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Ahrefs

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Panel rating · 6 judges · How to read the stars

Category median

Sovereignty: not determined

0–5 in half steps. 5 means the rubric's top anchor is met on the evidence.

by Ahrefs Pte. Ltd. · ahrefs.com

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Read this page as one judge. Each weighs the same scores by what they care about.

The Content Strategist

Weighted verdict

Decides what gets written and can only commission so much. Wants topic clusters, honest opportunity sizing, cannibalisation caught before it happens, and briefs scored against what actually ranks rather than against keyword density.

Same scores as the panel view — this lens weights them the way this judge cares.

Scored by The Content Strategist

Crawling & technical audit

How this is scored

Site crawling at real scale: what the crawler finds, how deeply it checks, whether Core Web Vitals and indexation problems are diagnosed rather than merely listed.

0 — No site crawler; the product is keyword data only.

3 — A crawler with a low page cap that reports broken links and missing tags, with no prioritisation and no rendering of JavaScript.

5 — Scheduled crawls at a stated page limit, JavaScript rendering, issue categories with severity, and Core Web Vitals pulled per template.

8 — Log-file or Search Console integration to compare what the crawler sees against what Google fetched, indexation and canonical diagnosis, structured-data validation, and issues prioritised by traffic impact rather than count.

10 — The audit is diagnostic rather than a list: crawl budget analysed, rendering differences surfaced, regressions detected between crawls with the deploy that caused them inferrable, and remediation guidance specific enough for a developer ticket.

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The Content Strategist

The Site Audit crawler is configurable at a level most are not — scheduled to the timezone, a JavaScript rendering toggle, speed and depth controls, regex scoping, and PageSpeed scoring that requires the customer's own Google API key. We found no public information on issue severity, prioritisation by traffic impact, log-file or Search Console comparison, structured-data validation, or regression detection between crawls. A configurable auditor, not yet a diagnostic that writes the developer ticket. 4 1 12

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Keyword research & content guidance

How this is scored

Keyword discovery, intent classification, SERP feature analysis and on-page guidance — judged on the depth of the German-language data as much as the English.

0 — A keyword list with volumes from one source and no intent or difficulty signal.

3 — Volume and difficulty for major markets, with thin or stale German data and no SERP feature detail.

5 — Keyword research with volume, difficulty and intent across German and other EU markets, SERP feature presence, and basic on-page recommendations.

8 — Topic clustering, competitor gap analysis, SERP composition tracked over time, content briefs with entity coverage, and cannibalisation detection.

10 — Research and guidance close the loop: opportunity sized against realistic traffic, content scored against what currently ranks rather than against a keyword density heuristic, and recommendations that reference the specific pages in the customer's own site.

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The Content Strategist

Volume, CPC, difficulty, clicks and search-intent filtering are documented, and the SERP feature set you can see and filter by is genuinely broad — AI Overview included. But I plan German-language content for a living and the captured pages answer nothing on German or EU market depth; the language-support question appears as a help-centre title with no answer shown. We also found no public information on topic clustering, competitor gap analysis, content briefs with entity coverage, or cannibalisation detection. 6 7 1

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Rank tracking & index quality

How this is scored

The proprietary data: ranking accuracy and frequency, backlink index size and freshness. Scored on what the vendor documents about their own data, because nothing here can be verified from outside.

0 — Rankings and backlinks with no stated update frequency, no country or device granularity, and no documentation of how either is collected.

3 — Weekly rankings for one country and device, a backlink index with no stated refresh cadence or size.

5 — Daily rankings with country, language and device selection, local results, and a backlink index with a documented crawl frequency.

8 — Rankings at stated frequency across many locations including city-level, SERP feature attribution, backlink index size and refresh published, lost-and-found link detection, and historical data retained for the life of the account.

10 — The vendor is accountable for their own data: methodology documented, index size and freshness published and updated, historical rankings retained and exportable in full, and discrepancies against Search Console explained rather than hidden.

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The Content Strategist

The backlink index is documented with unusual candour: their own crawler ranked by Cloudflare Radar activity, fresh data every 15–30 minutes, a full database refresh in about two months, and crawl priority and speed explained through their own rating metrics. The index size itself is not published, and we found no public information on rank tracking frequency or country, language and device granularity — unlimited historical data appears as an Enterprise feature rather than a baseline. 8 9 2

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Reporting, integrations & API

How this is scored

Getting the data out and in front of someone: dashboards, white-label reporting for agencies, Search Console and analytics integration, and an API a team can build on.

0 — On-screen views only; export is a manual CSV and there is no API.

3 — Scheduled PDF reports and CSV export, one analytics integration, no API worth building against.

5 — Customisable dashboards, scheduled reports, Search Console and analytics integration, and a documented API with stated limits.

8 — White-label reporting with client access, data-warehouse or BigQuery export, multi-site and multi-client management, and an API with credit costs published per endpoint.

10 — The tool is a data source rather than a destination: full historical export in open formats, a versioned API with a deprecation policy, integrations the vendor maintains, and reporting an agency can hand a client unedited.

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The Content Strategist

There is a documented API at version 3.0.0 with a rank-tracker reference, so a team can genuinely build against this. But the vendor states white-labelling reports is not currently allowed, and we found no public information on customisable dashboards, scheduled reports, Search Console or analytics integration, warehouse export, or per-endpoint credit costs; only Enterprise is described as having uncapped API access. 10 11 12 2

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Data portability & exit

How this is scored

Whether the ranking and crawl history — the only thing a multi-year subscription actually accumulates — remains the customer's when they leave.

0 — No bulk export; history is visible in the interface and nowhere else, and ends with the subscription.

3 — CSV export of current views only, with historical data capped or unavailable in bulk.

5 — Bulk export of rankings, keywords and crawl results including history, via interface or API.

8 — Complete historical export in open formats without credit metering that prices it out of reach, plus a documented retention period after cancellation.

10 — Exit is designed for: the full account exportable including every historical data point, API access sufficient to mirror the data continuously, and a stated grace period during which the archive remains retrievable.

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The Content Strategist

Export rows and a documented rank-tracker API give two paths out. Historical data is capped below the Enterprise plan, exports carry plan-specific credit limits on the credit-limited tiers, and we found no public information on any retention or grace period after cancellation — so the multi-year archive a subscription actually accumulates has an unclear exit cost. 2 11 12

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European sovereignty

How this is scored

Where the account and crawl data live and who the contracting entity is. Independently sourced by the sovereignty pipeline; weighted lower here than in categories holding personal data, because an SEO tool mostly holds the customer's own strategy rather than their customers' identities.

0 — Non-EU vendor and contracting entity, hosting unstated, subprocessors unnamed, and site or user data of unclear scope leaving the EU.

3 — EU hosting offered as an option while the contracting entity is non-EU, or the subprocessor list is absent.

5 — EU hosting as standard and an EU contracting entity, but parts of the chain are non-EU without an explained safeguard.

8 — EU hosting on named infrastructure, EU contracting entity, subprocessor list published, and any analytics or Search Console data handling described with its legal basis.

10 — Sovereign end to end and evidenced: vendor, entity, hosting and every subprocessor European, certification published, and a DPA that covers the crawl and analytics data the tool ingests.

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The Content Strategist

The contracting entity is Ahrefs Pte. Ltd. of Singapore, and we found no public information on where account or crawl data is hosted. A sub-processor list and a data processing agreement are published, which keeps this just above the floor for a tool that mostly holds the customer's own strategy rather than their customers' identities. 3 2

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Pricing transparency

How this is scored

The category where the headline price is least often the invoice. Whether a buyer can compute the real annual cost including keyword limits, crawl credits, API units, extra users and client seats — from public pages alone.

0 — No public prices at all; every tier is a sales conversation.

3 — A monthly headline exists, but keyword limits, crawl credits or the cost of an additional user are unstated — the invoice is unknowable.

5 — Tier prices public with the main limits given, but at least one commonly needed piece (extra seats, API credits, historical data) is unpriced or metered opaquely.

8 — Every tier priced publicly with keyword, crawl and API limits, overage rates, per-seat costs, minimum term and VAT treatment stated.

10 — Complete price computability: annual invoice derivable for a given keyword count, crawl volume, API usage and team size, with overage and every credit cost published.

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The Content Strategist

Five paid tiers from € 27 /mo to € 1,394 /mo are public in euros, with the up-to-17% annual discount and the Enterprise annual commitment stated. But we found no public information on per-plan keyword limits, crawl credit allotments, API credit prices or per-seat costs — additional-user limits are described as plan-specific with no numbers — so the real annual invoice for a given team size cannot be computed from public pages. 2 12 1

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European sovereignty — proven facts

0 of 4 dimensions proven

Built only from facts shown on the vendor's own pages. A dimension we could not prove is left open, not scored as zero.

Ownership Not determined — uncited Report an error
Data residency Not determined — uncited Report an error
Subprocessors Not determined — uncited Report an error

Where this could be wrong

What we left out

A claim that does not survive our checks costs us the claim, not the page. This is what was taken off this one.

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Sources (12)

The pages every claim on this page was read from — each one checked, dated, and kept verifiable.

  1. 1 Vendor homepage ahrefs.com Checked 5 Oct 2026 +3 earlier captures: 2 Sep 2026, 2 Sep 2026, 2 Sep 2026 Details →
  2. 2 Pricing ahrefs.com Checked 5 Oct 2026 +4 earlier captures: 11 Sep 2026, 2 Sep 2026, 2 Sep 2026, 2 Sep 2026 Details →
  3. 3 Legal notice ahrefs.com Checked 5 Oct 2026 Details →
  4. 4 Crawling & technical audit — found from sitemap help.ahrefs.com Checked 5 Oct 2026 Details →
  5. 5 Crawling & technical audit — found from sitemap help.ahrefs.com Checked 5 Oct 2026 +1 earlier capture: 1 Oct 2026 Details →
  6. 6 Keyword research & content guidance — found from sitemap help.ahrefs.com Checked 5 Oct 2026 Details →
  7. 7 Keyword research & content guidance — found from sitemap help.ahrefs.com Checked 5 Oct 2026 Details →
  8. 8 Rank tracking & index quality — found from sitemap help.ahrefs.com Checked 5 Oct 2026 Details →
  9. 9 Rank tracking & index quality — found from sitemap help.ahrefs.com Checked 5 Oct 2026 Details →
  10. 10 Reporting, integrations & API — found from sitemap help.ahrefs.com Checked 5 Oct 2026 Details →
  11. 11 Data portability & exit — found from sitemap docs.ahrefs.com Checked 5 Oct 2026 Details →
  12. 12 Data portability & exit — found from sitemap help.ahrefs.com Checked 5 Oct 2026 Details →