Ahrefs API review
Best backlink data
Ahrefs runs one of the largest independent web crawlers in existence, and the API is how you get at what it finds without opening the interface. Version 3 exposes Site Explorer, Keywords Explorer, Site Audit, Rank Tracker, SERP Overview and Batch Analysis as JSON, plus Brand Radar for AI answer visibility and endpoints for Web Analytics, GSC Insights and social channels.
The pricing story has changed completely and in the buyer's favour. The old standalone API subscription, which started at $500 a month as a hard floor, is no longer sold. Both ahrefs.com/api and ahrefs.com/api/subscription now redirect to the developer docs, and the help centre states plainly that API v3 works on Lite and higher.
Access begins at $129 a month with 200,000 units, and the $29 Starter plan below it has no API access at all.
What you buy is units, not rows, and the distinction is the whole cost model. A request costs the greater of 50 units or the per-row cost multiplied by the rows returned, where each unique field you name costs 1 unit, or 5 or 10 for expensive ones like traffic. Select fewer fields and your bill falls faster than trimming your request count. Requests served from cache cost nothing at all.
Our scorecard
Our editorial read across six dimensions, scored 1 to 5. This is our own assessment, not an aggregate of user reviews, and it is deliberately kept out of the page's structured data.
- Data coverage5/5
The backlink index practitioners benchmark others against, now with AI answer visibility beside it.
- Pricing4/5
Transparent and dramatically cheaper to enter than it was. Still metered, and the row cap bites below Advanced.
- Documentation5/5
OpenAPI spec, a documented cost formula, and response headers that tell you what each call actually cost.
- Ease of integration4/5
Bearer token and clean JSON. The unit model takes a read of the docs before you can forecast anything.
- Reliability5/5
60 requests a minute, a published 429 behaviour and cache hits that cost nothing. Predictable at volume.
- Support3/5
Fine once you are a customer. Ahrefs' own pricing guide currently contradicts its pricing page on API limits.
An editorial read, not an aggregate of user reviews, and deliberately kept out of this page's structured data.
What you can pull
Site Explorer
Per row, from 1 unit per field
Backlinks, broken backlinks, referring domains, anchors, organic and paid keywords, top pages, outgoing links and the full history series behind them
Keywords Explorer
Per row, from 1 unit per field
Metrics for one keyword or a list, volume history, volume by country, matching terms, related terms and search suggestions
Brand Radar
Per row, from 1 unit per field
AI Responses and AI Visibility overviews, plus history. The route to answer-engine share rather than blue links
Site Audit
Per row, from 1 unit per field
Project health scores, full issue reports, page content and page explorer data for your own crawls
Rank Tracker
Free
Tracked keyword positions, competitor overviews and SERP overviews for your own projects
Batch Analysis
Per row, from 1 unit per field
Metrics for many targets in one call, which is the cheapest shape for a bulk domain or URL comparison
Web Analytics and GSC Insights
Per row, from 1 unit per field
Your own traffic, sources, pages, geography and user agents, plus Search Console keywords, pages and anonymous queries
Management and Public
Free, no units
Create and edit Rank Tracker projects and keyword lists, read subscription limits, and fetch Ahrefs crawler IP ranges
Who Ahrefs API is for
Teams whose work turns on link data, and who now include a much wider range of buyers than they did a year ago. At $129 a month with 200,000 units, a solo consultant or a small agency can legitimately build reporting on the reference backlink index, which was impossible when the floor was $500.
It is still the wrong pick if you mainly need SERPs or keyword volume at scale. The row caps below Advanced make bulk extraction slow, and a per-request provider will cover the same ground for a fraction of the spend.
Strengths and limits
What it does well
- Backlink coverage and freshness that practitioners consistently rate as the best available, and treat as the benchmark for everyone else.
- The $500 floor is gone. Access starts at $129 a month, which reopens this API to buyers it priced out for years.
- The cost formula is published and the response headers report the real cost of every call, so you can profile a pipeline instead of guessing.
- Cache hits consume no units at all, which rewards a sensibly designed integration rather than punishing repeat queries.
- Brand Radar endpoints expose AI answer visibility from the same account, so answer-engine reporting does not need a second vendor.
- An official MCP server and Ahrefs Connect, both drawing on the same quota, so an AI client is a supported route rather than a workaround.
- Several endpoint families are free, including Rank Tracker reads, project management and the crawler IP ranges.
Where it falls short
- The row cap, not the unit count, is what hurts below Advanced. 100 rows a request on Lite turns a large backlink export into a long pagination loop.
- Units reset each billing cycle. Going past the allowance needs pay-as-you-go enabled, which bills automatically, and those extra units last three billing months.
- Expensive fields cost ten times a cheap one, so an unconsidered select statement can multiply a bill without changing the row count.
- 60 requests a minute by default, plus dynamic throttling that can reject requests below that during busy periods.
- API v2 is fully deprecated and cannot be used at all, so any old integration is a rewrite rather than a migration.
- Ahrefs' pricing page, help centre and pricing blog each state a different monthly API allowance, which is a poor experience when you are trying to budget.
- The terms restrict reselling and repackaging the data in a third-party product. Read them before building anything commercial.
Ahrefs API pricing
The important change first: there is no longer a standalone API subscription. The old API Standard, Plus and Premium tiers at $500, $2,000 and $10,000 a month are gone, and both of the URLs that used to sell them now redirect to the developer docs. API v3 is available on Lite and above.
That puts the ladder at Starter $29, Lite $129, Standard $249, Advanced $449 and Enterprise from $1,499, with API allowances of 200,000, 800,000 and 2,000,000 units on Lite, Standard and Advanced and a custom allowance on Enterprise, per the US pricing table. These are the US prices; the site prices by region, so a buyer elsewhere sees different figures.
Budget against the ROW CAP before the unit count. Lite returns at most 100 rows a request and Advanced 500, so a backlink export that needs 50,000 rows is 500 calls on Lite against 100 on Advanced, and the 60-per-minute rate limit turns that into wall-clock time. Enterprise removes the cap entirely, which is the real reason a product built on this data ends up there.
One warning about Ahrefs' own materials. Its pricing guide currently lists 25,000 units and 10 rows per request for Lite, the help centre says 100,000 units, and the pricing page's comparison table says 200,000 with 100 rows. We have used the pricing table, because it is what a buyer is sold against. Check your own account's limits before committing to a volume.
Lite
$129 / mo
The entry point for API access
- 200,000 API units a month
- 100 rows per request, on Direct API and MCP alike
- Replaces the retired $500 standalone API tier
- Enough to prototype and run a small internal pipeline
Standard / Advanced
$249 / $449 / mo
800,000 and 2,000,000 units
- 250 and 500 rows per request respectively
- The row cap matters more than the unit count on link exports
- Advanced is the first tier where a deep backlink pull is practical
- Past the allowance, opt-in pay-as-you-go units last three billing months
Enterprise
From $1,499 / mo
Custom units on the pricing table, no row cap
- Unlimited rows per request, which removes the pagination tax
- The only tier that suits a product built on Ahrefs data
- Annual commitment, quoted rather than self-serve
- Free test queries exist on any plan for evaluation
Request example
A minimal call against the live endpoint, with credentials read from the environment rather than pasted inline.
curl -s -v -G "https://api.ahrefs.com/v3/site-explorer/all-backlinks" \ -H "Authorization: Bearer $AHREFS_API_KEY" \ --data-urlencode "target=example.com" \ --data-urlencode "limit=100" \ --data-urlencode "select=url_from,domain_rating_source,anchor" \ --data-urlencode "order_by=domain_rating_source:desc" # Cost is max(50, per_row_cost x rows). Every unique field in # select, where or order_by adds to per_row_cost: 1 unit each, # but 5 or 10 for expensive ones such as traffic. # # -v prints the headers that tell you the real answer: # x-api-units-cost-total-actual what it actually cost # x-api-cache hit means it cost nothing
Rate limits and quotas
- Cost per request is max(50 units, per-row cost multiplied by rows returned).
- The base cost of any billable request is 50 units.
- A field costs 1 unit by default, and certain metrics cost 5 or 10.
- Fields counted are the unique ones across select, where and order_by; a field used twice is counted once.
- Max rows per request: 100 on Lite, 250 on Standard, 500 on Advanced, unlimited on Enterprise.
- API units a month, per the US pricing table: 200,000 on Lite, 800,000 on Standard, 2,000,000 on Advanced, custom on Enterprise. The help centre still says 100,000 for Lite.
- Rate limited to 60 requests a minute, returning HTTP 429 above that, with additional dynamic throttling.
- Requests served from cache consume no units.
- Direct API, the MCP server and Ahrefs Connect all draw on the same monthly allowance.
Third-party reviews
Scores read from each source on 3 September 2026. We report them as-is and publish no rating of our own.
These scores rate the Ahrefs platform as a whole, not the API specifically. No review site scores the API on its own.
What practitioners say on Reddit
Ahrefs is the rare tool practitioners defend on quality while complaining about the bill in the same sentence. The consistent view is that accuracy is the only feature that matters in this category and that Ahrefs has it, particularly on links.
The criticism splits two ways. Cost is the loud one, and much of the archived grumbling predates the change described above, so read it against a $500 floor that no longer exists. The sharper criticism is narrower: several long-term users rate the link data highly and the keyword research much less so, which is worth knowing if keywords are why you are buying.
The newer complaint is about AI features being sold as additions rather than included, which is the shape of the Brand Radar and prompt-package pricing.
“To me the most important feature in a tool like Ahrefs, Semrush, etc. is having data that is as accurate as possible. Nothing else is all that important to me.”
r/SEO on Reddit“I use ahrefs every day and love it, although the pricing is high. All I need is accurate data, a good user interface and an easy way to export data.”
r/SEO on Reddit“Useful tool for backlinks, website analysis, and some other stuff. But for anyone thinking they need Ahrefs for keyword research, I disagree. I wouldn't use it for keyword research even if it was free.”
r/juststart on Reddit“I haven't seen anything that does a very good job of filtering spammy backlinks.”
r/SEO on Reddit“I have a $99/mo grandfathered version of AHREFs but with AI SEO it's becoming useless unless you pay $99 per month PER AI platform”
r/TechSEO on Reddit
Verdict
Re-evaluate this one if you priced it out before. The single most important fact about the Ahrefs API used to be its $500 floor, and that floor is gone: the same reference-grade link index is now reachable on a $129 plan with 200,000 units a month.
Size the plan on the row cap rather than the unit allowance. Lite and Standard are fine for metrics, dashboards and monitoring, where you pull small result sets often. Anything that extracts links in bulk wants Advanced at minimum, and anything user-facing wants the uncapped Enterprise tier.
It remains a poor choice as a general-purpose SERP or keyword-volume source, and the practitioner consensus that the links are the reason to be here is worth taking at face value. Pair it with a per-request provider for the bulk work and let Ahrefs do the thing nothing else does as well.
Ahrefs API FAQ
How much does the Ahrefs API cost?
It is included with the plan rather than bought separately. Per the US pricing table, Lite at $129 a month carries 200,000 API units, Standard at $249 carries 800,000, Advanced at $449 carries 2,000,000 and Enterprise from $1,499 is custom. The old $500 standalone API subscription no longer exists.Is there still a separate Ahrefs API subscription?
No. The API Standard, Plus and Premium tiers at $500, $2,000 and $10,000 a month have been retired, and both ahrefs.com/api and ahrefs.com/api/subscription now redirect to the developer documentation. API v3 works on Lite and higher.How are Ahrefs API units calculated?
A request costs the greater of 50 units or the per-row cost multiplied by the rows returned. The per-row cost is the sum of each unique field named in select, where or order_by, at 1 unit for most fields and 5 or 10 for expensive ones such as traffic. Requests served from cache cost nothing.What is the row cap and why does it matter?
It caps how many rows one request can return: 100 on Lite, 250 on Standard, 500 on Advanced and unlimited on Enterprise. It usually matters more than the unit allowance, because a 50,000-row backlink export is 500 calls on Lite against 100 on Advanced, and the rate limit is 60 requests a minute.What is the Ahrefs API rate limit?
60 requests a minute by default, returning HTTP 429 when exceeded. Ahrefs also throttles dynamically to protect the platform, so a request can be rejected below that ceiling. Build backoff in rather than pacing to the stated number.Does Ahrefs have an MCP server?
Yes, and it is one of three supported access routes alongside the direct API and Ahrefs Connect. All three draw on the same monthly API and Integrations allowance, so connecting an AI client spends the same budget your pipeline does. Plan the quota accordingly.Can I still use Ahrefs API v2?
No. Version 2 is fully deprecated and cannot be used directly or through integrations, so an old integration needs rewriting against v3 rather than migrating. The current integrations system is built entirely on v3.Ahrefs API or DataForSEO?
Ahrefs for backlink depth and freshness, DataForSEO for SERP and keyword volume on a per-request budget. The comparison is much closer than it was now that Ahrefs starts at $129 rather than $500, but the models still differ: Ahrefs sells you a seat with an allowance, DataForSEO sells you requests with no floor at all.
Other providers worth a look
This is an independent review. We have no affiliate relationship with Ahrefs API, earn nothing if you sign up, and no provider pays for placement in the directory. Prices were read from the vendor's own pages in September 2026 and change without notice.