I was eating toast over the sink on a Sunday in February when the Ahrefs renewal email landed. The amount was $129. For a while I just looked at the number, and then at my two sites’ earnings for January: $412.
I didn’t like that ratio.
I run two small review sites, one about camping stoves and one about trail shoes, alone, out of a spare bedroom in Tacoma. Every month since 2018 I’ve paid for a backlink tool, and not once did I ask myself if I had to. This spring I finally tested it on my own wallet, with two months on a cheaper tool, a month on nothing at all, and an honest look afterwards at what I missed.
Why I Pay For One At All
It’s three jobs. Who links to me, who links to the sites beating me, and which of my links quietly died last week.
That’s the whole list, and it took me years to admit it. My friend Dee, who sold a much bigger site than mine in 2023, put it better than I can. “You’re not buying data,” she said. “You’re buying back the hour you’d spend guessing.”
Keep that line in mind. It’s how I ended up judging all of them.
March And April On Majestic
At $49.99 a month, Majestic Lite cost less than half of what I’d been paying, so I moved there in March.
The part I liked was Trust Flow and Citation Flow. They’re two numbers side by side, and inside a week I could glance at a site and know if its links were worth chasing or just plentiful. I haven’t used anything quicker for sizing up a prospect.
The part I didn’t like: Lite only gives you the Fresh Index. The Historic Index goes back years, but it sits on the Pro plan at $99.99, and the savings start to shrink at that price. The reports were harder for me to read, too. Habit, maybe. After six years of staring at one layout, I ended up exporting to a spreadsheet more often than I wanted.
It does links and nothing else. For some people that’s the appeal.
One Month On Nothing
May was the free month. Google Search Console has a Links report for your own site, and Ahrefs keeps a free tier for sites you’ve verified, capped at roughly a thousand backlinks on screen.
Honestly, for my own two sites that was enough. New links arriving, old ones dropping: I could see both.
Then a competitor passed me for a stove roundup I’d held for two years, and I had no way to see why. Free tools show you your own house. They don’t let you look over the fence.
Back To Ahrefs In June
So I paid the $129 again. (I looked hard at the $29 Starter plan. Its limits were too tight for the digging I had in mind.)
Within an evening I had a list of 23 sites that linked to two of my competitors and not to me. I emailed nine of them, and three added a link. One of those, as far as I can tell, explained why I got passed in May. I’ll never be sure about cause and effect with rankings, though.
Could I have built that list in Majestic? Probably, with more patience than I have.
A Word On Semrush
I didn’t test it this year, so I won’t pretend. Its plans start at $139 a month now, and that pays for a lot besides links, like keyword research, site audits and rank tracking. Through most of 2021 I used it, and I liked it for everything except deep link work. It might be the smarter buy if links are a small part of your week. From memory, I can’t rank it fairly.
So, The Best One?
It’s Ahrefs. It’s the best backlink analytics tool I’ve used if you need to study other people’s links regularly, and my cheaper spring didn’t change my mind.
This is what changed. I’d assumed I needed it twelve months a year, and I don’t. My link building happens in bursts, maybe three months out of twelve. If I pay only for those months it’s $387 a year. All year, it’s $1,548.
So I cancelled again in July. The quiet months are covered by Search Console, and I’ve set a reminder for September.
The toast is optional.