$600 to $800 revenue / month for a site that could be vibe coded in 15 mins. 7 Page site DR 4.5 , Traffic - 288,000 0 to ~1.6M visits in about 6 weeks (late Feb to April 2026). Revealing this in special list in my pro database - link Niche - Fonts Monetized by Google Adsense One page, “cute fonts”, gets ~64K/month. It’s a single extra page targeting a different way people search for the same tool. 1.6K keywords in the top 3 out of just 3K. More than half rank in the top 3. Ahrefs values the traffic at $39K/month 1900 AI Responses This could be easily vibe coded using claude / grok bot even by a beginner in an hour
brandRising
Ahrefs on X
The talk is practical: people post keyword, backlink and AI-visibility work built on Ahrefs' data and cite its studies, and the loudest complaint is that the numbers it reports are unreliable.
First written 27 Oct · what changed · from 155 posts by 126 people
Tracking posts that say “ahrefs”
Track this for your marketPosts, last 24h
60
+100%vs. previous 24h
Posts, last 7 days
264
130 in the last 72h
Velocity
38/day
7-day average
Momentum
+59%
Last 24h vs. a normal day this week
Posts per day, last 30 days
as of Nov 3, 11:01 UTCWhat changed
as of 27 Oct · checked once a monthFirst written 27 Oct. When what people say changes, it shows here.
Tone· 101 posts from 84 people· written 27 Oct
How do people feel about Ahrefs?
The conversation is less a verdict than a workbench: 31 people post work built on Ahrefs' data and 29 cite its studies, while 15 praise it outright and 6 question its numbers.
People use Ahrefs in public more than they argue about it: 31 people post work built on its data — low-difficulty keywords, competitors' referring pages, DR checks, AI-citation tracking, API and MCP pulls from agents, traffic valuations taken from its numbers.
Just behind, 29 people cite its studies: 75,000 brands analysed for which mentions show up in ChatGPT answers, AI Overviews on 83% of branded searches with Wikipedia cited in 71.9% of them, position-one clicks falling from 1.41% to 0.64%, and 97% of llms.txt files getting no requests.
Praise is smaller and blunter. Asked what to use, people answer "Ahrefs", and one calls it "the literal GOAT of all SEO tools"; others point to the free Webmaster Tools and Website Authority Checker. Doubt stays a minority: DR called a scam in one line, a test site pushed from a single-digit rating to 56 for $10. 5 people rate it the best suite while noting the data is only good when fresh and up.
- Cites its research37
- Relies on its data36
- Enthusiastic fans16
- Questions the numbers7
- Satisfied, with reservations5
See 5 of 101 postsHide the posts
En agosto, con Hernán Jaramillo @holdmybirra , grabamos 48 conversaciones en dos días en Conexión Summit. Protección, ERCO, Ruta N, el Metro de Medellín, Energy Valley. Pensé que el valor era el alcance. Me equivoqué. Ahrefs estudió 75.000 marcas. La señal que más se asocia con aparecer en ChatGPT no son los enlaces. Es que te nombren en un video de YouTube, en el título, la descripción o la transcripción. El agente no escucha tu podcast. Lo lee. ¿Tu marca está en una conversación grabada o solo en tu propia web? link
before you commit to 30 blog posts, check whether search is the right distribution channel. ahrefs studied roughly 14 billion pages in its index in 2023. 96.55% had no estimated google organic traffic. not the whole web. not all traffic. not proof that blogging doesn't work. the useful play: test one page idea before building a content calendar. 1. write the problem in your customer's words 2. check keyword variants and the actual search results 3. ask what your page adds that the existing results don't 4. ask why a relevant site would link to it a zero in a keyword tool isn't proof of zero demand. more backlinks correlating with traffic isn't proof of causation either. use those checks to choose a channel to test. publishing more pages isn't a distribution plan on its own.
Six of the biggest takeaways from @ahrefs EVOLVE around the state of SEO & AI search. 👇🏿 1) AGENTS ARE COMMODITIZING REPEATABLE ROUTINE SEO TASKS If a task can be written into an SOP, an agent will be running it by this time next year, and your value has to live above the checklist. Most SEO agencies are about to find out they were SEO task agencies, and the clients will figure it out before they do.., 2) THE OLD METRICS ARE BROKEN - WE HAVE TO EMBRACE BRAND DATA Rankings and clicks can't score a search where the answer gets generated, so branded search volume, mentions, and share of model become the scoreboard. 3) YOUTUBE IS THE MOST UNDERRATED CHANNEL IN BUSINESS TODAY Google pulls it into the SERP, and most B2B brands still treat it like a side project. 4) NON COMMODITY CONTENT IS NOT JUST A BUNCH OF HYPE & FLUFF When every competitor can generate the same 2,000 words in 30 seconds, the only content worth publishing is the stuff only you could have written: original data, real opinions, lived experience. 5) GOING AFTER THE LONG TAIL HAS NEVER BEEN MORE IMPORTANT AI engines answer the specific question, so the brand with a page for every niche query gets cited while the brand chasing head terms gets summarized away. 6) AI OVERVIEWS IS MAKING IMPRESSIONS MATTER WHETHER YOU LIKE IT OR NOT The model reads you, the answer cites you, the user never clicks...
Reasonable for SEO tools, pretty competitive
5 of the 101 posts behind this answer, one per person. The other 96, and every new one as it’s posted, come with tracking. Get early access
Pain points· 47 posts from 40 people· written 27 Oct
What do people complain about with Ahrefs?
The biggest complaint is that the numbers are unreliable: 23 of the 40 people here describe estimates, rank-tracking or automated warnings that are off, stale or gamed. Price is next (8 people), then outages and broken connections (6).
Rank tracking is the sorest point. People report tracker data "still broken" since mid-September, with Google serving scrapers partly swapped results — one repeats Ahrefs' own figure of 5-20% — and warn that any tracker number now needs a margin of error. Others find errors in brand volume, a tutorial page bringing a third of the traffic Ahrefs showed, and an audit where almost all estimated visits were branded. DR draws the sharpest words: pushed from under 5 to 56 for $10, called a scam.
8 people object to price: $150 a month or more for features they barely touch, $240 cited as too much, search volume and keyword difficulty locked behind a paywall. 6 describe outages — two weeks without a Search Console feed, a Grok connector that won't authorize — and one paying $249 for unlimited credits was locked for suspicious activity. A few flag spam detection that misfires or a dashboard unusable on a phone.
- Numbers are unreliable26
- Too expensive9
- Downtime and broken connections7
- Wrong spam flags3
- Clunky dashboard2
See 5 of 47 postsHide the posts
SEO truths I’d bet my life on: 1. keyword research tools are all wrong. SEMrush, Ahrefs and Moz all show you search volume estimates based on clickstream data from browser extensions installed by a tiny biased sample of internet users. the actual search volume for any keyword could be 3x higher or 3x lower than what any tool shows. 2. E-E-A-T is mostly unfalsifiable nonsense. Google can’t actually measure experience or trustworthiness at scale. what they can measure is click behavior, backlink patterns and engagement signals. E-E-A-T is the story they tell. engagement is what they actually use. 3. review velocity is the most underrated local ranking factor. it’s not how many reviews you have. it’s how recently you got them. a business getting 2 reviews a week beats a business with 500 reviews and nothing new. 4. Google uses “implied links” as a ranking signal. an implied link is when a website mentions your business name without linking to you. every mention of your business name across the web counts as a partial trust signal even without a hyperlink. getting mentioned in local news, local blogs and local directories without a link still moves your rankings. 5. review sentiment analysis is real and Google uses it. I’ve seen businesses with 4.2 stars outrank businesses with 4.8 stars because the language in their reviews contained more service-specific keywords. “John fixed our AC in 20 minutes” beats “great service highly recommend”. 6. Google’s search results have gotten worse every year since 2019. they know it. their engineers have written internal memos about it. they can’t fix it because fixing it would reduce ad revenue. the entire helpful content narrative is theater designed to make you think they’re improving results while they’re actually prioritizing ad revenue. 7. Google’s “original research” ranking boost is one of the most underexploited signals in SEO. publish a study with real data from your own clients or customers. it doesn’t need to be peer reviewed. it doesn’t need to be comprehensive. it needs to contain a number nobody else has published. which one of these do you disagree with?
Rank tracker data is still broken, and now we know more about how. Nozzle (data to Oct 21): since Sept 16, 13.9% of the SERPs they checked answered only part of the query. Peak was 39.9% on Sept 28. Their example: "easy strawberry jam" got a jam AI Overview on top and organic results about the TV show Easy. Ahrefs (Oct 22): 5-20% of results affected, depending on the data provider. They've added filters and are cleaning old data. Meanwhile forums are calling an October core update. Google's status dashboard shows nothing since the September spam update ended Oct 8. Before you report a drop: 1. Pull Search Console clicks and position for the same keywords. GSC isn't scraped. 2. Tracker says you left the top 10 but GSC position didn't move? Probably a junk SERP. Nozzle saw tracked sites out of the top 10 on 69.8% of affected pages vs 2% normally. 3. Re-check in 3 days. 85.8% of keywords were back to a normal SERP by then.
With more evidence of Google poisoning SERPs for bots/scrapers - How does any SEO tool or visibility tracker have credibility? Is the business model of Semrush, Ahrefs, DataForSEO, Profound, Searchable, etc just finding workarounds 24/7 and hoping your users don’t know about poisoned SERPs? This is not being talked about enough. And it makes sense because why would SEO SaaS companies want you to know this?
Anyone else tired of paying $150+/month for SEO/AI data? Semrush, Ahrefs, Moz… I just want keyword data, rank tracking and a site audit without paying for 50 other features I’ll barely touch. What’s everyone using that doesn’t cost as much as a car payment?
It is funny to see how tools like Wincher, Ahrefs, Semrush, and others have been down for two weeks now, simply because Google Search Console is not feeding them the data they need. Turns out, without that data, they are completely doomed.
5 of the 47 posts behind this answer, one per person. The other 42, and every new one as it’s posted, come with tracking. Get early access
Alternatives· 19 posts from 18 people· written 27 Oct
What are the alternatives to Ahrefs?
Semrush is what people weigh it against most (5 people), with OpenSEO close behind (4) on price and agent use, and 3 saying Google Search Console or other free first-party data covers the job.
Semrush comes up as the like-for-like swap: one user moved from $240 a month on Ahrefs to $140 on Semrush and finds its Claude integration fits their workflow; another, once "die hard Ahrefs over Semrush", now says Semrush picks up a new site's keywords much quicker. Others divide the work — Site Explorer and backlinks for Ahrefs, Keyword Gap for Semrush.
OpenSEO is the cheaper challenger at 4 people, and the argument turns on data: people ask where the backlink data comes from before ditching Ahrefs, call DataForSEO-sourced data not on the same level for backlink tracking, and say it would be "a step back after a decade" — though self-hosting it on Cloudflare for $0 a month drew reach.
3 people lean on free first-party data instead, using Search Console's long-tail queries or side-by-side Search Console and Bing data. One case for Claude plus an MCP connector: about $0.10 against $99 a month.
- Semrush5
- OpenSEO5
- Search Console and free tools3
- Own and self-hosted tools2
- DataForSEO data1
- Claude and AI-agent skills1
See 5 of 19 postsHide the posts
TBD but seems solid so far, I used to use ahrefs but $240/mo was a lot. $140 for Semrush. The MCP integrates nicely with Claude, I'm using it to look at competitor blog posts & target SEO terms on some new sites. May even cancel before the trial is over at this speed 🤣
I used to be die hard Ahrefs over Semrush but man… Semrush picks up keywords a new website is ranking for SO much quicker these days
I just self-hosted @openseo_so on Cloudflare 🔥 for $0/month I get: → site audit → ai visibility → backlink analysis → keyword research stop paying $100+ for Ahrefs
I'm on the fence about switching from Ahrefs to OpenSEO, but DataForSEO isn't on the same level as Ahrefs or Semrush, especially when it comes to backlink tracking. Rank trackers are all f*cked up right now, so none of them actually work properly anyway...
Nobody knows this about Google Search Console It shows you the long searches you can rank for, for free 1/ Performance, Search results, Add filter, Query, Custom (regex) 2/ Paste ^([^ ]+ ){3,}[^ ]+$ 3/ Toggle Average position and look for big impressions where you're not #1 4/ One search = one page: title, H1, URL slug, first sentence On ChatSEO: 220K impressions in 3 months on 4+ word searches "long tail pro vs ahrefs" alone: 3,771 at position 5.6 Google is literally handing you your next article
5 of the 19 posts behind this answer, one per person. The other 14, and every new one as it’s posted, come with tracking. Get early access
Questions· 8 posts· written 27 Oct
What do people ask about Ahrefs?
The largest group of questions is about Domain Rating (4 people): what the score means, how to move it, how often it updates. 3 people ask what to make of Ahrefs' warnings about swapped scraped results.
On DR, people want to know whether directory backlinks lift it — one site stuck at DR 6 for two months after submitting to 50 free directories — and whether growth gets harder as the number climbs. The answers offered: DR is Ahrefs' own third-party score, not something Google uses, so it doesn't move rankings; relevance and real visitors beat dozens of directory links; it seems to update about daily.
The second cluster reads Ahrefs' own communication: people repeat its line that 5-20% of scraper results are now swapped, ask what to make of its recent comms, and conclude that if Google serves scrapers different results, every rank-tracker number needs a margin of error.
One person asks whether an agent fed Search Console, GA and Bing data could take over part of what they use Ahrefs for, with Ahrefs estimates kept separate from real data.
- How DR works4
- What's behind the data warnings?3
- Will an agent replace it?1
See 5 of 8 postsHide the posts
My SaaS site has been stuck at DR 6 on Ahrefs for 2 months Yesterday I used AI to submit it to around 50 free directories. I'm trying to build backlinks and improve its SEO If you've done this for your own app, did it help your DR?
me since almost a week 😅 honestly: DR is something super weird! in the last months since Ahrefs opened up there API I had the feeling it is a lot easier to grow it when your DR is 20+ than before. and now since I hit 45+ it feels harder to grow. ofc I dont know if this was the case before the API opening but it feels like it is connected. Did you observer anything similiar?
Good question. DR is a third party score from Ahrefs, not something Google uses, so the number itself doesn't move rankings. What matters is the links behind it: 1. Check whether the linking sites are relevant to your niche and send real visitors. A few of those beat dozens of directory links. 2. Compare your page to the pages ranking for your keyword. If they have links from respected sites in your space and you don't, that gap is the real issue. 3. Skip DR targets. Aim for links you'd be glad to have even if Google didn't exist. Content that answers the search well still does most of the work.
serper scrapes google too, and ahrefs says 5-20% of scraper results are now swapped, so some of that top 10 may be decoys
@JHTScherck Thoughts on the recent Ahrefs comms?
5 of the 8 posts behind this answer, one per person. The other 3, and every new one as it’s posted, come with tracking. Get early access
Wishes· 2 posts· written 27 Oct
What do people want from Ahrefs?
The two wants on record are a smaller bill and a phone-friendly dashboard: one person wants keyword data, rank tracking and a site audit without paying for dozens of other features, another wants the dashboard to work on mobile without a paid add-on.
One person asks for a narrower purchase: keyword data, rank tracking and a site audit, without paying $150 or more a month for "50 other features I'll barely touch". They frame it against Semrush, Ahrefs and Moz together and ask what costs less than "a car payment".
The other wants the dashboard to be usable on a phone — "1% mobile friend" — and asks whether that would need a paid add-on. The same person's complaint that checking DR site by site is tedious is filed under problems, and they built a Chrome extension on Ahrefs' public API to show DR next to every link.
That is all the wishes filed so far: two people, each with one request, so neither want can be called common.
- Buy only what you need1
- Mobile-friendly dashboard1
See the 2 postsHide the posts
Anyone else tired of paying $150+/month for SEO/AI data? Semrush, Ahrefs, Moz… I just want keyword data, rank tracking and a site audit without paying for 50 other features I’ll barely touch. What’s everyone using that doesn’t cost as much as a car payment?
@ahrefs can you make your dashboard 1% mobile friend please? Or will this require a paid add on? 🥴
In their words
How do people talk about Ahrefs?
The phrases people use most, counted once per person.
- 1“keyword research”5
- 2“long tail”4
- 3“organic traffic”4
- 4“search volume”3
- 5“rank tracking”3
- 6“site audit”3
- 7“grok bot”3
- 8“zero volume”2
- 9“ai visibility”2
Posts are shown the way X shows them. One of them yours? Here’s why it’s shown, and how to take it off.
Also in SEO suites
- Similarweb−1%Similarweb is cited far more than it is discussed: its figures are the reference numbers in arguments about AI traffic share, news sites and app growth, with a smaller strand warning that what a figure counts has to be checked.282 posts / 7d
- Semrush0%The largest group, 25 people, is sharing or citing Semrush's AI-search research rather than discussing the tool itself.281 posts / 7d
Get every post about Ahrefs, filtered and labelled
This page is the summary. Tracking gives you the stream behind it for any brand, keyword or @mention: each new pain point, request and question as it’s posted, with the spam and promotions already taken out.