Ahrefs alternatives sorted by the job you open Ahrefs for

Most lists of Ahrefs alternatives rank whole suites against each other. That misses how people use Ahrefs. Few teams need all of it every day. They open it for one job: a rival's links, a keyword list, a crawl of their own site. This guide sorts the alternatives by that job, so you can replace the part you use and keep the rest out of your budget.

Prices are from each vendor's pricing page, checked in October 2026.

The short map

1. Competitor research by the run: seogeoaeo.ai

seogeoaeo.ai prices each report on its own. You buy a monthly plan of credits, starting with Indie at $29 for 2,000 credits, and each tool shows its price before it runs. For the Ahrefs jobs that matter most:

• Backlink Finder, 70 credits: the 100 strongest sites linking to a domain and the 50 link texts they use, with a spam score for each site.
• Domain Overview, 50 credits: how many Google keywords a site ranks for, estimated visits, what that traffic would cost in ads, and how many sites link to it.
• Competitor Keywords, 35 credits: a rival's Google keywords with volume, difficulty and cost per click.
• Keyword Gap, 85 credits: keywords a rival ranks for on Google's first two pages where you do not rank at all.
• Competitor Finder, 38 credits: the sites that compete with you for the same searches.

At 70 credits a lookup, the Indie plan covers 28 backlink reports a month. A failed run is refunded.

The trade-off is depth. The link data comes from a third-party provider, not an index seogeoaeo.ai runs itself. There is no link history and no rank tracking, and monthly credits do not roll over. If you need to see how a profile grew over five years, this is the wrong tool.

2. Your own site at no cost: Ahrefs Free and Search Console

Ahrefs renamed its Webmaster Tools to Ahrefs Free. For any site you verify, it gives Site Explorer (the top 1,000 backlinks and keywords), Site Audit (170+ issue types, 5,000 crawl credits per project a month) and Web Analytics. It shows nothing about competitors.

Google Search Console adds the queries your pages already appear for and a Links report with top linking sites and link text. Its tables stop at 1,000 rows.

3. A full suite: Semrush

If you want keywords, position tracking and audits behind one login, Semrush is the closest swap. Its SEO plan is $139 a month, or $117.33 a month billed yearly, with 500 keywords tracked daily. Its knowledge base lists Backlinks, Backlink Gap and Backlink Audit tools, but the pricing page does not say which plan includes each, so ask before you buy for links alone.

4. Link data from a specialist: Majestic

Majestic Lite is $49.99 a month plus VAT and covers its Fresh Index with Trust Flow. Pro, at $99.99, adds the Historic Index. New customers get a 7-day money-back guarantee. It does links and little else.

5. A lighter suite: Moz Pro

Moz lists an entry plan at $49 a month for one website, and Standard at $99, or $79 paid yearly. A free Moz Community account includes 10 Link Explorer queries a month, enough to test the data.

Where on-page and AI checks fit

Link tools tell you who points at a site. They say less about whether search engines and AI assistants can read your pages. seogeoaeo.ai covers that side with single-purpose checks: indexing (8 credits), robots.txt and AI crawler access (10), schema validation (8), an llms.txt generator (15) and an AI citation finder that shows which pages Google's AI Overviews and ChatGPT cite for a topic (160). A home page check costs 67 credits, and the full tool list with prices is public.

When Ahrefs is still right

Keep Ahrefs if you live in Site Explorer, track hundreds of keywords or need years of link history. Standard at $249 removes the per-user credit cap and keeps 2 years of data. Everyone else can pay for the jobs they actually run.