What Can You Do with Ahrefs for Free? A Complete Guide
Ahrefs lets you run site audits, search analysis, and analytics for free. We tested how much ground the free features actually cover.
When SEO starts to matter, Ahrefs is one of the first tools that comes to mind. You want to know what keywords bring people to your site, whether there are technical issues lurking, and how your competitors are doing. But paid plans start at $29/month (Starter) and $129/month for the more full-featured Lite tier. Whether to commit to a monthly SEO tool cost is a tricky call.
Ahrefs has a surprisingly wide range of free features. Ahrefs Webmaster Tools (AWT) lets you run site audits and analyze your search performance just by creating a free account and connecting Google Search Console. This article focuses on AWT while also covering the broader free toolkit.
What You Can Do with Ahrefs Webmaster Tools (AWT)
We use AWT as part of running Bundlecase, and the free tier has been plenty useful for understanding our site's status.
Site Audit
Automatically detects technical SEO issues on your site. You get 5,000 crawl credits per verified site per month, more than enough for most sites. Crawl schedules can be set to daily, weekly, or monthly. If your site isn't likely to exhaust the crawl credits, setting it to daily can help you catch issues sooner.
After a crawl completes, you get a Health Score along with an overview of your site's status: crawled URL count, issue breakdown, and an error trend graph that makes it easy to see how things are changing over time.
Individual issues are organized by category (redirect chains, meta description length, page speed, and more) with indicators that help you decide what to fix first. These kinds of problems are easy to miss, so running periodic crawls gives you confidence that nothing major is slipping through.
Site Explorer
View your organic search performance, backlinks, and ranking keywords. The free version shows up to 1,000 backlinks and 1,000 keywords.
It covers areas that Search Console doesn't, like your overall backlink profile and detailed ranking keyword data.
Web Analytics
Ahrefs offers a cookie-free analytics tool, free up to 1 million events per month. Sites with moderate traffic won't come close to that threshold, so it's effectively free long-term.
Rather than replacing GA4 entirely, running Ahrefs' Web Analytics alongside it seems like a practical approach. Setup is just a single script tag, so the barrier to trying it out is low.
No-Account Tools
Beyond AWT, Ahrefs offers a suite of tools you can use right in your browser without signing up. While AWT focuses on your own site, these tools can also be used to research competitor sites.
Keyword Research Tools
Several tools help with keyword exploration:
Keyword Generator
Generates keyword ideas for Google, YouTube, Amazon, and Bing with search volume and Keyword Difficulty (KD) scores.
Keyword Difficulty Checker
Rates ranking difficulty on a 0–100 scale. For newer sites with low domain authority, targeting lower-KD keywords is often a more realistic early strategy.
Keyword Rank Checker
Checks your ranking for specific keywords across hundreds of locations. Faster than Search Console when you just want a quick position check.
SERP Checker
Shows the top 10 Google results for various countries. Useful if you're building for multiple markets and want to see local results without a VPN.
Link Analysis Tools
Tools for investigating backlinks and link health:
Backlink Checker
Shows the top 100 backlinks for any site. Often enough to see where similar products are getting links from and spot patterns.
Broken Link Checker
Finds broken links on any website. AWT's Site Audit also covers broken link detection for your own site.
Website Authority Checker
Shows Domain Rating (DR), Ahrefs' 0–100 metric based on backlink strength. Useful as a baseline to track your domain's progress relative to competitors.
Other Free Tools
Website Traffic Checker
Estimates any site's organic traffic and top pages. Useful for getting a rough sense of how much traffic similar products receive.
AI Visibility Checker
Shows how your brand appears in AI search results from ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Copilot. Worth checking periodically as AI-driven search continues to grow.
SEO Toolbar (Chrome Extension)
A Chrome extension from Ahrefs. The free version lets you inspect on-page SEO elements (meta tags, heading structure, outgoing links) with a single click. It also extracts related keywords and "People Also Ask" questions from Google search result pages.
Particularly useful when studying competitor product pages. You can check their meta tags and link patterns while browsing, turning everyday research into a learning opportunity.
AI Writing Tools
Ahrefs also offers free AI-powered writing tools. They're more limited than general-purpose AI like ChatGPT or Claude, but available without an account.
Grammar Checker
Detects grammar, spelling, and punctuation errors to help polish your writing.
Paragraph Rewriter
Improves readability and rewrites paragraphs into more natural-sounding text.
Paraphrasing Tool
Rephrases text into alternative expressions while preserving the original meaning.
AI Content Detector
Detects AI-generated text and can rewrite flagged sections to sound more natural.
Wrapping Up
Ahrefs' free features, especially AWT, can be a solid foundation for tackling SEO. Use Site Audit to catch technical issues and Site Explorer to understand your keyword and backlink landscape. That workflow alone covers a good amount of ground.
There are limits compared to paid plans, but the free features alone can go a long way toward understanding your site's current state. Why not start by giving your site a checkup with AWT?