I was eating toast over the sink on a Sunday in February when the Ahrefs renewal email landed. The amount was $129. I looked at that number for a while, and then I looked at what my two sites had earned in January, which was $412.
That ratio bothered me.
I run two small review sites, one about camping stoves and one about trail shoes, alone, out of a spare bedroom in Tacoma. I’ve paid for a backlink tool every month since 2018 without once asking if I needed to. So this spring my wallet became the experiment. Two months on something cheaper, one month on nothing, then an honest look at what I’d missed.
The Three Jobs I Need Done
Three jobs. Seeing who links to me. Seeing who links to the sites that beat me. And catching the links of mine that 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.”
Remember that line. I ended up judging every tool by it.
My Two Months With Majestic
In March I went to Majestic Lite, which is $49.99 a month and less than half what I’d been paying.
What I liked: Trust Flow and Citation Flow. Two numbers, side by side, and within a week I could glance at a site and tell if its links were worth chasing or just plentiful. For sizing up a prospect fast, I haven’t used anything quicker.
The part I didn’t like: Lite only gives you the Fresh Index. For the Historic Index, the one going back years, you need the Pro plan at $99.99. At that price the savings start to shrink. I found the reports harder to read as well. That might be habit. Six years of staring at one layout will do that, and I exported to a spreadsheet more than I’d have liked.
It does links and nothing else. For some people that’s the appeal.
May, With No Paid Tool
In May I paid for nothing. Google Search Console gives you a Links report for your own site. Ahrefs also keeps a free tier for sites you’ve verified, capped at roughly a thousand backlinks on screen.
For my own two sites, honestly, that was enough. I could watch new links arrive and old ones drop off.
Then a competitor passed me on a stove roundup I’d held for two years, and I couldn’t see why. Free tools show you your own house, and they don’t let you look over the fence.
Back To Ahrefs In June
So I paid the $129 once more. (There’s a $29 Starter plan, and I looked hard at it. Its limits were too tight for the digging I had in mind.)
It took an evening to get a list of 23 sites that linked to two of my competitors and not to me. I emailed nine of them. 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, if I had more patience.
Where Semrush Fits
It wasn’t part of this year’s test, so I won’t pretend. At $139 a month to start, you’re paying for much more than links. Keyword research, site audits and rank tracking come with it. I used it through most of 2021 and liked it for everything except deep link work. If links are a small part of your week, it might be the smarter buy. I can’t fairly rank it on memory alone.
My Verdict
It’s Ahrefs. For anyone who studies other people’s links on a regular basis, it’s the best backlink analytics tool I’ve used. A cheaper spring didn’t change my mind.
Here’s what did change. I’d assumed I needed it twelve months a year. I don’t. I build links in bursts, perhaps three months out of the twelve. Paying only for those months costs me $387 a year, and paying all year costs $1,548.
So I cancelled again in July. Search Console covers the quiet months, and I’ve got a reminder set for September.
The toast, you can skip.