Ahrefs vs Semrush
How is Ahrefs better than Semrush?
Explore the features, data, and automations that make top marketers choose Ahrefs over Semrush.
Marketers at 44% of the Fortune 500 use Ahrefs to stay ahead in search and AI.
Better data than anyone else in the industry
Most active web crawler in the SEO industry
AhrefsBot is the most active web crawler in the “Search Engine Optimization” category on Cloudflare Radar. It’s also the 10th most active web crawler in the world.
Rank | Bot | Owner |
|---|---|---|
1 | AhrefsBot | Ahrefs |
2 | SemrushBotBacklinks | Semrush |
3 | Moz dotbot | Moz |
4 | Google StoreBot | |
5 | prerender | Prerender, LLC |
6 | Chrome-Lighthouse | |
7 | MJ12Bot | Majestic |
8 | Cloudflare Healthchecks | Cloudflare |
9 | Ahrefs Site Audit | Ahrefs |
10 | Barkrowler | Babbar |
Bots ranked by traffic volume. Data supplied as of July, 2026
18 things only Ahrefs can do
1/ Check any brand’s AI visibility instantly
While other AI visibility tools make you setup custom lists of prompts, Brand Radar allows you to enter any brand and instantly see its AI visibility based on our massive index of 519M prompts across 7 AI indexes.
2/ Research content and find link prospects
Find top-performing content in your niche and thousands of link prospects across Content Explorer’s database of 20.3B pages.
3/ Track every brand mention across the web
Brand Radar ranks every domain that mentions your brand by organic traffic and referring domains, so you know which carry weight.
4/ Connect content changes to rankings outcomes
Monitor how a page’s content changes over time, both text and HTML, and see how each edit affects organic traffic.
5/ Audit your website 24/7 and get instant issue alerts
Toggle Always-on audits to catch critical SEO issues early before they impact performance and cost you visibility.
6/ See the full list of a website’s crawled pages
Track how fast your competitors ship new content and catch “index bloat” issues of your own website. Instantly.
7/ Study your competitors’ site structure
See which sections of your competitor’s website drive the most traffic, links, and ads — without having to run a crawl. Then reverse-engineer the winning ones.
8/ See a website’s pages and traffic over time
Compare how the number of organic pages on a website correlates (or not) with its organic traffic.
9/ Compare a website’s current and historical rankings
Pick any two dates and spot the keywords that caused the most significant changes in traffic and rankings over the specified time period.
10/ Spot AI-written content at scale
Understand how much of your competitor’s content is created with AI. Spot copycat pages (high-score) from those created with human insight and AI-assisted workflows (low-score).
11/ Cluster keywords instantly
Group by Parent Topic or Related Terms — no duplicates, no near-matches, no waiting. Most tools take hours, Ahrefs takes seconds.
12/ Compare SERPs side-by-side
Study SERPs for the same keyword on different dates to spot any ranking changes. Or compare two different keywords to see if Google perceives them as similar or not.
13/ Filter keywords by category
Zero in on your niche faster. Browse 25+ keyword categories to cut through noise and find keywords worth targeting.
14/ Check ranking and ad history for any keyword
Study the SERP volatility for a given keyword using the Position history graph. Or uncover websites that have run ads for your target keyword with the Ads history chart.
15/ Track backlink spikes in real-time
We update referring domains and backlinks daily, so you can spot link building campaigns, negative SEO attacks, or vital moments as soon as they happen.
16/ Find valuable links in seconds
Use the Best Links filter to cut through the noise and filter out the best links based on 77 different link signals.
17/ Monitor multiple URLs as a whole
Group up to 1,000 URLs from 10 different domains and monitor competitors, authors’ performance, regional rankings, and much more as a single project.
18/ Compare HTML & page text changes between crawls
Troubleshoot SEO issues with ease. Spot changes in the HTML code and page text of any crawled page, in-between crawls.
Semrush got acquired by Adobe
Ahrefs is independent
Bootstrapped since 2011
API on all paid plans
200+ features released in 2025
Built for marketers and enterprises