Ahrefs Pricing in 2026: Plans Explained

Disclosure: This post contains affiliate links. If you buy through them, Affitrove may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. I only recommend tools I’ve actually researched — and I’ll tell you plainly when a tool isn’t worth your money. One thing to know upfront: Ahrefs has no affiliate program, so I earn nothing if you buy Ahrefs. The links in this article that do earn me money are the ones to Semrush and SE Ranking, and I’ve marked those. Prices checked November 12, 2026.

Ahrefs pricing in 2026 has a trap in it, and it’s not the prices themselves. It’s the guides. Half the pricing articles ranking on Google right now still quote Lite at $99 a month and Standard at $199 — prices Ahrefs killed in April 2024, more than two and a half years ago. If you budget around those numbers, you’ll be short by $30 a month on Lite and $50 on Standard before you’ve even opened the tool. I read Ahrefs’ live pricing page on November 11, 2026, cross-checked every figure against six independent roundups from September to November, and read the help center pages that explain the parts the pricing page glosses over. Everything below comes from those reads. Where sources disagree — and a couple do — I’ll say so instead of picking the number that makes the cleanest table.

Here’s the other thing you should know before you start comparing: Ahrefs is the rare SEO tool that refuses to play the discount game. No free trial. No Black Friday sale. No coupon codes. The help center says it flat out — “We never run discounts.” So the only question that matters is which plan fits your actual work, because you can’t trial your way into the answer and you can’t wait for a sale to fix a wrong choice. That’s what this article is for.

The quick answer

• Cheapest way in is $29 a month for Starter, and it’s monthly-only — there is no annual discount on Starter, no matter what a coupon blog tells you.
• Lite is $129 a month, or $107.50 a month if you pay annually ($1,290 a year). That’s the plan most solo bloggers and small sites should actually buy.
• Standard is $249 a month, or $207.50 on annual billing ($2,490 a year). It’s the first plan with unlimited credits, and that matters more than any feature list suggests.
• Advanced is $449 a month, or $374.17 annual ($4,490 a year). Agencies and serious content teams live here.
• Enterprise is $1,499 a month on an annual contract ($17,988 a year) — and no, there is no annual discount on it, despite what older articles claim.
• There is no free trial. The free option is Ahrefs Free — the renamed Webmaster Tools — which only works on sites you can prove you own.
• Ahrefs has no affiliate program. It shut the program down around 2019 and says it has no plans to bring it back, so nobody writing about Ahrefs pricing is earning a commission from Ahrefs itself.

If you only need one number to carry away: Lite on annual billing costs $0.14 per tracked keyword a month, Standard costs $0.10, and SE Ranking’s Core plan — the honest alternative — costs $0.05. But read the catch before you switch on price alone, because Ahrefs updates rankings weekly while the other two update daily, and a keyword you check once a week isn’t the same product as one you check every day.

Ahrefs pricing at a glance

Plan	Monthly billing	Annual billing (per month)	Annual total	Tracked keywords	Credits
Ahrefs Free	$0	$0	$0	—	—
Starter	$29	$29 (monthly only)	$348	50	200/mo
Lite	$129	$107.50	$1,290	750	1,000/user/mo
Standard	$249	$207.50	$2,490	2,000	Unlimited
Advanced	$449	$374.17	$4,490	5,000	Unlimited
Enterprise	$1,499	$1,499 (no discount)	$17,988	From 10,000	Unlimited

Annual billing works out to paying for 10 months and getting 12 — Ahrefs’ pricing page calls it “up to 17%” off, and the maths is 16.67%, so “two months free” is the honest way to say it. The help center calls it “almost 20%” in one place, which is just loose rounding; the 10-for-12 rule is what the checkout actually charges. One more thing the table hides: every plan includes exactly one user. A second seat costs extra on every paid plan, and those seat prices climb with the tier — $40 a month on Lite, $60 on Standard, $80 on Advanced, $100 on Enterprise. I’ll do the team maths later, because it changes the answer for anyone buying for more than one person.

First, the stale-prices trap (and the Enterprise correction)

Before the plan-by-plan detail, two corrections worth making, because both are sitting in live articles right now — including one of mine.

The old prices are everywhere. Before April 2024, Ahrefs Lite cost $99 a month, Standard $199, Advanced $399. Those numbers still show up in pricing guides, YouTube descriptions, and “Ahrefs alternatives” posts that were never updated. If a page you’re reading quotes $99 for Lite, close it. It’s describing a product that hasn’t existed for over two years. The current prices — $29, $129, $249, $449, $1,499 — have been stable since that April 2024 increase. Nothing moved in 2026, and I found no new increase announced as of November 12. That stability is genuinely useful to know: the price you see today is the price you’ll pay next quarter.

The Enterprise annual price in my own earlier article was wrong. In my Semrush vs Ahrefs comparison I listed Enterprise at $1,249.17 a month on annual billing. That figure doesn’t exist. Enterprise is $1,499 a month, period — it requires an annual contract, but the contract buys you no discount. The $1,249.17 number came from assuming the same 10-for-12 annual maths applies to every tier. It doesn’t. I’m correcting it here because it’s the kind of small error that costs a real buyer $3,000 a year if they budget on it ($17,988 a year, not $14,990). If you saw that number in my earlier article, this is the correction.

What each plan actually gets you

Ahrefs sells the same core toolkit on every paid plan — Site Explorer, Keywords Explorer, Site Audit, Rank Tracker, Web Analytics, and now Brand Radar for AI visibility. What changes between tiers isn’t which tools you get, it’s how much of each tool you’re allowed to use. Credits, keyword counts, rows per report, history depth, crawl allowance — those are the real product. Here’s each tier on its own terms.

Ahrefs Free — $0, forever, with a catch

Ahrefs Free is the renamed version of Ahrefs Webmaster Tools; the name changed in 2026, the deal didn’t. It costs nothing, needs no credit card, and never expires. The catch is scope: it only works on websites you can verify you own. Connect your site, prove it’s yours, and you get Site Explorer and Site Audit for that site, plus Web Analytics, with 5,000 crawl credits a month per verified project. You can see up to 1,000 backlinks and keywords at a time for your own domain.

What you can’t do on Free is look at anyone else. Competitor research, Keywords Explorer, Content Explorer, and Rank Tracker all need a paid plan. So Free is genuinely useful — it’s a real site audit and analytics tool for your own site — but it’s not a trial of Ahrefs. It’s a different, smaller product that happens to live in the same account. If you own one site and mostly want to know what’s broken on it and who links to it, Free might be all you ever need. If you want to research keywords your competitors rank for, Free will frustrate you within an hour, and that’s by design.

Starter — $29 a month, monthly only

Starter launched in January 2026 as Ahrefs’ cheapest paid door, and it’s the plan most people should look at first — carefully. Twenty-nine dollars a month gets you the full toolkit on one project you don’t own, 50 tracked keywords, 200 credits a month, 250 rows per report, and one month of historical data. You can’t add a second user at any price, and you can’t buy extra credits — when the 200 are gone, you wait for the month to turn over.

Here’s the part that trips people up: Starter has no annual discount. Every other paid plan drops to roughly two months free on annual billing. Starter stays $29 a month whether you pay monthly or try to pay yearly — the help center is explicit that it’s monthly renewal only. So the “annual” column for Starter is just $348 a year, and anyone telling you annual Starter costs less is wrong. It’s also the only paid plan with a hard credit cap that can’t be topped up, which makes it a strange fit for the person it’s aimed at. Two hundred credits sounds like plenty until you learn that a credit is spent every time you load new data — run a few Site Explorer reports, pull a keyword list, audit a page, and you’ve burned a day’s allowance before lunch. For a hobby blogger checking one site once a week, Starter is fine. For anyone doing daily SEO work, it’s a demo with a monthly bill.

Lite — $129 a month, or $107.50 on annual billing

Lite is where Ahrefs starts making sense as a working tool, and it’s the plan I’d point most solo bloggers and small-site owners toward. At $107.50 a month on annual billing ($1,290 a year), you get 750 tracked keywords, 1,000 credits per user a month, 2,500 rows per report, six months of history, 100,000 Site Audit crawl credits a month, and five non-verified projects. You also get the full Brand Radar allowance at this tier’s level — 5 tracked AI prompts and 150 checks a month — plus API and MCP access, and a Report Builder with 5 reports and 30 widgets.

The credit limit is the thing to watch. A thousand credits a month sounds generous next to Starter’s 200, and for a lot of users it is. But heavy users hit it. If you’re pulling big backlink exports, running batch analysis, or auditing large sites regularly, 1,000 credits can go faster than the 750-keyword limit suggests. Ahrefs lets you buy extra credits pay-as-you-go if you enable it, and those purchases last three billing months, but that’s an extra charge on top of the plan. The honest way to think about Lite is: it’s unlimited ambition with a meter running. Standard removes the meter entirely, and that’s the real upgrade — not the keyword count.

Standard — $249 a month, or $207.50 on annual billing

Standard is the sweet spot for anyone doing SEO as a real part of their income. At $207.50 a month on annual billing ($2,490 a year), the headline numbers are 2,000 tracked keywords, 30,000 rows per report, two years of history, 500,000 crawl credits a month, and 20 non-verified projects. But the number that actually changes your working life is the credits column: unlimited. From Standard up, you stop counting. No meter, no pay-as-you-go top-ups, no “I’ll check that report tomorrow when my credits reset.”

Standard also unlocks the tools Lite holds back. Portfolios for grouping sites, Content Explorer for finding what’s earning links in your niche, Batch Analysis at 200 URLs per report (Lite doesn’t get it in the same form), SERP comparison, and the fuller Site Explorer views — site structure, broken backlinks and links, outgoing links, linking authors, and the Google Search Console site-structure view. Brand Radar steps up to 10 tracked prompts and 300 checks a month. Extra users cost $60 a month each, up to five of them.

Here’s my honest read: if you’re choosing between Lite and Standard, don’t compare the keyword counts. Compare your usage pattern. If you open Ahrefs a few times a week and run a handful of reports, Lite’s 1,000 credits will last you and Standard is $1,200 a year of overkill. If you live in the tool — daily rank checks, regular audits, big exports, client reporting — the credit wall on Lite will cost you more in friction than the $100-a-month jump to Standard costs in money. The upgrade that matters is unlimited credits, and it only starts here.

Advanced — $449 a month, or $374.17 on annual billing

Advanced, at $374.17 a month on annual billing ($4,490 a year), is an agency plan wearing a mid-tier badge. You get 5,000 tracked keywords, 75,000 rows per report, five years of history, 1.5 million crawl credits a month, 50 non-verified projects, and Brand Radar at 20 prompts and 600 checks. Batch Analysis jumps to 1,000 URLs per report, Report Builder expands to 15 reports and 150 widgets, and you get Looker Studio integration, search-type distribution data, an agency directory listing, and Site Audit with HTTP authentication for crawling behind logins.

Who actually needs this? Agencies managing dozens of client sites, content teams running large-scale audits, and anyone whose reporting volume breaks Standard’s limits. For a solo blogger, Advanced is almost never the right buy — the jump from 2,000 to 5,000 tracked keywords sounds impressive, but most solo sites don’t track 2,000 keywords, let alone 5,000. The honest test is crawl credits and reporting: if Standard’s 500,000 crawl credits a month and 30,000 rows per report are genuinely constraining you, Advanced is the answer. If they’re not, you’re paying $1,800 a year extra for headroom you’ll never use. Extra users are $80 a month each, up to ten.

Enterprise — $1,499 a month, annual contract required

Enterprise is $1,499 a month and $17,988 a year, and I’ll repeat the correction because it matters: there is no annual discount. The contract is annual, the price is flat. What you get is 10,000+ tracked keywords, 150,000 rows per report, unlimited history, 5 million+ crawl credits a month, 100 non-verified projects, uncapped API access with custom endpoints, SSO and enterprise security, access management with an audit log, forecasting and trends, and three users included (extra seats at $100 a month, unlimited). Brand Radar starts at 83 prompts and 2,500 checks, with personalised higher limits on request.

Enterprise is also the only tier where Ahrefs will talk about custom limits and a “no training on your data” commitment. If you’re reading this article to decide whether to buy Enterprise, you probably already know you need it — it’s a procurement conversation, not a pricing-page decision. For everyone else, Enterprise exists mainly as the ceiling that makes Advanced look reasonable.

The credit system, explained properly

Credits are the part of Ahrefs pricing most guides skip, and they’re the part that decides whether your plan actually works for you. A credit is spent each time you load or request new data. Open a Site Explorer report, pull a keyword list, run an audit — credits go. Re-viewing data you’ve already loaded doesn’t cost again, but anything fresh does.

Starter gets 200 credits a month, and that’s a hard stop: no top-ups, no extra purchases. Lite gets 1,000 credits per user a month. Standard, Advanced, and Enterprise get unlimited credits per user. If you turn on pay-as-you-go, Ahrefs auto-charges for extra data when you pass your limit, and those pay-as-you-go purchases last three billing months including the current one — prepaid limits are always used first.

Why does this matter more than the keyword counts? Because the keyword counts are generous and the credits aren’t. Lite’s 750 tracked keywords look like the binding constraint, but a heavy user will burn through 1,000 credits long before they fill 750 keyword slots. That’s the quiet upsell built into the pricing: Lite is priced for light-to-moderate use, and the moment your usage gets serious, the tool starts charging you for the privilege or nudging you toward Standard. I’m not saying that’s unfair — unlimited data access costs Ahrefs real money, and the crawler behind Site Explorer is famously one of the most active on the web — but you should know the meter exists before you buy, not discover it on day nine of your first month.

The add-ons that change the bill

The plan price is the floor, not the total. Ahrefs sells a shelf of add-ons, and a couple of them are easy to buy without noticing how fast they stack up. Here’s the shelf, with the prices I verified on the pricing page on November 11, 2026.

Add-on	Price	What it is
Extra users	$40–$100/user/mo	Lite $40 (max 2 extra), Standard $60 (max 5), Advanced $80 (max 10), Enterprise $100
Content Kit	From $99/mo	AI Content Helper, Content Grader, Content Inventory
Report Builder	$99/mo	50 reports, 500 widgets, scheduled reporting
Project Boost Pro	$20/mo per project	Auto IndexNow, Ask AI in Site Audit, instant recrawl, always-on audit, AI detection on 1,000 URLs per crawl
Project Boost Max	$200/mo per project	Everything in Pro, plus batch AI, always-on audit at 30 pages a minute, unlimited AI-detection URLs
Traffic Analytics — Traffic reports	$99/mo	Total estimated traffic with a 10+ channel breakdown, including AI traffic
Traffic Analytics — Traffic & Market	$299/mo	Market share, audience overlap, trends, API access
Brand Radar standalone (one AI platform)	$199/mo per platform	AI Visibility Index for a single platform; all platforms $699/mo
Brand Radar custom prompt packages	$50 / $100 / $250/mo	Extra checks: 2,500 / 7,000 / 25,000, with overage billed per check

Two of these deserve a closer look. Brand Radar is Ahrefs’ big 2026 bet — tracking how often your brand shows up in AI answers across Google AI Overviews, AI Mode, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Copilot, Gemini, and Grok. It’s bundled into every paid plan (Lite gets 5 prompts, Standard 10, Advanced 20), but you can also buy it standalone with no base Ahrefs plan at all: $199 a month per platform, or $699 a month for all of them. If AI visibility is the only thing you want from Ahrefs, the standalone price is worth knowing — it’s cheaper than Lite plus the bundle if you don’t need the rest of the toolkit.

Project Boost is the one that can surprise you. At $20 a month per project for Pro, it looks trivial — until you enable it on ten projects and it’s $200 a month, and the Max tier at $200 per project turns a five-project setup into a $1,000-a-month line item. It’s genuinely useful stuff (instant recrawls, always-on auditing, AI detection), but it’s priced per project, not per account, so count your projects before you switch it on.

And the team maths, since I promised it: a three-person team on Standard annual pays $2,490 a year for the plan plus two extra seats at $60 a month each — that’s $1,440 a year in seats, $3,930 a year total. The seats alone cost more than a whole Lite annual subscription. On Lite, a second seat is $40 a month, but you’re capped at two extra users, and Starter can’t add users at all. If you’re buying for a team, budget the seats first and the plan second.

No free trial, no Black Friday, no coupons — the honest truth

Let’s deal with the three questions every buyer asks, because Ahrefs’ answers are unusually blunt.

Is there a free trial? No. Ahrefs’ help center, updated November 9, 2026, says it in one sentence: “We don’t provide any free trials.” Not seven days, not thirty, not with a card on file. The pricing page FAQ points you to Ahrefs Free instead — the free-for-verified-sites plan I described above. That’s the trial, such as it is. If a blog tells you there’s a 7-day Ahrefs trial, it’s describing a product that doesn’t exist.

Is there a Black Friday deal? No, and there won’t be one on November 27, 2026. The same help center page says Ahrefs “does not run one-off discounts or seasonal specials (this includes Thanksgiving, Black Friday, Cyber Monday etc.)” and the pricing FAQ adds “We never run discounts.” Deal trackers checked in late October and early November 2026 confirm nothing has been announced, and Ahrefs hasn’t run a Black Friday sale in 2023, 2024, or 2025 either. Any “Ahrefs Black Friday coupon” you find on a coupon site is not legitimate — Ahrefs says so explicitly, and there’s no coupon field in the checkout that would accept one.

So how do you save money? Annual billing, and only annual billing. Pay for 10 months, get 12, and save about 17% — except on Starter, which has no annual discount, and Enterprise, which has no discount either. That’s the whole discount strategy. It’s honest, it’s boring, and it means there’s no reason to wait for a sale before buying: the price in November is the price in February.

Refunds and cancellation

Ahrefs’ refund policy is as blunt as its discount policy. The pricing-page FAQ says the company “does not issue refunds in general.” For monthly subscriptions, you can request a refund if you haven’t used the service, but Ahrefs says it may decline the request if it sees “any material activity” in your account. There is no money-back guarantee, no 7-day window, no try-it-and-refund-it safety net. Read that twice before you buy Advanced on a hunch.

Cancellation is kinder. You can cancel anytime from your account settings, and you keep access until the end of your billing period, then drop back to Ahrefs Free. Upgrades take effect immediately; downgrades and cancellations take effect at the period end. There are no contracts and no setup fees, and switching to annual billing goes through support rather than the checkout page. Payment methods are Visa, Mastercard, Amex, and UnionPay, with wire transfer available for Enterprise on request.

Cost per tracked keyword: the maths that actually decides it

Plan prices only tell you what you pay. Dividing by what you get tells you what you’re paying for. Here’s the cost per tracked keyword per month on annual billing — the number that separates a plan that looks expensive from one that is expensive.

Plan	Annual price per month	Tracked keywords	Cost per keyword / month
Ahrefs Lite	$107.50	750	$0.143
Ahrefs Standard	$207.50	2,000	$0.104
Ahrefs Advanced	$374.17	5,000	$0.075
Semrush SEO	$117.33	500	$0.235
SE Ranking Core	$103.20	2,000	$0.052

On this maths, SE Ranking Core looks like it wins by a mile — $0.05 a keyword against Ahrefs Lite’s $0.14 and Semrush’s $0.24 — and Advanced is the cheapest Ahrefs tier per keyword by a wide margin. But don’t buy on this table alone, because it hides the caveat that changes everything: Ahrefs updates rankings weekly. Semrush and SE Ranking update daily. A keyword tracked once a week is not the same product as a keyword tracked every day. If you need to see a ranking move the morning after you publish, Ahrefs’ weekly cadence will frustrate you no matter how cheap the per-keyword maths looks. If you check rankings in a weekly batch anyway — which is how most bloggers actually work — the weekly update is a non-issue and Ahrefs’ numbers stand on their own.

The other thing the table hides is what the keyword count is for. SE Ranking gives you 2,000 keywords a day at $103.20 a month, but its backlink index is smaller and its data depth is thinner. Ahrefs’ value was never the keyword count — it’s the backlink index, built on one of the most active crawlers on the web, and the depth of the data behind every report. People don’t pay $207.50 a month for Standard because they need 2,000 keywords. They pay it because when they open Site Explorer on a competitor, the data is there, it’s deep, and it’s current. Cost per keyword is a useful lens, but it’s the wrong lens if you buy Ahrefs for its backlinks and judge it on its keywords.

One more honest note on the Semrush number in that table. I use $139.95 a month ($117.33 annual) for Semrush’s SEO plan, because that’s what the live Semrush pricing page showed when I read it on November 11, 2026 for my Semrush pricing article. A few November 2026 roundups quote $139 a month for the renamed SEO plan instead — Semrush renamed Pro to SEO in May 2026, and some sources say the price dropped a dollar with the rename. The annual figure is $117.33 either way, so the per-keyword maths doesn’t move. I’m flagging the $0.95 difference because it’s exactly the kind of small discrepancy that makes a reader distrust everything else in the article if they spot it first.

Ahrefs vs Semrush vs SE Ranking — which one should you buy?

This is the question underneath the pricing question, and I’ve already written the long version of it — my Semrush vs Ahrefs comparison for bloggers goes tool by tool, and my Semrush pricing explainer has the full Semrush numbers. Here’s the short version, with the prices attached.

Buy Ahrefs Lite if backlinks are your main job. Link building, competitor backlink research, broken-link prospecting, content gap analysis driven by who links to whom — that’s Ahrefs’ home turf, and Lite at $107.50 a month on annual billing is the cheapest honest way into it. The 1,000-credit cap will pinch if you’re a heavy user, but for a solo blogger it’s usually enough.

Buy Ahrefs Standard if you do SEO daily and you’re tired of meters. Unlimited credits, 2,000 keywords, Content Explorer, and the full Site Explorer views — at $207.50 a month annual, it’s the plan for people whose income depends on the tool. The per-keyword cost actually drops from Lite’s $0.14 to $0.10, so the upgrade pays for itself in unit economics as well as in sanity.

Buy Semrush SEO instead if you want daily rank updates, the bigger keyword research toolkit, and the all-in-one breadth — position tracking, site audit, content tools, and social and advertising modules under one roof. Semrush’s entry plan is $139.95 a month ($117.33 annual) for 500 tracked keywords, and while that’s $0.24 a keyword against Ahrefs Lite’s $0.14, you’re paying for daily updates and a wider toolset. My full breakdown is in my Semrush pricing in 2026 article, and the head-to-head is in Semrush vs Ahrefs for bloggers.

Buy SE Ranking Core instead if budget is the deciding factor and you track a lot of keywords. At $129 a month ($103.20 annual) for 2,000 keywords updated daily, it’s $0.05 a keyword — roughly a third of Ahrefs Lite’s cost and less than a quarter of Semrush’s. The backlink data isn’t as deep, and the brand isn’t as well known, but for a blogger whose main need is “tell me where I rank, every day, for a lot of keywords,” it’s the best value on this page by a clear margin. My full numbers are in my SE Ranking pricing in 2026 article.

And the awkward truth for an affiliate blog: I earn a commission if you buy Semrush or SE Ranking through my links, and nothing at all if you buy Ahrefs, because Ahrefs closed its affiliate program around 2019 and has no plans to bring it back. I’m telling you that because it’s the kind of thing that should be disclosed, and because the recommendation above doesn’t change on account of it — if Ahrefs is the right tool for your work, buy Ahrefs. Just buy it through the plain link to the pricing page, not through a coupon site promising a discount that doesn’t exist.

Which Ahrefs plan should you buy?

Cutting through all of it, here’s how I’d decide:

• You own one site and want to know what’s wrong with it: Ahrefs Free. Costs nothing, audits your site, shows your backlinks. Start here and see how far it takes you.
• You’re a hobby blogger or you’re testing whether SEO tools are worth paying for: Starter at $29 a month, for one month. Watch the 200-credit meter. If you run out in week one, you’ve learned something valuable: you’re a heavier user than you thought, and Starter isn’t your plan.
• You’re a solo blogger or small-site owner doing real SEO work: Lite on annual billing, $107.50 a month. It’s the best balance of price and capability in the lineup, and the annual saving is $258 a year against monthly billing.
• SEO is part of your income and you use the tool daily: Standard on annual billing, $207.50 a month. Unlimited credits is the feature you’re actually buying, and the per-keyword cost drops to $0.10.
• You run an agency or a content team: Advanced on annual billing, $374.17 a month. The crawl credits, reporting limits, and Looker Studio integration are what you’re paying for, not the keyword count.
• You need custom limits, SSO, or an audit log: Enterprise, $1,499 a month. And remember — no annual discount, whatever an old article told you.

Frequently asked questions

How much does Ahrefs cost in 2026?

Starter is $29 a month (monthly only). Lite is $129 a month or $107.50 on annual billing. Standard is $249 a month or $207.50 annual. Advanced is $449 a month or $374.17 annual. Enterprise is $1,499 a month on an annual contract with no discount. Ahrefs Free costs $0 for sites you verify you own.

Does Ahrefs offer a free trial?

No. Ahrefs’ help center states plainly that it doesn’t provide free trials of any length. The free option is Ahrefs Free, which gives you Site Explorer, Site Audit, and Web Analytics for your own verified sites — not a trial of the paid plans.

Is there a free version of Ahrefs?

Yes — Ahrefs Free, renamed from Ahrefs Webmaster Tools in 2026. It’s free forever with no credit card, but only for websites you can verify you own. You get 5,000 Site Audit crawl credits a month per verified project and can view up to 1,000 backlinks and keywords for your own domain.

Can I get a discount on Ahrefs?

Only through annual billing: pay for 10 months, get 12, saving about 17%. That applies to Lite, Standard, and Advanced. Starter has no annual discount and Enterprise has no discount at all. There are no coupon codes, no seasonal sales, and no Black Friday deal.

Does Ahrefs have a Black Friday 2026 deal?

No. Ahrefs’ help center says it doesn’t run one-off discounts or seasonal specials, including Black Friday and Cyber Monday, and its FAQ says “We never run discounts.” It hasn’t run a Black Friday sale in 2023, 2024, or 2025 either. Any coupon site claiming an Ahrefs Black Friday code is not legitimate.

What are Ahrefs credits, and how many do I get?

A credit is spent each time you load or request new data — opening a report, pulling a keyword list, running an audit. Starter gets 200 credits a month with no top-ups. Lite gets 1,000 per user a month. Standard, Advanced, and Enterprise get unlimited credits per user. Pay-as-you-go extra data can be enabled on capped plans, and those purchases last three billing months.

How many keywords can I track on each plan?

Rank Tracker limits are 50 on Starter, 750 on Lite, 2,000 on Standard, 5,000 on Advanced, and from 10,000 on Enterprise. All plans update rankings weekly — daily updates are not available on any Ahrefs tier, which is the main practical difference from Semrush and SE Ranking.

Can I add team members to my Ahrefs plan?

Yes, except on Starter, which can’t add users at any price. Extra seats cost $40 a month each on Lite (maximum two extra), $60 on Standard (maximum five), $80 on Advanced (maximum ten), and $100 on Enterprise, which includes three users and allows unlimited extras.

Does Ahrefs have an affiliate program?

No. Ahrefs shut its affiliate program down around 2019 — its own blog says only 3% of affiliates were generating 90% of leads, and the billing side had become too costly to maintain — and it says it has no plans to relaunch it. Old referral links are dead. That’s why this article earns nothing from Ahrefs itself.

What happens when I cancel Ahrefs?

You keep access until the end of your billing period, then your account drops back to Ahrefs Free. There are no refunds in general — monthly subscribers can request one if they haven’t used the service, but Ahrefs may decline if it sees material activity in the account.

Is Ahrefs Starter worth $29 a month?

For a hobby blogger checking one site once a week, yes — it’s the cheapest paid door into the full toolkit. For anyone doing daily SEO work, no: 200 credits a month with no top-ups runs out fast, and the 50-keyword limit and one-month history will frustrate you. Most people who outgrow Starter should skip Lite’s credit cap conversation and think carefully about whether Standard’s unlimited credits are what they actually need.

Is Ahrefs cheaper than Semrush?

On annual billing, Ahrefs Lite ($107.50 a month) is cheaper than Semrush’s SEO plan ($117.33 a month), and it tracks more keywords — 750 against 500. Per keyword, Ahrefs Lite costs $0.14 a month against Semrush’s $0.24. But Semrush updates rankings daily while Ahrefs updates weekly, and Semrush bundles a wider toolset. The full comparison is in my Semrush vs Ahrefs article for bloggers.

Check the prices yourself

Prices change, and a pricing article is only as good as the day it was written — this one was written on November 12, 2026. Before you pay, check the live pages:

• Ahrefs pricing — plain link, no affiliate relationship, no tracking parameters.
• Semrush pricing — Semrush runs an affiliate program; I’m not enrolled yet, so this is a plain link for now.
• SE Ranking pricing — same as above: affiliate program exists, I’m not enrolled yet, plain link for now.

And if you take one thing from this article, make it this: the cheapest Ahrefs plan is $29 a month, the plan most people should buy is Lite at $107.50 on annual billing, and the plan that removes the meter from your work is Standard at $207.50. Everything else — the add-ons, the credits, the keyword counts — is detail around those three decisions. Re-check at checkout before you pay.

References

1. Ahrefs pricing page — official, read November 11, 2026 (plan-card prices are JavaScript-rendered; figures cross-checked against the sources below).
2. Ahrefs help center: “Do you offer any discounts or free trials?” — updated November 9, 2026.
3. Ahrefs help center: “About the Ahrefs Starter plan” — updated September 3, 2026.
4. Ahrefs blog: “Ahrefs’ Affiliate Program. We Don’t Have One (& Here’s Why)” — June 12, 2023.
5. Ahrefs blog: “How to choose the right Ahrefs plan in 2026” — official.
6. Semrush pricing page — read live November 11, 2026 (SEO $139.95 a month / $117.33 annual).
7. SE Ranking pricing page — read live November 11, 2026 (Core $129 a month / $103.20 annual).
8. mrkeyword.io — Ahrefs pricing breakdown, read November 2, 2026.
9. penguinsights.io — Ahrefs pricing checked November 1, 2026.
10. blog.contentforce.ai — Ahrefs pricing verified September 6, 2026.
11. zapro.ai — Ahrefs pricing verified September 21, 2026.
12. aiocopilot.com — Ahrefs vs Semrush vs AIO Copilot, rechecked November 3, 2026.
13. openseo.so and seoquick.com.ua — Semrush Pro-to-SEO rename and repricing, October 2026 (the $139 vs $139.95 monthly figure conflict noted in the cost-per-keyword section).
14. gauravtiwari.org, wpblogging101.com, gscwizard.com — Black Friday 2026 deal trackers, checked late October to early November 2026 (no Ahrefs sale announced).