The best estimate of organic traffic. Valuable insights into your competitors. Tools to create better content. Ahrefs is one of the world’s leading SEO tools – and they charge a premium for it. That was until 2024, when they introduced the Ahrefs Starter Plan: a $29 per month subscription for small-scale SEO. I started using it in October 2024, and now I’m sharing my personal Ahrefs Starter Plan review based on hands-on experience.
Disclaimer: Ahrefs has not approached or paid me to write this review – this Ahrefs Starter review is purely based on my own experience. (But of course, the good people at Ahrefs are more than welcome to offer me a lifetime free subscription!)
I’ll start this review with an overview of the Ahrefs Starter Plan: what exactly does it include? If you’re already familiar with it, feel free to jump to one of the following sections.
- Ahrefs Starter: What exactly is it?
- Ahrefs Starter: What can you do with it?
- Ahrefs Starter: good deal or not?
Ahrefs Starter: What exactly is it?
- A monthly subscription of $29 (depending on exchange rates, roughly €26–€28) – no annual plan available.
- No additional users, credits, or upgrades possible.
- Includes access to:
- SEO Dashboard
- Site Explorer
- Keywords Explorer*
- Site Audit
- Rank Tracker*
- Ahrefs SEO Toolbar
Please note: Rank Tracker and Keywords Explorer are not included in the free Ahrefs Webmaster Tools, which makes the Ahrefs Starter plan the logical choice if you need these features. For comparison, the next tier in Ahrefs’ paid plans, the Lite plan, currently costs $129 per month.
| Limits | Ahrefs Webmaster Tools | Starter ($29) | Lite ($129) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Credits per month | – | 100 | 500 |
| Additional users | 0 | 0 | 2 |
| Unverified projects | 0 | 1 | 5 |
| Max pages per project | – | 500 | 10,000 |
| Crawl credits per month | – | 25,000 | 100,000 |
| Verified projects (proven website owner) | Unlimited | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| Extra credits for verified projects | 500 | 500 | 500 |
| Rank Tracker Keywords | 0 | 50 | 750 |
A key distinction is the 100 monthly credits you can use for one unverified project—in other words, a competitor’s site. But how exactly do these credits work?
Ahrefs works with credits
With the Starter plan, you receive 100 credits per month. These are consumed when you open reports or request new data in most of Ahrefs’ core tools. However, Site Audit and Rank Tracker do not consume credits because they have their own separate limits. Got it.
So, where do credits actually get used?
Credits are spent on these features:
✅ Core tools: Site Explorer, Keywords Explorer, Content Explorer, Web Explorer, Competitive Analysis
✅ Standalone tools: Batch Analysis, Looker Studio (Site Explorer only), Page Inspect
And these actions:
- 1 credit for opening a report in any of the above tools
- 1 credit for applying filters and clicking “Show results”
- 1 credit for adjusting date ranges
- 1 credit for opening the SERP viewer or position history graph
💡 Navigating between pages within the same report doesn’t cost extra credits—you can browse freely as long as you don’t alter the data view (clicking show results). Even clicking back to a previously viewed report doesn’t consume an additional credit.
👉 Ahrefs explains credit usage here with visuals, but in practice, clicking around can burn through all 100 credits within two hours if you’re not careful. That’s why it’s smart to understand how to get the most value—which is exactly what the next section covers: Ahrefs Starter – what can you do with it? From the standard subscription at $249 per month, everything is unlimited, so credits are really meant to prevent excessive use of lower-priced plans.
Starter vs. Lite Plan
The Ahrefs Starter Plan is a stripped-down version of the more expensive Lite Plan, with key limitations in specific features:
| Limit | Ahrefs Webmaster Tools | Starter ($29) | Lite ($129) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Historical data | 0 | 1 month | 6 months |
| Max rows per report | – | 250 | 2500 |
| Max rows in “Top Pages” report | 0 | 25 | 2500 |
| Rows available for export per month | None | None | 500,000 |
| Keyword lists | 0 | 5 (max 100 keywords per list) | 50 |
Ahrefs Starter: What can you do with it?
Ahrefs Starter is designed as an entry-level way to get familiar with Ahrefs. It’s a monthly subscription (cancel anytime), offers more features than the free Ahrefs Webmaster Tools (including Rank Tracker and Keywords Explorer), and gives you 100 credits per month for core functions.
Before diving in, watch this Ahrefs Starter review video on YouTube—currently the only one available! Make sure to turn on subtitles for better understanding:
The video focuses mainly on Keyword Explorer, giving you a first look at what the tool can do.
Now, let’s break down the core features in more detail:
SEO Dashboard
This includes standard Ahrefs Webmaster Tools functionality. You can add unlimited sites by verifying them via Google Search Console. In this dashboard, you can see:
- Health Score
- Domain Rating
- Referring domains
- Backlinks
- Organic traffic
- Organic keywords per country
👉 Particularly useful if you manage multiple sites in a portfolio.
Site Explorer
Site Explorer is also included in Ahrefs Webmaster Tools, but Ahrefs Starter unlocks additional features. Here’s what you can see:
- Backlink profile
- Organic search results
- Paid search results
- Traffic by location
- Organic keywords sorted by search intent
- Organic pages ranked by traffic
- Crawled pages overview
The best part: you can analyze any website, including your competitors! Each time you check an unverified project, it costs one credit.
In the left-hand menu, you can retrieve additional data—each report costs one credit. If you’re using Ahrefs Webmaster Tools, you’ll only see the first 10 results, after which you’ll be prompted to upgrade to Ahrefs Starter.
I’m now reviewing a competitor and will go through the menu options step by step.
Backlink Profile
Links: Which high-quality backlinks does this site have?
- Free sorting by DR, UR, domain traffic, referring domains, linked domains, external page traffic.
- Filtering costs credits: Dofollow/Nofollow, best links, backlink type, DR, domain traffic, specific words or phrases.
- Clicking “Show Results” costs 1 credit.
Broken links:
- Great for outreach opportunities—reach out to sites with broken links and suggest an alternative.
- This lets you steal backlinks from competitors, though not all site owners will agree to update them.
Referring domains:
- Where does the competitor get their links from?
- Are they mostly foreign sites, directory pages, or authoritative sources like newspapers?
Anchor texts:
- Brand-related keywords usually rank first.
- Next, you’ll see keywords they’ve likely been actively link-building for.
- Super useful for analyzing an established site—what is their anchor text distribution strategy?
Linking authors: Requires a higher-tier subscription.
Referring IPs:
- Shows IP addresses, countries, and ISPs—this helps identify potential link-building tactics.
- Example: A competitor receiving most of their links from one IP or country could be using a private blog network (PBN).
- You won’t directly find PBNs here, but you can spot patterns.
Organic Search Results
- Organic keywords:
- Sort and filter competitor keywords—find low-hanging fruit!
- Top pages:
- View top-performing pages sorted by traffic.
- Sort by value, keywords, top keyword, search volume, ranking position.
- See content updates—how often does your competitor update a page?
- To view exact changes, a higher subscription is required.
- Organic competitors:
- See your competitor’s competitors (you don’t necessarily have to be in the list yourself).
- Pay attention to:
- Keyword overlap
- Total keywords per competitor
- Percentage of shared keywords
- Competitor’s DR, traffic, value, and number of pages
- If a competitor is too large to compare yourself to, this report can help you find a better benchmark.
Paid Search Results
Paid keywords, ads, and paid pages: insight into your competitor’s advertisements. This is particularly useful if you also advertise on Google. Example: a company bidding on “plumber Amsterdam”.
Pages
Here, you only have the function: Best by links. And you know what that means, right? Just click on the question mark at the top, ‘How to use this,’ and the explanation appears: The Best by links report shows you which pages on a target website or subsection have the most backlinks. You can switch between external and internal backlinks. The homepage is usually at the top. For internal links, you’ll then find the links included in the navigation menu and footer.
Outgoing links: You need a higher-tier subscription for this.
Internal links
This gives you some insight into how your competitor has structured their internal linking – and thus how their site structure is set up. According to Ahrefs, this is one of the most important ways to rank well for certain keywords without external backlinks: by optimally distributing the PageRank you receive on your homepage across the underlying pages.
Legacy: Top pages
By this, Ahrefs means an old feature they want to remove, but customers still find very useful. It sorts all your competitor’s pages by traffic.
And those were all the options under Site Explorer. Plenty to work with, right?
Keywords Explorer
According to Ahrefs, this is where it all really begins: the keywords that search engine users enter to find answers. Brainstorm a few core words around your topic, and this Ahrefs tool will generate hundreds or even thousands of keyword ideas for you. Plenty of other tools can do that too – the real value lies in what you do with them next.
Example: I entered some DIY tasks: replacing a door, replacing a threshold, replacing a window frame.
Then I clicked on Matching terms on the left. Voilà: 318 keywords. And that cost me just 2 credits.
Ahrefs recommends evaluating your keywords based on three factors:
- Search demand. Is there enough monthly traffic? Is that traffic somewhat consistent? In Keyword Explorer, you’ll find this under the SV (Search Volume) column. “Replacing a window frame” has 500 monthly searches, and the traffic remains stable.
- Competition. Do you realistically stand a chance of ranking? The KD column (Keyword Difficulty) provides a good indication. But that’s not all: Ahrefs advises only targeting keywords that sites of similar authority already rank for. You can check your own site’s authority using Ahrefs’ free Domain Authority checker. Set this above the columns, under Lowest DR:
Press Apply, then Show Results – and another credit is used.
See how in the new screenshot, the keyword “garage deur vervangen” has disappeared from the list? And how under the Intentions column, the C (Commercial) and T (Transactional) tags are missing? That brings us to the third point:
3. Business value. What’s the actual benefit of ranking for this keyword? The Intentions column offers an interpretation, but you need to determine whether a keyword is commercially valuable to you.
For example, “bosch wasmachine deur vervangen” (bosch washing machine door replacement) Are you an official Bosch technician? Then this keyword is valuable for your business. If you’re not – and that’s a requirement – then it’s merely an informational keyword: visitors searching for it won’t convert into customers.
Now, do you just plug these keywords into your content and you’re done? Almost. You need to think from the customer’s perspective. According to Google, people online only want to do three things:
- Find information
- Buy or arrange something
- Navigate further
In other words, they go through a journey (navigate), where they first look for answers (information) and then take action (buy or arrange something). Every keyword has a search intent with accompanying questions.
Take for example “raamkozijn vervangen” (replacing a window frame):
- How much does it cost?
- When is it necessary?
- Can you do it yourself?
- What tools do you need?
- How long does it take?
- Does the weather affect it?
- How do you find the right tradesperson?
- How is the price determined?
- Should you choose plastic or hardwood?
- Is it sustainable?
Ahrefs advises: Answer the main question first, then address the next five related questions.
Clicking SERP behind a keyword? That shows you the Search Engine Results Page for that term – meaning your competitors and how they rank for it. Cost: 1 credit.
Site Audit
I find Site Audit very useful: it’s part of Ahrefs Webmaster Tools, and you can add unlimited verified sites. Naturally, there’s a limitation: crawl credits. This feature uncovers technical issues that Ahrefs believes impact your search engine success.
Take this site, for example, katten-fotografie.nl:
Underneath, you see crawls, which you can click to view specific issues found at the time.
Below that, you’ll find individual issues:
Since this site is hosted on Vimexx.nl, those timeout issues make sense. However, orphan pages and links to broken pages are real problems you need to fix. In this case, there were two broken links on the homepage – oops! The two orphan pages turned out to be unused categories – not ideal.
Every month, I receive an email for each issue per site – fortunately, you can disable this or direct it to a separate mailbox – helping you gradually improve your site(s) technically.
Rank Tracker
You’re limited to 50 keywords here. Personally, I still find Google Search Console the most obvious choice, though it only lets you look back 16 months. I also find it tricky to decide which keywords to track here. The most valuable? The highest traffic ones? For this review, I added two keywords:
The SERP feature in the last column is particularly interesting (costs 1 credit):
My site ranks 5th for this keyword, with EDM, Kvk.nl, and Rijksoverheid.nl above it, and Amsterdam.nl and Belastingdienst.nl (Dutch tax office) below. Not bad! Of the top 5, my site gets the most traffic. However, this is an informational keyword for my site, so it doesn’t generate revenue.
Ahrefs SEO Toolbar
Ahrefs lists this functionality, but you’ll find it here. This is a browser plugin that provides SEO insights while browsing:
As a free Ahrefs Webmaster Tools user:
- Redirect tracer with HTTP headers
- Outgoing links report with a link highlighter and broken link checker
- SERP rankings
- Country switch for SERP
For Ahrefs Starter Plan subscribers and above:
- SEO metrics for every visited page/site and Google search results
- Keyword stats like search volume and difficulty, displayed directly in the SERP
Here’s the Ahrefs SEO Toolbar in action on Google.nl for “ondernemen” (entrepreneurship):
The search results remain personalised – my own site ranks 2nd. On the right, a panel shows Keyword Ideas and People Also Ask. That last one matches Google’s More to Ask section exactly. The metrics need to be enabled separately in the plugin, and then linked to your Ahrefs Starter Plan. This lets me see these metrics for every visited site:
I personally don’t use plugins to retrieve SEO data – it’s just another tool to manage. But if you’re constantly online and researching SEO, it could be perfect for you.
Ahrefs Starter: good deal or not?
It’s only $29 per month – quite affordable for an SEO professional, right?
It depends on your experience and use case.
If you haven’t used Ahrefs Webmaster Tools yet:
Then start there first: Ahrefs Webmaster Tools is completely free and offers a lot of valuable functionalities. The UX of Ahrefs is somewhat atypical: there is logic to it, but not necessarily the one you are used to. You can open almost all reports, but you only see the first 10 results. That’s already enough to take action and a great way to learn.
This gives you functionalities similar to those found in the former Google Webmaster Tools (now called Google Search Console), but from a reputable company that isn’t Google. It also shows you how your competition sees you.
If you already use Ahrefs Webmaster Tools:
Tired of seeing the message “this report is only available for paid subscriptions“? Unfortunately, with Ahrefs Starter, you’ll keep encountering it—sometimes when it makes sense, but often when it doesn’t. You can do more, but still not everything. Being able to dig through a competitor’s website with Site Explorer can be extremely valuable, just like Keyword Explorer, where you quickly find good keywords thanks to the useful suggestions and extensive filtering options.
Make sure you work efficiently—after this demo, my credit counter was at 24/100. You get the most out of Ahrefs Starter when you integrate its insights into your tasks, such as:
- Planning new content. Which keywords should you target?
- Link building. Which keywords? What links does your competitor have? What are they ranking for? Which ones can you take?
- Site maintenance. What issues are there? Can you improve the site structure?
- Competitor analysis. How is your competitor performing? What works for them and what doesn’t?
- Ranking. How are your selected keywords performing? What’s happening with them?
If you don’t focus on at least one of these areas, you probably won’t get much value from Ahrefs Starter.
If you have the Ahrefs Lite subscription
Check how many credits you’re using and how many unverified projects (competitors) you’re actively tracking. Keep track of what you do in Ahrefs and which features you actually use. If a week easily goes by without logging in, you could probably cancel your Lite subscription and switch to Starter instead—Ahrefs doesn’t allow downgrading. Be careful, though! You’ll lose the competitor analysis feature, including Content Gap Analysis, which was still part of Ahrefs Starter until August 12, 2024.
Great deal!
Final verdict on this Ahrefs Starter Plan review: go for it. The monthly cancelation option and (limited) access to premium Ahrefs tools make it worth it for me. Ahrefs is one of the best tools for tracking backlinks. With careful use, you can maximize your credits, making it ideal for a serious webshop or blog owner who only needs to track one competitor. The UX takes some getting used to.
Still feeling that $29 per month in your wallet?
Ahrefs is just one of many SEO tools. You can get quite far with free tools alone. Consider:
- Google Search Console
- Ahrefs Webmaster Tools
- Semrush free tools (Keyword Rank Checker, SERP checker, Keyword Search Volume Checker)
Frequently asked questions
In response to your comments, here are some additional details.
Where can I find those damned credits?
Review by Thomas Lapperre
