How to use Ahrefs: a practical guide from setup to weekly routine.

Ahrefs is easy to open and hard to use well. Within five minutes you can look at a competitor’s backlinks, traffic graph and best keywords. Five weeks later, plenty of teams still have not changed a single page because of it. The tool has dozens of reports, and nobody tells you which ones matter.

This guide is the hands-on part. It covers setup, the reports worth your time in Site Explorer, Keywords Explorer, Site Audit and Rank Tracker, what the main metrics mean and a weekly routine that turns data into work. At Viralistic we use SEO tools such as Ahrefs in our audits, and every feature name and definition below was checked against Ahrefs’ own help centre and Academy in October 2026. New to the tool itself? Start with our explanation of what Ahrefs is and what it costs.

Set up your first Ahrefs project

A project is where Ahrefs keeps everything about one website: its Site Audit crawls, its tracked keywords and its competitors. Create one for your own site before you research anyone else’s. It gives you the baseline every other report is measured against.

On the Dashboard, click ”+ Create” and either import your sites from Google Search Console or add one manually. Ahrefs then walks you through five steps:

1. Scope. Enter your domain and choose the protocol and mode (more on modes below).
2. Ownership. Verify through Google Search Console, which Ahrefs recommends, or with a DNS record, an HTML file or an HTML tag. Verified projects are unlimited on every plan. Unverified projects are capped by your subscription.
3. Site Audit. Set the crawl schedule, the seed URLs and the crawl settings.
4. Rank tracking. Add the keywords you want to follow and the location for each.
5. Competitors. Add the websites you want to compare yourself with.

One detail prevents a lot of frustration. If you verify through Search Console, add the project in exactly the same form. A Search Console property for www.example.com and an Ahrefs project for example.com give you a verification error.

Pick the right mode: Subdomains, Domain, Prefix or Exact URL

Every time you enter a target, Ahrefs asks how wide to look. Pick the wrong mode and the data can look inaccurate, so check it first when numbers surprise you.

So what does prefix mean in Ahrefs? It limits the analysis to one path. Enter example.com/blog in Prefix mode and you see data for the blog and every page under it, and nothing else. Ahrefs explains all four in its help article on analysis modes.

Why Ahrefs asks for competitors during setup

Step 5 asks for competitors because Rank Tracker uses them. Ahrefs tracks the sites you enter for the same keywords as your own, so you can compare positions, share of voice and SERP features over time. You can type them in or pick from suggestions based on sites that rank for similar keywords.

Wondering where the competitors you entered went? They live in Rank Tracker under Competitors overview, where you can also edit them, or in the project settings. How many you can add depends on your plan: up to 10 on Starter, 20 on Lite, Standard and Advanced, and 100 on Enterprise.

Give everyone their own login

Ahrefs seats are personal. Every person who works in Ahrefs needs a seat of their own, and sharing one login breaks Ahrefs’ terms. You can invite members from the Lite plan up; Starter does not support extra users. Each person gets an access level: Member, Admin or Owner.

For contractors and clients, one detail matters. The Guest level, which only sees projects shared with it explicitly, is exclusive to Enterprise. On other plans a member is a full user of your workspace, and the search history is shared between all Members, Admins and Owners. Extra users are charged on top of your plan.

Site Explorer: analyse any website

Site Explorer answers one question: what is working for this website in search? Enter a domain or URL, choose the mode, and the Overview shows Domain Rating, referring domains, organic traffic, organic keywords and paid search at a glance. The useful work happens in the reports in the left-hand menu.

Want to check your current SEO rankings for a term? Open Organic keywords for your own domain and search for it. Ahrefs refreshes those positions at a pace tied to search volume, so add the terms that matter to Rank Tracker for a steady weekly measurement.

Turn a Top pages report into action items

Top pages is the report people screenshot and then forget. Read it with three questions instead.

1. Which topics carry this site? Look at the ten pages with the most traffic and the keyword that sends each one the most visitors. Group them by topic, not by URL.
2. Which of those topics do you cover? No page on a topic that feeds a competitor? Put it on your content list. You do have one? Compare both pages honestly on depth, format and freshness.
3. Which format wins? A guide, a tool, a comparison or a category page. Matching the format matters more than matching the length.

Then run the same report on your own domain. Pages ranking between roughly position 4 and 15 for keywords that bring customers are usually your quickest wins, because Google already sees them as relevant.

Read backlinks: live, lost and historical

The Backlinks report always shows all live backlinks, whatever your plan. A toggle switches between new, lost and all links, and a date selector compares periods within the history your plan includes. Older tutorials mention three separate indexes called Live, Recent and Historical. Ahrefs merged them into this single report with Backlinks 2.0, so “historical backlinks” now simply means links Ahrefs found in the past that may no longer exist.

Two quick wins come out of this data:

• Reclaim lost link value. In Best by links, set the HTTP code filter to 404. Restore every broken page that still has backlinks, or redirect it to the most relevant live page.
• Learn why a page earns links. Open Anchors for a competitor’s most-linked article. If most anchors mention one statistic, that statistic is what earns the links, and your page needs something at least as citable.

Keywords Explorer: keyword research step by step

Keywords Explorer is where you decide what to write. Enter a few seed keywords, pick the country, and Ahrefs shows search volume, Keyword Difficulty, clicks, Traffic Potential and Parent Topic for each. The idea reports then widen the list. This is how to conduct keyword research in Ahrefs without drowning in it:

1. Set the country first. Volume, difficulty and SERPs differ per market. Research Dutch keywords in the Netherlands, not in the United States.
2. Enter seeds the way your customers talk. Use their words, not your internal product names.
3. Open Matching terms. It lists ideas that contain your seed. Terms match finds the words in any order, Phrase match keeps them in your order, and the Questions toggle shows informational queries.
4. Check Related terms and Search suggestions for ideas around the same topic that do not contain your seed.
5. Filter. Set a maximum KD and a minimum volume that suit your niche. The Lowest DR filter shows SERPs where a site with low authority already ranks in the top 5.
6. Leave out what you already own. The Target filter can show only keywords where your site is not in the top 10: topics for new pages and pages to improve.
7. Cluster by Parent Topic. Keywords with the same Parent Topic usually belong on one page. Clustering is available on Standard and higher plans.
8. Open the SERP. Click SERP next to a keyword to see what ranks now. If the top 10 is all product pages, a blog post will struggle, whatever the KD says.

Already have a list of keywords? Paste them in together and open Traffic share by domains. It shows who owns the traffic for that exact set of searches, which is often a more honest competitor list than the one in your head. To turn the result into a plan, give each search intent its own page type, as in the keyword map in our guide to SEO for software companies.

Ahrefs metrics explained

Ahrefs’ metrics are estimates built on its own crawl and keyword data, so read them as directions, not facts. (How Ahrefs collects that data is covered in our guide to Ahrefs.) These are the metrics you will use most.

Why Ahrefs’ KD sometimes looks off

KD only looks at links. Ahrefs calculates it from the number of referring domains pointing at the top 10 pages and does not consider on-page factors, as its KD help article states. Search intent, content quality and brand recognition are not in the score. A low KD can therefore still be hard to win when Google clearly prefers official sources or well-known brands, and a high KD sometimes hides a SERP full of outdated pages.

There is a second reason. A grey KD is a cached score: Ahrefs has not refreshed that SERP for 20 days or more. Click Update on the keyword’s overview to refresh it, which uses one of your monthly SERP updates. Ahrefs itself calls KD a “first filter”.

Parent Topic and Traffic Potential in practice

Test the Parent Topic before you plan a new page. Ahrefs finds it by taking the page in position 1 for your keyword and looking up the query that sends that page the most traffic. If the Parent Topic is a broader term, the winning page already ranks for both, and one thorough page will usually beat two thin ones. If the Parent Topic is your keyword itself, it deserves its own page. Only keywords whose SERPs Ahrefs updates regularly have Parent Topic data, so small long-tail searches sometimes show none.

Traffic Potential follows the same logic: it is the organic traffic of the page ranking first for the Parent Topic. Two keywords with similar search volume can have very different Traffic Potential, and the second number is the better guide.

Ahrefs Rank and the numbers not to chase

Ahrefs Rank is a league table of every site in Ahrefs’ database, ordered by dofollow referring domains, which in practice means by Domain Rating. Because it is relative, your AR can drop without losing a single link, simply because other sites gained more. At the bottom of the scale, one link won or lost can move a site hundreds of thousands of places. Neither AR nor DR is a Google metric. Watch them for context and judge your SEO on rankings, clicks and enquiries.

Site Audit and Rank Tracker for your own site

Site Audit and Rank Tracker work on your project rather than on someone else’s site. On Starter and Lite they do not use report credits either; both have their own limits.

Run Site Audit and fix issues in the right order

Site Audit crawls your site for more than 170 technical and on-page issues and sorts them by importance. Errors (red) come first, because they pull your health score down. Warnings (yellow) are less urgent but still need a fix. Notices (blue) are a nudge for when the rest is done.

Open All issues, start at the top and click the number in a row to see the affected URLs. Not every issue applies to every site. Ahrefs treats orphan pages as errors, for example, while a shop that takes seasonal products offline may have them on purpose. You can change an issue’s importance or switch it off in Issue settings. Broken internal links and links that only work through JavaScript are worth fixing early; our guide to a href and SEO explains why crawlers need real HTML links.

Crawl credits are spent sensibly: only internal HTML pages that return a 200 status use them. Redirects, broken pages, images, CSS, JavaScript and external links are free. For every verified project, the first 5,000 crawl credits a month cost nothing, on any plan.

Two reports go beyond technical health. Page Explorer filters every crawled page on almost any property, for example pages with a certain outgoing link and a minimum amount of organic traffic. Internal link opportunities suggests pages that mention a keyword another of your pages ranks for, so you can connect them.

Track rankings with Rank Tracker

Rank Tracker follows the Google positions of the keywords you choose. Rankings update weekly by default on every plan; daily updates come with the Project Boost Max add-on. You can track a whole country or zoom in to a city or postcode, which matters for local businesses.

A few habits make it useful:

• Tag keywords by topic or by page, so you see whether a whole theme moves rather than one term.
• Track the keywords that bring customers, not every variation. Fifty well-chosen commercial terms tell you more than five hundred random ones.
• Check Competitors overview for share of voice. When a competitor gains across a tag, open its pages in Site Explorer and see what changed.
• Use Competitors traffic share to see who owns the traffic for your tracked keywords, including sites you never added.

Competitor research with Content Gap and Link Intersect

To find out which competitors outrank you and why, combine three reports. Organic competitors tells you who they are. Content Gap shows the keywords they rank for and you do not. Link Intersect shows the sites that link to them and not to you. The reason is usually one of two things: they have a page on the topic and you do not, or their page has links from sites that have never heard of you.

Content Gap: keywords your competitors have and you lack

1. Open the Competitive Analysis tool and choose keywords.
2. Enter your own domain at the top and two or three real organic competitors below.
3. Click Show keyword opportunities.
4. Set the competitors’ positions filter to All competitors, so you only see keywords where every competitor ranks and you do not.

For quick wins, set your own position to 11 to 20 and the competitors to the top 10: topics where you are already close. Planning one new article? Enter its future URL at the top and the three best-ranking pages below, all in Exact URL mode. The result is a list of subtopics the new page should cover.

Link Intersect: prioritise backlink outreach

Link Intersect sits in the same Competitive Analysis tool, under referring domains or referring pages. Enter your site at the top and your competitors below, click Show link opportunities and filter to sites that link to all of them. Then rank the list:

1. Relevance. A site in your niche that links to three competitors is a warmer lead than a strong site that has nothing to do with you.
2. Authority. Filter to dofollow links and a minimum DR, for example 50, to see the stronger sites first.
3. Real traffic. Check the linking site in Site Explorer. A site with organic visitors sends people as well as authority.
4. Link type. Directories and resource pages are quick to request. Editorial links need a reason to cite you, such as original data or a useful tool.

Earn links with something worth citing rather than buying them: Google’s spam policies treat paid links that pass ranking credit as link spam.

A weekly Ahrefs routine that leads to action

Ahrefs pays for itself when it becomes a routine. Without one, it is an expensive dashboard. This is the rhythm we recommend:

Set up Ahrefs Alerts for backlinks, new keywords and mentions, so the changes come to you instead of the other way round.

Save credits on Starter and Lite

On Starter and Lite, every report you open costs a credit, and so do follow-up actions such as applying filters, changing dates or opening the SERP view. Reopening the same report with the same filters within 30 minutes, paging through results and sorting columns are free. Decide your questions before you open the tool, group related lookups and export what you need once. Standard and higher plans work on fair use instead of a credit cap.

Let an AI assistant do the first read

From the Lite plan, Ahrefs offers an API and an MCP server that let AI assistants such as Claude pull Ahrefs data into a conversation. Asking an assistant to summarise a Top pages report into action items is a fair first step. Each request uses API units from your plan, and the judgement about which actions fit your brand stays with you.

Check estimates against Google Search Console

Ahrefs estimates. Google Search Console measures. For your own site, confirm traffic and ranking questions in Search Console before you act, and use Ahrefs for what Search Console cannot show: competitors, links across the web and keywords you do not rank for yet. If nobody on your team has these thirty minutes a week, that is a signal in itself, and a good moment to look at outside help with SEO.

How we help

A tool shows you the gaps. Deciding which ones matter for your brand, and then closing them, is the actual work. At Viralistic we use SEO tools such as Ahrefs in our audits and turn the findings into a plan: technical fixes first, then pages that match what people search for and sound like your brand, and links worth earning. One strategic lead, from audit to execution.

Read more about our SEO approach or what a good SEO specialist takes off your plate. If you want Ahrefs data in your reporting without manual exports, we connect its API to automated workflows in n8n. And visibility in AI answers follows its own rules, which we explain in SEO vs GEO.

Frequently asked questions

If I research a competitor in Ahrefs, can they see it?

No. Site Explorer and Keywords Explorer report from Ahrefs’ own index, built by its crawler AhrefsBot, and Ahrefs documents no feature that tells a site owner who looked them up. One exception: if you run Site Audit on their site, their server logs show visits from the AhrefsSiteAudit crawler. Inside your own workspace, Members, Admins and Owners share search history.

Where does Ahrefs get its data?

Ahrefs collects link data with its own crawlers, AhrefsBot and AhrefsSiteAudit, and says its backlink index is entirely its own. Keyword data comes from a mix of sources, including Google Keyword Planner, Google Trends, Google Search Console and other partners, collected with consent and anonymised. Organic traffic is an estimate calculated from rankings and search volume, so treat it as a direction.

How do you use Ahrefs for free?

Create an Ahrefs Free account and verify your website. You then get Site Explorer and Site Audit for the sites you verify, plus Web Analytics, AI Content Helper and the SEO Toolbar. Ahrefs’ free standalone tools, such as the Keyword Generator and Backlink Checker, work without an account but show limited results. Researching competitors requires a paid plan.

Do I need technical skills to use Ahrefs?

No. Keyword research, competitor analysis, backlink checks and rank tracking are point-and-click reports. The real learning curve is SEO itself: search intent, keyword difficulty and why links matter. Site Audit is the most technical part, because some fixes need a developer. Ahrefs’ free course How to Use Ahrefs covers the tools in 62 lessons across 12 modules, without sign-up.

How complete is Ahrefs’ data outside English-speaking markets?

It depends on the size of the market. According to Ahrefs, large markets such as Germany and France have solid keyword data with good long-tail coverage, while smaller markets have thinner data and less reliable volumes. Link data is strong everywhere, because AhrefsBot crawls the web regardless of language. Run a handful of your own local keywords through Keywords Explorer before you commit.