How to Use Ahrefs for Free? Explore Its Best Features and Practical Uses

Table Of Contents

Introduction

If you have ever searched for ways to grow a website, rank higher on Google, or understand what your competitors are doing online, you have probably come across the name Ahrefs. It is one of the most well-known SEO (Search Engine Optimization) tools in the world, used by marketers, bloggers, freelancers, and large businesses alike.

But there is one big question that most beginners ask: Is Ahrefs free? And if so, how can I use it without paying?

The good news is that Ahrefs does offer a free version, known as Ahrefs Webmaster Tools (AWT), along with a handful of other features you can access without spending a single rupee or dollar. While the full suite of Ahrefs is a paid product, the free options are surprisingly powerful, especially for beginners and small website owners.

In this guide, we will walk you through everything you need to know about using Ahrefs for free. We will cover the free tools available, what each one does, how to set them up, and how to use them to grow your website’s visibility on search engines. By the end of this article, you will have a solid foundation to start using Ahrefs confidently, even without a paid subscription.

What is Ahrefs?

Ahrefs is a powerful SEO software platform founded in 2010 by Dmitry Gerasimenko. It is headquartered in Singapore and has become one of the go-to tools for digital marketers, content creators, SEO professionals, and business owners who want to improve their online presence.

At its core, Ahrefs helps you understand how search engines like Google see websites. It gives you data about keywords, backlinks (links from other websites pointing to yours), organic traffic, and much more. Using this data, you can make smarter decisions about your content, your website structure, and your overall digital marketing strategy.

Why is Ahrefs So Popular?

Ahrefs has built an excellent reputation for several reasons:

It has one of the largest backlink indexes in the world, meaning it tracks links from billions of web pages.
Its keyword data is highly accurate and pulled from multiple search engines including Google, Bing, YouTube, and Amazon.
The interface is easy to understand even if you are a beginner.
It provides actionable insights, meaning it does not just show you data but also tells you what to do with it.
It is regularly updated with new features and improvements.

With paid plans starting at $129 per month (as of 2024-2025), Ahrefs is not cheap. This is exactly why understanding the free options becomes so important, especially for people who are just getting started.

Can You Really Use Ahrefs for Free?

Yes, you absolutely can. While Ahrefs no longer offers a free trial for its full paid plans (they discontinued the $7 trial in 2021), the company has made several free options available:

Ahrefs Webmaster Tools (AWT) – Free access to Site Audit, Site Explorer, and more for websites you own.
Ahrefs Free Keyword Generator – A free keyword research tool available on the Ahrefs website.
Ahrefs Free Backlink Checker – Shows the top 100 backlinks for any website.
Ahrefs Free SERP Checker – Lets you check Google rankings for any keyword in different countries.
Ahrefs Free Website Authority Checker – Checks the Domain Rating (DR) of any website.
Ahrefs Free YouTube Keyword Tool – Helps find keyword ideas for YouTube videos.

Each of these tools has a different use case, and together they can help beginners get a lot of value without opening their wallets. Let us explore each one in detail.

Ahrefs Webmaster Tools (AWT) – The Most Powerful Free Option

If you own a website and want to use Ahrefs for free, Ahrefs Webmaster Tools (AWT) is the single best option available to you. It gives you access to some of the most valuable features in the entire Ahrefs platform, absolutely free, as long as you verify that the website belongs to you.

What is Ahrefs Webmaster Tools?

Ahrefs Webmaster Tools is a free product launched by Ahrefs in 2020. It is similar in concept to Google Search Console (another free tool from Google), but it provides significantly more detailed data. With AWT, you get access to three powerful tools: Site Explorer, Site Audit, and the Keywords tab, all for free.

How to Set Up Ahrefs Webmaster Tools

Setting up AWT is simple and takes only a few minutes. Here is a step-by-step process:

Go to ahrefs.com/webmaster-tools in your web browser.
Click on the ‘Get started for free’ button.
Create a free Ahrefs account using your email address or sign in with your Google account.
After logging in, click on ‘Add a new project’ and enter your website’s URL.
Verify your website ownership. Ahrefs offers multiple verification methods: via Google Search Console (easiest if you already have it set up), via DNS records, via an HTML file upload, or via an HTML meta tag.
Once verified, Ahrefs will start crawling your website and populating data within a few hours.

What Can You Do with AWT? Key Features Explained

Site Audit

Site Audit is one of the most useful tools inside AWT. It automatically crawls your website and identifies technical SEO issues that might be hurting your rankings on Google. Think of it as a health check for your website.

Some of the issues it checks for include:

Broken links (links on your site that go to pages that do not exist).
Missing or duplicate meta titles and descriptions.
Slow-loading pages that could frustrate users and hurt rankings.
Pages that are not indexed by search engines.
Redirect chains and redirect loops.
Images without alt text (important for accessibility and SEO).
Low word count pages that may not be providing enough value.
Orphan pages (pages with no internal links pointing to them).

The Site Audit gives each issue a severity rating (warning, error, or critical), so you know which problems to fix first. It also gives you an overall health score for your website out of 100, which is a great way to track improvements over time.

Practical Tip: Run a Site Audit immediately after setting up AWT. Look at the critical errors first, then work your way down to warnings. Even fixing five or ten issues can make a noticeable difference in how your site performs on Google.

Site Explorer (for Your Own Website)

Site Explorer is Ahrefs’s flagship tool for analyzing any website’s SEO performance. With AWT’s free version, you can use Site Explorer exclusively on your own verified websites. While paid users can enter any website in the world, the free version still gives you incredible insight into your own site’s performance.

Inside Site Explorer for your own website, you can see:

Organic Keywords: A list of all the keywords your website is currently ranking for on Google and other search engines. You can see which page ranks for each keyword, what position it holds, and how much traffic it drives.
Backlink Profile: A complete picture of all the websites that are linking to your site. You can see the total number of backlinks, the number of referring domains, and the quality of those links.
Top Pages: A list of your best-performing pages based on estimated organic traffic and keyword rankings.
Organic Traffic Overview: A visual graph showing how your estimated traffic has changed over time.

The Keywords Tab

Inside AWT, there is a dedicated Keywords section that shows you all the keywords your website ranks for across Google. This is extremely valuable because it helps you understand your current SEO status and discover opportunities you might be missing.

For each keyword, you can see the search volume (how many people search for it each month), your current ranking position, the traffic it brings to your site, and the keyword difficulty (how hard it would be to rank higher). Using this data, you can identify keywords where you are already ranking on page two or three of Google and prioritize them for content improvement, which can lead to quicker traffic gains.

Ahrefs Free Keyword Generator

Even if you do not have a website yet or simply want to do quick keyword research without logging in, Ahrefs offers a Free Keyword Generator tool on their website. You do not need to create an account to use it.

What is the Free Keyword Generator?

The Ahrefs Free Keyword Generator is a simplified version of the Keywords Explorer tool found in the paid plan. You can find it at ahrefs.com/keyword-generator. Simply type in a seed keyword (a starting word or phrase related to your topic), choose a country, and the tool will show you a list of related keyword ideas.

What Data Does It Show?

For each keyword, the free tool displays:

Keyword Difficulty (KD): A score from 0 to 100 indicating how hard it is to rank on the first page of Google for that keyword. A score below 20 is generally considered easy for beginners.
Search Volume: The estimated number of searches that keyword gets each month.
A list of up to 150 keyword ideas including phrase match keywords, questions, and related terms.

How to Use the Free Keyword Generator Effectively

Here is a practical approach for beginners:

Think of 3 to 5 broad topics related to your website or business. For example, if you have a cooking blog, your topics might be: recipes, meal planning, healthy eating, kitchen tips, and baking.
Enter each topic as a seed keyword in the tool.
Look through the results and focus on keywords with low Keyword Difficulty (KD under 20-30) and reasonable search volume (at least 100-500 searches per month).
Make a list of these keywords and use them to plan your content calendar.
Pay special attention to the ‘Questions’ tab which shows question-format keywords like ‘how to’, ‘what is’, ‘why does’ as these often have clear search intent and are great for blog posts.

Example: If you type ‘intermittent fasting’ into the tool and select India as your country, you might find keywords like ‘intermittent fasting for beginners’ (KD: 15, Volume: 8,000), ‘intermittent fasting meal plan’ (KD: 18, Volume: 5,500), and ‘is intermittent fasting safe’ (KD: 12, Volume: 3,200). These would all be excellent targets for a health blog just getting started.

Ahrefs Free Backlink Checker

Backlinks are one of the most important factors in Google rankings. When high-quality websites link to your pages, Google sees this as a vote of confidence and tends to rank your content higher. The Ahrefs Free Backlink Checker lets you peek into the backlink profile of any website for free.

How to Use the Free Backlink Checker

Visit ahrefs.com/backlink-checker and enter any website URL, including your own or a competitor’s site. You do not need an account.

The tool will show you:

Domain Rating (DR): Ahrefs’s proprietary metric that measures the overall strength of a website’s backlink profile on a scale of 0 to 100.
Total Backlinks: The total number of backlinks pointing to that website.
Referring Domains: The number of unique websites that are linking to the site.
Top 100 Backlinks: A list of the 100 most powerful backlinks pointing to the site, along with the anchor text used in each link and the page it is linking to.

Practical Uses for the Free Backlink Checker

Analyze Your Own Backlinks

Check your own website to see who is already linking to you. This helps you understand your current authority and identify which content is attracting the most links, so you can create more of it.

Study Your Competitors

Enter a competitor’s website and look at where they are getting their backlinks from. If a website is linking to your competitor, there is a good chance they might be interested in linking to you too, especially if you have equally good or better content. This practice is called link prospecting.

Evaluate Guest Post Opportunities

If someone approaches you for a link exchange or guest post, check their website’s Domain Rating with the free backlink checker before agreeing. A website with a DR below 10 is generally not worth getting a link from, while a DR above 40 or 50 is considered quite valuable.

Ahrefs Free SERP Checker

SERP stands for Search Engine Results Page. The Ahrefs Free SERP Checker at ahrefs.com/serp-checker allows you to see the top 10 websites currently ranking for any keyword on Google, along with key data about each result.

What Information Does It Show?

For each of the top 10 results on Google for your chosen keyword, the SERP Checker displays:

URL: The exact page that is ranking for that keyword.
DR (Domain Rating): The authority of the website hosting that page.
UR (URL Rating): The strength of that specific page’s backlink profile.
Backlinks: The number of backlinks pointing to that specific ranking page.
Referring Domains: The number of unique websites linking to that page.
Estimated Traffic: An approximation of how much monthly organic traffic that page receives.

How to Use the SERP Checker for Competitor Analysis

The SERP Checker is incredibly useful for what SEOs call ‘competitive analysis.’ Before you decide to write a piece of content targeting a specific keyword, it is smart to understand who you are competing against.

For example, if you want to rank for the keyword ‘best budget laptops in India 2025,’ enter it into the SERP Checker. If you see that all the top 10 results are from websites with DR 70+ and thousands of backlinks, it tells you this keyword will be extremely difficult to rank for. However, if you find that some results come from websites with DR 20-30, that is a sign you may be able to compete with enough quality content and some link building.

Ahrefs Free Website Authority Checker

Domain Rating (DR) is one of Ahrefs’s most well-known metrics. It measures the overall strength of a website’s backlink profile and is often used as a quick way to gauge how authoritative a website is compared to others.

The Ahrefs Free Website Authority Checker at ahrefs.com/website-authority-checker lets you check the DR of any website instantly without logging in. You can even check multiple websites at once by entering several URLs.

When to Use the Website Authority Checker

Before accepting a guest post opportunity: Check the DR of the website that wants to publish your guest post. Higher DR = more valuable backlink.
When buying or selling a website: A website with a higher DR is generally more valuable because it has established authority.
To benchmark your own site: Check your DR regularly to track how your link building efforts are paying off over time.
When evaluating partnership opportunities: If a brand wants to collaborate or exchange links, checking their DR helps you assess whether it is worthwhile.

Ahrefs Free YouTube Keyword Tool

YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world. If you are a content creator, vlogger, or marketer who uses YouTube as a platform, the Ahrefs Free YouTube Keyword Tool is a fantastic resource.

Found at ahrefs.com/youtube-keyword-tool, it works similarly to the standard keyword generator but focuses specifically on searches made on YouTube. When you type in a keyword, it returns a list of related YouTube search terms along with their search volume and Keyword Difficulty score.

This tool is especially useful because YouTube SEO is quite different from regular Google SEO. Knowing what people are searching for directly on YouTube helps you craft video titles, descriptions, and tags that match real user intent, leading to more views and subscribers over time.

Putting It All Together: A Practical Workflow for Beginners

Now that you understand each free tool, let us look at how you can combine them into a simple but effective SEO workflow even as a complete beginner.

Step 1: Set Up Your Foundation

Start by setting up Ahrefs Webmaster Tools for your website. This is your home base. Verify ownership, run your first Site Audit, and fix the critical errors it finds. Also check which keywords you are already ranking for and identify any pages that are ranking on page 2 or 3 for valuable terms.

Step 2: Research Your Keywords

Use the Free Keyword Generator to find low-competition keywords in your niche. Write them down in a spreadsheet, noting the search volume and KD for each. Prioritize keywords with KD under 20 and at least 200 monthly searches. Group related keywords together into content clusters, topics that can be covered across multiple interlinked blog posts.

Step 3: Analyze the Competition

Before writing any content, use the Free SERP Checker to see who is currently ranking for each keyword you plan to target. Look at the DR of the top 10 results. If all top results are from massive authority sites, you may want to look for a less competitive variation of the keyword.

Step 4: Build and Monitor Your Backlinks

Periodically use the Free Backlink Checker to check your own site and your competitors’ sites. When you identify websites that are linking to competitors but not to you, reach out to them with valuable content they might want to link to. This is one of the most effective ways to build authority over time.

Step 5: Improve Your Existing Content

Return to AWT regularly. Check if your rankings are improving for the keywords you are targeting. Look at the Site Audit scores over time and continue fixing any new issues that appear. Use the ‘Top Pages’ report to understand which pages are performing best and consider updating and expanding them with fresh information.

Limitations of the Free Ahrefs Tools

While the free options from Ahrefs are genuinely useful, it is important to be honest about their limitations so you can set realistic expectations.

No competitor analysis in Site Explorer: With AWT, you can only use Site Explorer on your own verified websites. To analyze a competitor’s traffic, keywords, or backlinks in depth, you need a paid plan.
Limited keyword data: The Free Keyword Generator shows only up to 150 keyword ideas per search, whereas paid users can see tens of thousands of keywords with far more filtering options.
No Rank Tracker: Ahrefs’s Rank Tracker tool, which monitors your keyword positions over time automatically, is only available on paid plans.
No Content Explorer: The Content Explorer, which helps you find the most shared and linked-to content in any niche, requires a paid subscription.
Limited historical data: Free tools show current data but do not allow you to go back and see how things looked months or years ago.
Daily crawl limits in AWT: The Site Audit in the free plan crawls up to 5,000 pages per project per month, which is fine for small websites but may not be enough for large sites.

Understanding these limitations helps you use the free tools wisely and know when it might make sense to invest in a paid plan as your needs grow.

Tips to Get the Most Out of Ahrefs Free Tools

Here are some expert tips to help you maximize the value of your free Ahrefs access:

Run Site Audit monthly: Make it a habit to run a Site Audit at least once a month. Websites change constantly, and new issues can appear after publishing new content, adding plugins, or updating your site design.
Focus on ‘quick wins’ in keyword rankings: In AWT, filter your keyword list to show only positions 4 through 15. These are your ‘low-hanging fruit’ rankings. A little content improvement can push these into the top 3, resulting in significantly more traffic.
Use question keywords for blog posts: The question keywords from the Free Keyword Generator are perfect for blog posts and FAQs. They tend to have lower competition and match very specific user intent.
Combine Ahrefs with Google Search Console: Google Search Console is another free tool that complements AWT nicely. While AWT shows you Ahrefs data, GSC shows you real-time data directly from Google. Use them together for a fuller picture.
Track your Domain Rating growth: Check your DR using the Website Authority Checker every month. As your DR grows from 0 toward 20, 30, and beyond, you will notice your content starts ranking more easily.
Study competitors’ backlink anchors: When using the Free Backlink Checker on competitor sites, pay attention to the anchor text used in their best backlinks. This tells you which keywords other websites associate with your competitors, which can give you ideas for your own link building and content strategy.

When Should You Upgrade to a Paid Ahrefs Plan?

The free tools are excellent for getting started, but there will come a point where you need more. Here are some signs that it might be time to consider upgrading:

You want to analyze competitor websites in depth and see their full keyword and traffic data.
You need to track dozens or hundreds of keywords automatically on a daily or weekly basis.
You are managing SEO for multiple websites and need consolidated reporting.
You want to do in-depth content research using Content Explorer to find viral content ideas.
Your business has grown to the point where SEO is a significant revenue driver and you need more comprehensive data.

Ahrefs currently offers the following paid plans: Lite at $129/month, Standard at $249/month, Advanced at $449/month, and Enterprise with custom pricing. The Lite plan is generally enough for most freelancers, bloggers, and small business owners starting out.

Conclusion

Learning how to use Ahrefs for free is not just possible, it is genuinely rewarding. The combination of Ahrefs Webmaster Tools, the Free Keyword Generator, the Free Backlink Checker, the SERP Checker, and the Website Authority Checker gives you a surprisingly complete SEO toolkit without spending any money.

For beginners, the best place to start is by setting up Ahrefs Webmaster Tools for your website. Run your first Site Audit, explore which keywords you already rank for, and use the free keyword tools to plan your next pieces of content. These actions alone can lead to meaningful improvements in your search rankings over time.

SEO is a long game. It requires consistency, patience, and a commitment to creating genuinely helpful content. But with the right tools, even those tools available for free, you are well-equipped to compete and grow. Ahrefs’s free offerings give you the data and insights you need to make smarter decisions, attract more visitors, and build a stronger online presence.

Start today. Sign up for Ahrefs Webmaster Tools, run your first audit, find your first low-competition keyword, and take one step forward. That single step is often all it takes to start building the momentum that leads to real, lasting results.

About the Author

Jay Patel is the Founder of XSquareSEO, a full-service SEO agency with experience in on-page SEO, eCommerce SEO, link building, technical SEO, SaaS SEO, and local SEO. For more information, feel free to contact us.

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