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How much does backlink data cost, and why don't the tools agree?
Summary
You can see a fair amount for free: Ahrefs Free shows up to 1,000 backlinks at a time for sites you own, and Semrush's free checker gives a sample for any domain without an account. Full lists, filters and exports cost money, and the plans differ less in headline price than in how many rows a report shows and how far back the history goes. The counts themselves will not match between tools, because each vendor builds its own index with its own crawler.
What you get for free
Ahrefs Free needs you to verify that you own the site. After that it shows up to 1,000 backlinks at once, with no card and no trial clock. It will not show you a competitor's links.
Semrush's free backlink checker works on your site or anyone else's, without registering. It gives total backlinks, referring domains, Authority Score, top backlinks, the dofollow share, and tags for links that are newly found or recently lost. The complete profile, filters and exports are in the paid Backlink Analytics tool.
What the paid tiers change
Ahrefs publishes the clearest limits:
- Lite, $129 a month: 2,500 rows per report, 500,000 export rows a month, 6 months of history.
- Standard, $249: 30,000 rows, 1.5 million export rows, 2 years.
- Advanced, $449: 75,000 rows, 4 million export rows, 5 years.
If a site has 40,000 backlinks, Lite shows 2,500 of them in any one report, and only Advanced shows them all at once. If you want to compare this year's links with last year's, Lite's six months of history will not reach. Below Lite there is Starter at $29 a month, which includes Site Explorer within 200 credits a month, renews monthly only, and cannot add users or credits.
Semrush's SEO plan is $139 on monthly billing or $117.33 a month billed annually. Its pricing page says "basic keyword research and competitor analysis" and gives no row limits for backlink reports. Semrush also offers Backlink Gap, which finds domains linking to competitors but not to you, and Backlink Audit, which flags possible spam links and builds a disavow file. SE Ranking's Core plan ($129, or $103.20 a month billed annually) lists unlimited backlink research, with exports capped at 50,000 rows and 6 months of history. Growth raises that to 100,000 rows and all-time history.
Why the counts disagree
Ahrefs says its crawler visits more than 8 billion pages every 24 hours and that its index gets fresh link data every 15 to 30 minutes. That does not mean every page is rechecked that often. Some pages are revisited 60 times and others once, depending on their rating, and a full pass over the web takes about two months. Ahrefs shows live links plus links deleted in the last 60 days.
Semrush reports more than 43 trillion backlinks across 800 million-plus domains, gathered by a crawler that covers about 10 billion pages a day. Ahrefs counts 209.5 million domains "post-vetting," so the two are not even counting the same thing. Semrush's own pages describe freshness as daily in one place, continuous in another and at least hourly in a third. A bigger number is not proof of a better index. Trends are more reliable when you follow one site in one tool over time.
Work out your own number: the SEO Tools Cost Calculator finds the cheapest published plan for your sites, tracked keywords and users.
Sources
- https://ahrefs.com/academy/how-to-use-ahrefs/ahrefs-crawler/overview
- https://help.ahrefs.com/en/articles/78052-how-often-is-ahrefs-links-database-updated
- https://ahrefs.com/big-data
- https://ahrefs.com/free
- https://ahrefs.com/pricing
- https://ahrefs.com/blog/starter-plan/
- https://www.semrush.com/analytics/backlinks/
- https://www.semrush.com/features/backlink-analysis/
- https://www.semrush.com/pricing/seo-ai-search/
- https://seranking.com/subscription.html
Figures come from each vendor's own pricing pages and documentation. We have not tested these tools hands-on, and no ranking here is paid for.