backlinks for that domain my all tlds got indexed from ahrefs but tlds like .cfd and .sbs are not indexed on ahrefs while all other seo platforms like moz, semrush and majestic crowl these type of tlds but ahrefs not.
they need to update their algorithm

Terrible service. They send an invoice, but it is not possible to pay with Paypal and not possible to pay with bank transfer. They are truly customer unfriendly and not interested at all.

I used to find its audit of my website useful... but now it is just lies to get you to pay for a subscription. When I see the results of its audit I get stressed out about the website errors it tells me I have only to find out after checking the information they provided that its results are either wrong or they won't give me the specifics of the errors (so that I can investigate it) because it wants me to upgrade to a paid subscription which is a ludicrous amount of money they want from a small business. If you want accurate information, I do not recommend using the tools/services/audit on the Ahrefs website.

Scammers stop takeign my money

you get what you pay for and this service is free.
It's simply not good quality, an AI bot could provide before SEO guidance.

I’ve used Ahrefs for several years. At first, it felt more accessible, but over time, the pricing has gone up and the value for smaller websites has gone down. The free tools are still suitable for basic research and obtaining an overview, but I’ve recently noticed that the data is less reliable than it used to be. For bigger projects with a proper budget, Ahrefs can still be worth it, but for small sites, the return on investment has definitely declined.

They wasted 2 minutes (now 10, because of the additional 8 minutes on Trustpilot) of my life, where can I claim it?

Well, seriously, who needs a service that is better, faster and for free when you just do it yourself on MS-Paint?

They just kicked me out of grandfathered plan by removing the feature I needed most (batch analysis), effectively raising the price a lot, and now they have a new ranking factor related to AI showing how often you show up in ChatGPT and other LLM's and that would raise the price again 5x. Most of the new features I don't need in the new more expensive plan, and then of course the main useful thing is locked behind a big service price increase. This company has gotten greedy and is hoping you are too lazy to do your research on alternatives. I've canceled my sub and won't be back, the trust is broken.

I used to have a paid subscription for long years and I was happy. Then they changed my plan to a new one, that was inferior to what I had and I couldn't do my job properly any more. I ended up moving to a competitor. My free (now) plan at ahrefs doesn't even let me check a website's DA (their own metric! having me moving to competitor's metrics. Great marketing move!) All that at a time where a competitor is giving life-subscriptions for cheap.

they do not show searched result, they charge credit every time you login and the same result. not recommended , very much wasting money

I've worked with several SEO tools, and this is by far the worst. The UX is like something from 20 years ago. It's incredibly confusing, and the fact that they use non-standard language for core services doesn't help. The documentation and their AI bot are worthless. I had the AI bot try to tell me I needed to upgrade my credits to use a tool I was having trouble with, in spite of having 350 credits in my account. This company is VERY shady. SEMRush a superior alternative.

Used to love the tool....last years of changing their product and price tier made me look for alternatives

I am a customer since February 2018 (invoice
AHR180216-4025-38586).

I used to love the product, but in the last 2 years or so they have changed so much that I am forced to look for an alternative.

It looks like their only goal is to extract as much LTV from customers as possible. From a flat fee model they changed the approach to basically pay add-ons for everything.

Taking into consideration how their model works nowadays, I wouldn't be surprised if you would have to buy an add-on just to be able to login into your account.

PS: The only reason I leave a 2 star review instead of 1 is because support team at least do a great job, taking into consideration that they can't do much to solve Ahrefs's greed (Kudos to Quinn, Helen and Lucy).

It is a good product. They implement a lot of updates, also in the area of AI search results, etc.

What I find to be a major downside is that they have a lot of outages. Sometimes the keyword explorer is unavailable, and other times a different tool of theirs doesn’t work. That’s a shame.

Also, the keyword difficulty isn’t completely accurate.