The renewal email from Ahrefs landed on a Sunday in February, while I was eating toast over the sink. $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.
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. I’ve paid for a backlink tool every month since 2018 without once asking if I needed 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.
What I Use A Backlink Tool For
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 entire list, and admitting it took me years. My friend Dee sold a much bigger site than mine in 2023, and she 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.
Two Months On Majestic
Majestic Lite is $49.99 a month, less than half what I’d been paying, so that’s where I went in March.
What I liked: Trust Flow and Citation Flow. Within a week, those two side-by-side numbers let me glance at a site and tell worthwhile links from merely plentiful ones. For sizing up a prospect fast, I haven’t used anything quicker.
What I didn’t like is that Lite gives you the Fresh Index only. The Historic Index, the one that goes back years, sits on the Pro plan at $99.99, and at that price the savings start to shrink. I found the reports harder to read as well. That might be habit. I’d been staring at one layout for six years, and I ended up exporting to a spreadsheet more than I wanted to.
Links are all it does. Some people like it for exactly that.
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.
For my own two sites, honestly, that was enough. New links arriving, old ones dropping: I could see both.
Then I got passed by a competitor for a stove roundup I’d held for two years, with no way to 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. (I looked hard at the $29 Starter plan. 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. Nine of them got an email from me. Three added a link. As far as I can tell, one of those was why I’d been passed in May, though with rankings I’ll never be sure about cause and effect.
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. Its plans start at $139 a month now, and that pays for a lot besides links, like keyword research, site audits and rank tracking. I used it through most of 2021 and liked it for everything except deep link work. For someone whose week only has a little link work in it, it might be the smarter buy. I can’t rank it fairly from memory.
So Which Is Best?
Ahrefs. If you need to study other people’s links on a regular basis, it’s the best backlink analytics tool I’ve used, and my cheaper spring didn’t change my mind.
Here’s what did change. I’d assumed I needed it twelve months a year, and 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. Paying all year costs $1,548.
So I cancelled again in July. Search Console covers the quiet months, and there’s a reminder on my phone for September.
The toast, you can skip.