Ahrefs

Site Explorer: the most reliable backlink analysis

The heart of Ahrefs, and the reason we pay for it every month. Enter any domain and you get a complete X-ray of its link profile:

• referring domains, anchors and most-linked pages;
• Domain Rating trends and detection of gained or lost links;
• fine filters (dofollow, language, referring site traffic) to qualify each link.

The index is refreshed continuously: when a competitor gets a link, we usually see it within a few days.

Content Gap and Link Intersect: competitive analysis

These two reports are our favourites for building a strategy. Content Gap reveals the keywords your competitors rank for and you don't; Link Intersect lists the sites linking to several competitors but not to your domain — in other words, already-qualified link building spots.

Keywords Explorer: keyword research

A massive keyword base covering Google but also YouTube, Amazon and Bing, with a realistic difficulty score and an estimate of real clicks (not just search volume). Handy for discarding high-volume but clickless queries captured by Google's direct answers or AI.

Site Audit and Rank Tracker

The cloud-based technical audit crawls your sites on a schedule and scores their overall health, while the Rank Tracker follows your positions by country and device. They are not the most advanced modules on the market, but they round out the toolkit nicely without an extra tool.

What we do with it at the agency

In practice, Ahrefs comes into our link building services at three moments: qualifying spots before purchase (real metrics, organic traffic, domain history), monitoring competitors' links, and the monthly report of links acquired for our clients. It is our referee before any link order.