Ahrefs is usually introduced as "the backlink checker", although links stopped being the whole story a long time ago. Today it is a platform of fifteen or so modules covering competitor research, keyword research, site audits, rank tracking and mention monitoring. This article covers what is inside, where the numbers come from, and how to fit Ahrefs into your work when most of a project's traffic comes from Yandex rather than Google.
The service in brief
Ahrefs collects data about other people's websites: which links point to them, which Google queries they show up for, and which of their pages earn traffic. You can learn a lot about your own site for free from the search engines' webmaster consoles. You cannot learn the same about a competitor, and that gap is what Ahrefs fills.
That gives a simple rule to start with. Data about your own site is more reliable when it comes from the search engines; data about other sites has to come from third-party platforms. Ahrefs is strongest on questions about links and competitors, and weakest where you need the precise traffic of a specific site.
Where the data comes from
Ahrefs runs its own crawler. The company crawls the web itself, stores the pages and the links between them, and builds its metrics on top. In its article on Domain Rating, Ahrefs says outright that DR is one of the factors it feeds to its own crawler when deciding what to crawl first (ahrefs.com/blog/domain-rating, checked 27 September 2026).
Two things follow for the user.
Link data in Ahrefs is observed. If a report shows a link, the crawler saw it. The link may have disappeared since, but it existed. Numbers like these can be checked by sampling: open twenty links from the report by hand and count how many are still live.
Traffic and rankings in Ahrefs are estimated. The service sees Google results for its own keyword database and estimates how many clicks a page gets at each position. That is a model, and comparing it with your own analytics is worthwhile: on a site you know, you can see how far off the model is, and keep that correction in mind when you look at competitors.
The modules and what each one does
The ahrefs.com homepage (checked 27 September 2026) groups its tools under search marketing, website performance, content marketing, reporting and local SEO. Five modules matter most to an SEO specialist; the rest are supporting tools.
Site Explorer
The main tool, and the one people usually buy Ahrefs for. Enter a domain or a page URL and you get the backlink profile, organic keywords, top pages, a traffic estimate and the site's competitors in search. Most of the work of analysing other sites happens here.
Keywords Explorer
Keyword research. The tool's page (ahrefs.com/keywords-explorer, checked 27 September 2026) lists four headline metrics: search volume, keyword difficulty (KD), traffic potential and parent topic. Traffic potential shows how much traffic the page ranking first gets across all the queries it ranks for, and for content planning that is more useful than raw volume.
Site Audit
A crawler for your own site: status codes, duplicates, redirects, canonicals, speed, internal links. In capability it is comparable with the audit tools in other platforms. The order of checks, whichever tool you use, is covered in our technical audit checklist.
Rank Tracker
Tracks positions for a list of keywords, on desktop and on mobile. Yandex is not named anywhere in the tool's description (ahrefs.com/rank-tracker, checked 27 September 2026), so for a Yandex project Rank Tracker alone will not be enough. What to do instead is covered below.
Content Explorer
A search engine over Ahrefs' page database: what has been published on a topic, which pieces attracted links, and who publishes them. Ahrefs describes it as a tool for tracking web mentions and finding link prospects. In practice people use it to see which content formats in a niche earn links at all.
Everything else
The same homepage lists Web Analytics (Ahrefs' own traffic analytics), Brand Radar and Custom Prompts (brand visibility in answers from language models), Report Builder and Dashboard for reporting, and GBP Monitor for Google Business Profiles. Several of these are sold separately from the main plan, so check what your chosen plan includes before you buy.
The metrics you will see on every screen
The Ahrefs interface is built around a few of its own metrics. Understand them before you base decisions on them.
- DR (Domain Rating) rates the strength of a domain's backlink profile on a scale from 0 to 100. There is a detailed breakdown in our article on Ahrefs DR.
- UR (URL Rating) does the same for a single page and takes internal links into account.
- Ahrefs Rank puts every site in the database into one list by backlink strength, with the strongest in first place. It has its own article: what Ahrefs Rank is.
- KD estimates how hard it is to reach the top for a query, and is calculated from the links pointing at the pages already ranking there.
All four are built on links. Content quality, behavioural signals and regional results play no part in them. For Yandex, where commercial and behavioural factors weigh heavily, that limitation is worth keeping in mind at all times.
Who needs Ahrefs, and who can manage with free tools
The platform pays for itself where the work keeps running into other people's websites.
- Link building and lost-link recovery. This needs a link index with history, which is where Ahrefs is strong.
- An agency that takes apart a client's competitors every month and looks for the source of their growth.
- A content project that plans articles by traffic potential and wants to see which pieces in its niche attract links.
- Expansion into a foreign market where Google is the main search engine.
Who barely needs it: a small site of fifty pages serving one region with its traffic from Yandex. Yandex Webmaster, Yandex Metrica and Wordstat (Yandex's keyword volume tool) cover almost everything there, and the money is better spent on content. How to work out whether a subscription pays off at all is covered in our article on budgeting for SEO tools.
Ahrefs on a Yandex project
For anyone working in the Russian market, it helps to know in advance which part of the job Ahrefs covers there.
Links. Here the service is fully useful, because a link exists identically for both search engines. A competitor's backlink profile, lost links, the referring-domain gap, anchors: all of it applies to a Yandex project with no adjustment.
Keywords and rankings. This is weaker. The Keywords Explorer page talks about searches in Google and does not mention Yandex (ahrefs.com/keywords-explorer, checked 27 September 2026). Yandex search volume comes from Wordstat, and Yandex positions are tracked with local services. Ahrefs data on Russian Google results is useful as a secondary guide: which competitor pages earn search traffic at all, and on which topics.
Technical audit. The crawler works the same on any site, but it does not know why Yandex excluded a page from its index. Only Yandex Webmaster shows that.
A working setup for the Russian market looks like this: Yandex Webmaster and Metrica as the source of truth about your own site, Wordstat and a local rank tracker for keywords and positions, and Ahrefs for links and competitor analysis. What else differs between the two engines is covered in Yandex and Google.
The free way in: Ahrefs Webmaster Tools
Ahrefs has a free version for site owners. According to ahrefs.com/webmaster-tools (checked 27 September 2026), it includes Site Audit, Site Explorer and Web Analytics, and works only with sites you have verified. The free version has limits on export volume and pages per crawl, listed on the same page.
That is enough to learn the interface. Verify your site, run an audit, look at your own backlink profile. Once you know which data you are missing, deciding whether you need a paid plan gets easier. What the free version does not include is data on other people's sites, and that is exactly what people usually pay Ahrefs for.
Where to start in your first week
The order in which the service starts earning its keep fastest:
- Open your own site in Site Explorer and compare the traffic estimate with your analytics. Write down the ratio between them; you will need it when you look at competitors.
- Look at the referring domains and lost links reports. Links pointing to your 404 pages can be fixed with a redirect in five minutes.
- Take three competitors from your search results and open their top pages. You will see which kind of content earns traffic in the niche.
- Build the link gap: domains that link to competitors and not to you.
- Run Site Audit on your own site and compare what it finds with what Yandex Webmaster and Search Console show.
A method for competitor analysis that does not depend on any particular tool is set out in our article on competitor analysis in search.
What Ahrefs costs
Plans and limits change often, and prices are shown in the visitor's local currency, so check the current figures on the Ahrefs pricing page on the day you buy. Plans are easier to compare by their limits: the number of projects, tracked keywords and users matters more than the plan's name.
If a retail subscription does not fit the budget, the calculator on the gbseo.ru homepage prices access to Ahrefs on its own or together with other tools. How that access works is described in our piece on cloud access.
Frequently asked questions
Does Ahrefs show data for Yandex?
Link data does not depend on the search engine and applies to Yandex in full. Ahrefs describes its keyword and ranking data in terms of Google, so Yandex volume and positions come from Wordstat and local services.
Can you use Ahrefs for free?
Yes, for your own verified site through Ahrefs Webmaster Tools. Data on other sites is not part of the free version.
How accurate is the Ahrefs traffic estimate?
It is calculated from rankings and search volume, and it can be off by a factor of several. Comparing competitors with each other inside Ahrefs is sound; carrying the absolute figure into a business plan is not.
How does Ahrefs differ from Semrush?
Ahrefs is stronger on links and on analysing individual pages; Semrush covers more channels and is stronger on paid search. The detailed comparison is in Semrush vs Ahrefs.
How long does it take to learn Ahrefs?
The basic Site Explorer reports take a day. Reading the metrics with confidence, and knowing where they go wrong, usually takes a few weeks of work on real projects.