Ahrefs Pricing and Plans in August 2026: Ahrefs Free, Starter, Lite, Standard, Advanced and Enterprise Costs

Rank tracking past 750 keywords

Rank Tracker ships with every tier from Lite up, so the feature is never the question. The allowance is. Lite tracks 750 keywords, Standard 2,000, Advanced 5,000, and Enterprise starts from 10,000. Those numbers sound generous until a real portfolio meets them. A brand tracking 30 head terms across three countries and two devices is already burning positions fast, and an agency running rank tracking as a deliverable eats 750 slots with two mid-size clients. The allowance is also a hard wall rather than a meter: there is no published per-keyword overage, so the fix for keyword 751 is the next tier, not a small charge.

The economics reward honesty at signup. Counting your live keyword list before buying costs nothing; discovering mid-quarter that the list outgrew Lite costs the $120 monthly gap to Standard, and the annual-cycle switch runs through support email rather than a toggle. There is one consolation at the top: SERP history and Competitive Analysis ride along at every level, so the tiers charge for volume, never for the tracker itself. Budget by list size and the tier picks itself.

A second ceiling hides in reporting. A single report stops at 2,500 rows on Lite and 30,000 on Standard, so a large position export hits the report cap before the keyword cap does. Plan both together, or the tracker outgrows the tier twice.

On the published rates2,000 tracked keywords fit Standard at $249 a month; keyword 2,001 forces Advanced at $449.

Site audits sized by crawl credits

Site Audit is on every paid tier, and crawl credits decide what it can actually touch. Lite carries 100,000 credits a month, Standard 500,000, Advanced 1.5 million, Enterprise from 5 million with a 5-million-page ceiling per project. For a 20,000-page store audited weekly, Lite's 100,000 is gone by week five of a long month. A 150,000-page publisher cannot complete even one full crawl at entry. This is the quota that most often surprises buyers, because page counts include every parameter URL and pagination page the crawler finds, not the tidy number in your sitemap.

Two pressure valves exist and both cost money. Standard's half-million credits handle most mid-size properties with room for recrawls. For a single site that needs constant attention, Project Boost Pro at $20 a month per project adds an always-on audit at 10 pages a minute plus instant recrawl, which is cheaper than a tier jump if only one project needs it. The trap is the automatic side: enabled extra credits charge as pay as you go, so an unattended crawl schedule can quietly outspend the plan. Cap the crawler before it caps you.

Verified ownership softens one constraint: projects for sites you can verify are unlimited on Lite. For an in-house team auditing its own estate, the credit budget is the real limit, and the project count never enters the conversation.

On the published ratesA 150,000-page monthly crawl passes Lite's 100,000 credits; Standard at $249 a month carries 500,000.

Backlink research on a history clock

Ahrefs built its name as a backlink checker, and Site Explorer is present from Lite up, at full strength. What the tiers ration is time. Lite sees 6 months back, Standard 2 years, Advanced 5, and only Enterprise has no clock at all. For routine link monitoring on your own site, 6 months is workable: you see new links, lost links and the recent shape of the profile. For competitive research it is a different tool entirely. Reconstructing how a rival earned its authority means reading years of link velocity, and at 6 months the story starts in the middle.

Advanced adds the specialist tooling on top of the longer clock: broken backlinks, outgoing links and site structure views live only there. That combination is why link-heavy shops treat $449 as the working rate rather than the premium one. One more constraint deserves a line. Export caps of 500,000 rows a month on Lite mean a large link profile cannot even leave the building at entry level, and a link audit that feeds a disavow file is exactly the kind of bulk export that hits it.

The tier decision compresses into one question. Watching your own profile move is Lite work at $129; explaining a competitor's five-year climb is Advanced work at $449. Nothing in between splits the difference.

On the published ratesTwo years of index history comes with Standard at $249 a month; year three exists only on Advanced at $449.

AI visibility tracking, metered in checks

Brand Radar sits on every tier from Lite, and the meter behind it counts two things: prompts tracked and checks run. Lite holds 5 prompts and 150 checks a month, Standard 10 and 300, Advanced 20 and 600, Enterprise from 83 prompts and 2,500 checks. Five prompts checked daily uses exactly Lite's 150 checks, which tells you what the plan allowances are for: a taster. Anyone monitoring how a brand shows up across AI answers at real breadth, dozens of prompts across several platforms, is shopping in the add-on aisle whether they know it or not.

The packages price the serious work: $50 a month adds 2,500 checks, $100 adds 7,000, $250 adds 25,000, with overage at $0.020, $0.015 and $0.010 a check respectively. The vendor's own sizing examples are useful here: 80 prompts checked daily on one platform fits the $50 Basic package, 100 prompts daily across two platforms fits Growth at $100. Above all of it sits Brand Radar AI from $199 a month, a standalone research layer over 476M+ prompts that works even from a free account. The plan gets you started; the meter and the add-ons are the actual product.

The overage clause runs one way. A package overrun bills automatically at the end of the billing month, at the printed per-check rate, and nobody confirms the charge first. Whoever owns the prompts should own the meter too.

On the published ratesLite's 150 monthly checks cover 5 prompts daily; 80 prompts a day on one platform is the $50 Basic package on top.

Agency work: projects, seats and reports

Client work stresses three quotas at once, and they do not break at the same tier. Projects first: Lite's five unverified slots hold five client sites, since clients rarely hand over verification, while Standard's 20 covers a real book. Seats second: one is included everywhere below Enterprise, extras cost $40 to $80 a month, and the caps are the sharp edge. Lite tops out at three people, Standard at six, Advanced at eleven. An eight-person agency is an Advanced customer on seat count alone, no matter how small its keyword lists are.

Reporting is the quota nobody prices in. Report Builder comes with the plans, but the expanded version, 50 reports, 500 widgets and scheduling, is a $99 monthly add-on, and client-facing shops tend to need exactly that version. Portfolios and the Looker Studio integration also start at Standard, which is where most agency reporting stacks actually begin to function. Run the numbers on a six-client, two-analyst shop: Standard at $249, one extra seat at $60, Report Builder at $99, and the working figure is $408 a month before a single boost or prompt package.

One seat discount exists and only one. Prepaying an analyst seat for the year costs $600 on Standard against $60 a month rolling, and $800 against $80 on Advanced. Small money, but it is the only cut the price list prints on people.

On the published ratesA ten-client book fits Standard's 20 projects at $249 a month; the second analyst adds $60.

Keyword research against the credit meter

Keywords Explorer is on every paid tier, but Lite pairs it with the quietest limit in the whole lineup: 1,000 credits per user a month. Most report views draw on that meter, so a daily research habit, checking volumes, pulling SERPs, expanding idea lists, spends it well before month's end. Casual use survives; a content team feeding a weekly publishing calendar does not. This is the limit that turns Lite buyers into Standard buyers faster than any keyword cap, because it throttles the researcher rather than the tracker.

Standard removes the meter entirely: credits per user become uncounted, and the research-adjacent tools arrive in the same step, Content Explorer for finding what ranks, batch analysis for scoring lists, SERP comparison for watching a result change over time. For anyone whose job is finding keywords rather than merely tracking them, that single line, uncounted credits, is the honest reason to pay $249. The meter also has the pay-as-you-go clause behind it on Lite, so a heavy month can bill past the plan automatically rather than stopping politely.

Starter deserves a line because it looks adjacent: $29 for basic search visibility. It prints no credit allowance at all, and that absence is not generosity. A researcher should read a missing meter as a warning, not an invitation.

On the published ratesLite meters 1,000 credits per user a month; Standard at $249 stops counting per-user credits entirely.

Brand Radar AI is the research layer over the AI-answer index: it lets you study any brand at all, yours or a stranger's, across a corpus of 476M+ organic prompts. It sells from $199 a month and stands alone, working even from a free Ahrefs account, which makes it the one product on this page you can buy without buying Ahrefs.

On top of a working subscription the math gets real quickly: Lite plus Brand Radar AI is $328 a month, more than Standard's $249 on its own. That comparison is the honest test. If AI-answer research is a billable deliverable, the $199 pays for itself in one client report; if it is curiosity, the plan's built-in Brand Radar tab already answers questions about brands you track.

The Basic prompt package adds 2,500 checks a month for $50, with overage at $0.020 a check once those run out. The vendor's own sizing makes it concrete: 80 prompts checked daily on one platform. That is a full order of magnitude past what any plan includes, since even Advanced tops out at 600 monthly checks.

The bill logic is simple: $50 on top of Lite makes AI monitoring $179 a month total, and the overage rate is the ceiling to watch. Run 500 checks past the package and the month ends with an extra $10 billed automatically at month end. Small money, but it compounds silently across quarters if nobody owns the meter.

Growth doubles the price and nearly triples the volume: $100 a month for 7,000 checks, overage at $0.015. The sizing example is 100 prompts daily across two platforms, which is where multi-platform AI visibility work actually lives, since brands rarely care about one answer engine in isolation.

The per-check economics improve with scale: two Basic packages would cost the same $100 for 5,000 checks, while Growth hands you 7,000 with a lower overage rate on top. Anyone buying Basic twice in a quarter should already be here. On Standard, the combined line is $349 a month, still under an Advanced subscription with its 600 native checks.

Scale is the bulk tier: $250 a month for 25,000 checks with overage at $0.010, the cheapest per-check rate Ahrefs publishes. This is agency infrastructure, sized for running AI-visibility monitoring across a client roster rather than one brand's prompts.

At full use the arithmetic favors it heavily: 25,000 checks through Growth packages would take four of them at $400. The risk points the other way. A shop that buys Scale and uses 8,000 checks is paying Growth-and-a-half money for Growth volume, and the package renews monthly whether the roster filled it or not. Size it off a real quarter of usage, not off ambition.

Content Kit bundles the writing-side AI tooling from $99 a month: AI Content Helper, AI Content Grader, and an AI Content Inventory the vendor marks as coming soon. It is the content team's counterpart to the SEO team's subscription, aimed at scoring and improving pages rather than researching them.

The from-pricing deserves attention before budgeting: $99 is the floor, not the number on every invoice. On Lite the combined line starts at $228 a month, within sight of Standard at $249, which includes Content Explorer, a research tool many content teams want anyway. Weigh the bundle against the tier jump before adding it; one of the three components is not even shipping yet.

Report Builder as an add-on runs $99 a month for 50 reports, 500 total widgets and scheduling. The name is confusingly familiar because a base Report Builder already appears in every plan's feature list; the $99 buys the expanded capacity and the automation that client work actually requires.

The buyers are agencies, and for them the math is per-client: 50 scheduled reports across a book of ten clients is five automated deliverables each, at $9.90 a client each month. Compare that against the hours of manual exporting it replaces and it clears easily. A solo consultant sending two reports a month is the wrong customer at any price.

Project Boost Pro is the only per-project add-on: $20 a month each for auto-submit to IndexNow, Ask AI inside Site Audit, an always-on audit crawling 10 pages a minute, instant recrawl, and AI detection on 1,000 URLs per crawl. It effectively puts one project on a faster clock than the rest of the account.

The per-project unit is the trap and the tell. One flagship site at $20 is cheap for the recrawl speed alone. Boosting all five Lite projects is $100 a month, almost a second Lite subscription, and across Standard's 20 projects a blanket boost would hit $400, past the plan's own rate. Buy it for the site that ships daily, not for the portfolio.