Preview
What it is.
Verify a domain and you get three reports that normally sit behind a subscription: site analytics, a technical crawl, plus the keyword and backlink data for that site. Ahrefs renamed Webmaster Tools to Ahrefs Free.
Run the crawl and you get every technical problem sorted by how much it matters, checked against 170+ common technical and on-page issues. You get 5,000 crawl credits per verified project per month, and credits only burn on HTML pages that come back 200, so redirects and images cost nothing.
What you get.
- A worklist drawn from 170+ common technical and on-page checks, with the reason attached.
- A health score you can hold next to last month's crawl to show the work landed.
- 5,000 crawl credits per verified project per month, which recrawls most B2B sites in full.
- The backlinks you gained and lost, so a partner quietly dropping your link shows up.
How to set it up.
Sign up, then verify the domain through Google Search Console or a DNS record.
Start a Site Audit crawl and leave the page limit alone on the first run, since 5,000 crawl credits per project per month covers most B2B sites.
Sort the issue list by severity and work the indexing and canonical errors before the cosmetic ones.
Open Site Explorer for the same domain and sort pages by organic traffic to see which ones carry the site.
Set the crawl to repeat monthly, then read the health score against the previous run instead of the absolute number.
Pricing Plans
Ahrefs Free
$0
unlimited verified websites, 5,000 crawl credits per project per month
Use cases
First month of technical work
Verify the domain, then work the crawl list from the top severity down.
Proof the work landed
Re-crawl after a sprint and hold the new health score next to the old one.
Backlink triage before a migration
Check who links to you, so the redirect map protects the links that carry weight.
Best for
A first technical audit
Point it at a site you inherited and the issue list gives you a month of work ordered by severity, without a crawl to configure.
Watching a migration
Crawl before and after a replatform, then compare the health score and the redirect chains between the two runs.
Checking your own backlinks
New and lost links for the verified domain, which is enough to spot a link that broke when a partner redesigned their site.
Open the tool
Opens on Google in a new tab.