On a Sunday in February, while I was eating toast over the sink, the renewal email from Ahrefs landed. The amount was $129. I stared at that number for a while. Then I checked what my two sites had earned in January, and it was $412.
The 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. Since 2018 I’ve paid for a backlink tool every single month and never once asked if I needed to. So this spring I ran an experiment on my own wallet: two months on something cheaper, one month on nothing, and then an honest look at what I missed.
The Three Jobs I Need Done
I need three things. 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 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.”
Remember that line. I ended up judging every tool by it.
Trying Majestic For Two Months
Majestic Lite is $49.99 a month, less than half what I’d been paying, so that’s where I went 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. When I need to size up a prospect fast, nothing I’ve used is 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 also found the reports harder to read. Habit, maybe. Six years of staring at one layout will do that, and I exported to a spreadsheet more than I’d have liked.
Links are all it does. Some people like it for exactly that.
One Month Without Paying
May was my 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.
That was enough for my own two sites, honestly. I could see new links arrive and old ones drop.
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. They don’t let you look over the fence.
June: Paying For Ahrefs Again
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.)
In one evening I had a list of 23 sites linking to two of my competitors and not to me. I emailed nine of them, and 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.
I could probably have built that list in Majestic, with more patience than I’ve got.
What About Semrush?
It wasn’t part of this year’s test, so I won’t pretend. Plans start at $139 a month now, and you’re paying for a lot besides links: keyword research, site audits, rank tracking. I used it for most of 2021. I liked it for everything but deep link work. For someone whose week only has a little link work in it, it might be the smarter buy. I can’t fairly rank it on memory alone.
So, The Best One?
It’s 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. 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. Search Console covers the quiet months, and there’s a reminder on my phone for September.
The toast, you can skip.