Ahrefs vs Semrush

Ahrefs

Site Audit is documented in real operational depth — scheduled crawls by day and timezone, configurable page and time limits, JavaScript rendering as a toggle with regex include/exclude and HTTP-authenticated crawling, and PageSpeed flags when I supply my own Google API key. We found no public information on issue prioritisation by traffic impact, structured-data validation, canonical or indexation diagnosis, or any comparison of the crawl against what Google actually fetched — without that, findings stay a list rather than a ticket queue.

Semrush

The audit modules go deep — crawlability and indexability, redirects, canonicals, structured data, Core Web Vitals measured against Google's published good and poor values at the 75th percentile, mobile rendering parity, even AI-crawler access — and the Enterprise tier promises multi-million-page crawling, which matters at my scale. But we found no public information on crawl page limits per plan, scheduled crawl cadence, log-file analysis or prioritisation by traffic impact, and nothing that turns findings into a diagnosis with regression tracking between crawls.

Ahrefs

Volume, keyword difficulty, CPC, clicks, intent filtering and Parent Topic are all documented, and SERP feature tracking is genuinely strong — seventeen features including AI Overview and local pack, with positions tracked on all plans. But we found no public information confirming the depth of the German-language data, nor on content briefs, entity coverage or cannibalisation detection.

Semrush

Volume, difficulty, CPC and traffic estimates, SERP feature coverage including AI Overviews and the Local Pack, on-page gap recommendations and keyword cannibalisation analysis are all documented, on a database of 26.4 billion keywords across 142 geo databases with history back to 2012. We found no public information on intent classification, topic clustering, competitor gap analysis or content briefs, and nothing on the depth of the German-language data — for the site I run, that gap decides whether planning happens here or elsewhere.

Ahrefs

The backlink side is unusually well documented — fresh data every 15–30 minutes, a full database refresh of about two months, and crawl priority driven by Domain Rating and URL Rating. The rank-tracking side gives me almost nothing to defend in a monthly report: we found no public information on update frequency, country or device granularity, index size, historical retention below the Enterprise plan, or how their numbers square with Search Console.

Semrush

Daily position updates at city and country level on desktop and mobile, unpersonalized results, published index sizes of 43 trillion backlinks and 808 million domain profiles, and documented calculation details such as capping average position at 21 beyond position 20 — that is a rank tracker whose numbers I can largely defend. What the captured pages do not document is a backlink refresh cadence, lost-and-found link detection, or any handling of disagreements against Search Console, which is the conversation I have every month.

Ahrefs

A versioned rank-tracking API and an AI assistant that runs API queries and generates exports exist, so data can move; the vendor also states outright that white-label reports are not allowed at present. We found no public information on Search Console or analytics integrations, dashboards or scheduled reports, or API limits and per-call costs.

Semrush

This is the strongest area for a team like mine: API v3 and v4 with per-endpoint unit prices (keyword metrics at 20 API units per request), a checkable unit balance, OAuth 2.0, MCP for AI tools, and white-label reporting priced as an add-on at €19.18/mo. We found no public information on data-warehouse or BigQuery export, v4 is still in Early Access with pricing subject to change while v3 is deprecated, and tools with external users are routed to sales.

Ahrefs

Row exports and a rank-tracking API give a route out, and unlimited historical data is advertised as an Enterprise feature, leaving the treatment of history on the lower tiers unstated. We found no public information on bulk historical export in open formats, retention after cancellation, or whether credit metering on the credit-limited plans prices a full export out of reach.

Semrush

Ranking history back to January 2012 is retrievable via the API in JSON or CSV, and the terms grant thirty days after suspension to back up stored data. But every export request is metered in API units, use is limited to internal business purposes, cached data may not be kept beyond one month without written consent, and on account deletion the vendor may delete everything with no responsibility — so continuously mirroring my multi-year history is not something the captured terms allow.

Ahrefs

The contracting entity is Ahrefs Pte. Ltd. of Singapore, with an American entity for US customers, so there is no European contracting party, and we found no public information on where accounts and crawl data are hosted. A published subprocessor list with services and locations, plus a data processing agreement, are the only positives on an otherwise non-European picture.

Semrush

The contracting entity is a Delaware corporation in Boston, and the privacy policy confirms transfers of personal data to the United States and to affiliates, with Standard Contractual Clauses as the safeguard; an EU joint controller in Prague exists. We found no public information on hosting location or EU data residency options, and the named subprocessors cover merchandise delivery and marketing tags rather than the core crawl and analytics chain.

Ahrefs

Five tiers are priced openly — from € 27 /mo Starter to € 1,394 /mo Enterprise with annual commitment — plus a free tier and up to 17% off for annual payment. The invoice is still not computable: we found no public euro figure for the credit allowances of the credit-limited plans or for an additional user (one user included, extra users carry plan-specific credit limits), and no public information on API costs or VAT treatment.

Semrush

Plan limits are concrete — 5 to 40 websites and 500 to 5,000 daily tracked keywords, with API access from Advanced — additional users start at €43/mo, reporting add-ons are exactly priced, and the terms state fees are exclusive of taxes. We found no public information on crawl page limits per plan, overage rates or a minimum term, and the captured facts give no headline subscription figure for the tiers themselves.