What Is Ahrefs Used For?

Based on my research of current Ahrefs features, your article covers the core backlink analysis, keyword research, and content discovery tools quite well. However, you’re missing several significant tools and features that Ahrefs offers. Here’s what you should consider adding:

Site Audit 

 Scans websites for 170+ technical and on-page SEO issues, making it one of Ahrefs’ most comprehensive diagnostic tools. This powerful feature crawls your entire website to identify critical problems that could be hurting your search engine rankings, including broken links, missing metadata, duplicate content, slow page load times, and structural issues.

The tool segments problems into errors, warnings, and notices, helping you prioritize which issues to fix first based on their potential impact on your SEO performance. Site Audit also provides detailed, actionable recommendations for resolving each issue, complete with instructions that you can send directly to developers. The tool generates comprehensive reports that can be downloaded as ZIP or CSV files, and it includes advanced features like Page Explorer and Link Explorer for deeper analysis of specific issues.

Rank Tracker

Monitors keyword rankings over time by device and location across 190+ countries, providing crucial insights into your search performance. This tool has recently undergone a complete overhaul with Rank Tracker 2.0, featuring a new tech stack that delivers much faster reports and quicker keyword adding and deleting capabilities.

The tool now includes bulk editing functionality, allowing you to select, edit, or delete keywords in batches to efficiently monitor hundreds of positions. You can track rankings on both desktop and mobile devices, visualize Share of Voice (SOV) against competitors, and access integrated Google Search Console reports.

The tool also features SERP overview comparisons to analyze time periods and an “Identify intents” function to track shifts in search intent over time, making it invaluable for understanding how your keyword strategy performs in the competitive landscape.

Web Analytics

 Privacy-focused alternative to Google Analytics that provides comprehensive website traffic insights without the complexity and privacy concerns of traditional analytics platforms. This tool offers real-time visitor data, traffic sources analysis, and user behavior tracking without requiring cookies or GDPR consent, making it an ideal solution for businesses prioritizing user privacy. Includes conversion funnels, UTM tracking, and outbound link monitoring, allowing you to track key user journeys and understand how visitors move through your website’s critical stages.

The platform monitors button clicks, form submissions, downloads, and other important business activities, while also tracking which external links your visitors click and from which pages. Web Analytics integrates seamlessly with Google Search Console data and includes unique features like tracking traffic from LLM chatbots, giving you insights into emerging traffic sources that traditional analytics tools miss.

Brand Radar

 Tracks your brand’s presence in AI search results and large language models (LLMs), representing a cutting-edge approach to modern brand monitoring. This innovative tool helps you understand how your brand appears in AI-generated content and chatbot responses, which is becoming increasingly important as more users rely on AI tools for information.

Brand Radar allows you to monitor brand mentions across AI chatbots, benchmark your presence against competitors, and identify key AI content gaps that you can fill to improve your brand visibility. The tool analyzes mentions across web content using Ahrefs’ 16-billion-page content index, providing historical trends in two modes: “New” which shows fresh mentions from the current month, and “Total” which displays cumulative mentions over time. This tool is essential for businesses looking to optimize their presence in the evolving landscape of AI-powered search and content discovery.

Batch Analysis

A powerful scaling tool that allows you to analyze websites at scale by pulling comprehensive website and backlink metrics across up to 2,000 individual URLs simultaneously.

This feature is invaluable for SEO professionals and agencies who need to quickly assess large portfolios of websites or conduct extensive competitive analysis without manually checking each URL individually.

The tool provides bulk insights into domain ratings, URL ratings, backlink counts, referring domains, and organic traffic estimates, making it possible to identify patterns, opportunities, and threats across multiple websites in a single analysis. This capability significantly streamlines workflow for large-scale SEO projects and competitor research initiatives.

Ahrefs SEO Toolbar

 A comprehensive browser extension that serves as your personal SEO assistant, providing valuable on-page SEO data about any website you visit without leaving your browser.

This handy tool displays key metrics like Domain Rating, URL Rating, backlink counts, and organic traffic estimates directly in your browser, making it easy to quickly assess any website’s SEO strength during casual browsing or research. The toolbar also provides on-page SEO analysis, showing you title tags, meta descriptions, heading structure, and other important on-page elements, making it an essential tool for quick competitive analysis and SEO auditing on the go.

AI-Powered Features Added to Ahrefs

AI Content Helper/AI Content Grader

 AI-powered content guidance and optimization tools that revolutionize how you create and optimize content for search engines. The AI Content Helper assists in creating high-quality, SEO-optimized articles in a fraction of the time traditionally required, ensuring comprehensive topical coverage and providing competitor outranking insights.

Each topic card in the tool features an “Ask AI” button that opens a chat trained on specific topics, allowing you to refine your content coverage or explore new content ideas to increase topical depth. The AI Content Grader complements this by comparing your articles against top-ranking pages and providing detailed suggestions on how to improve each subtopic. These tools use real-time data and best practices to help you create content that not only ranks well but also provides genuine value to your audience, making them essential for content marketers looking to scale their efforts while maintaining quality.

Batch AI

Generates AI-powered titles and meta descriptions for multiple pages at once within Site Audit, representing a significant time-saving innovation for large-scale SEO optimization. This feature allows you to scale AI-powered optimization across your entire website, automatically generating compelling and SEO-optimized titles and meta descriptions that align with best practices and search intent.

Available with Max project boost, you can batch up to 1,000 pages and process 50,000 pages per project per month, making it ideal for enterprise websites or agencies managing multiple large sites. The tool considers existing content, target keywords, and SEO best practices to create titles and descriptions that improve click-through rates and search visibility.

Advanced Features:

Always-on Audits (AOA)

24/7 site monitoring that represents a paradigm shift from traditional scheduled crawling to continuous website health monitoring. This advanced feature monitors your website around the clock and alerts you about critical issues as soon as they occur, rather than waiting for your next scheduled crawl.

AOA prioritizes high-value pages based on important data like traffic volume and internal link structure, ensuring that the most important parts of your website receive the most attention. Before AOA, most users ran scheduled crawls weekly, meaning that if something broke on your website early in the week, it might go unnoticed for days. This feature complements rather than replaces scheduled crawls, using the comprehensive site mapping from scheduled scans to know what to focus on during continuous monitoring, making it an essential tool for maintaining optimal website health.

Report Builder/Reports

 A sophisticated custom reporting functionality that allows you to create highly tailored reports using widgets from Site Explorer and Rank Tracker data. This tool enables SEO professionals to build comprehensive reports that showcase their work’s impact and communicate results effectively to clients or stakeholders. You can customize widgets by adjusting parameters like heading names, target URLs, volume, location, time periods, data granularity, and comparison dates.

The reports can be used for various purposes including monthly SEO summaries, competitor analysis, brand monitoring, and regional ranking reports. Currently available free for all paid plans, the tool supports up to 50 reports and 200 widgets per workspace, making it valuable for agencies and in-house teams that need to demonstrate SEO progress and value to decision-makers.

Anonymous Queries

 Uncovers hidden keyword data from Google Search Console by solving a significant problem that many SEO professionals don’t even realize they have. Google Search Console hides approximately 46% of all clicks under queries marked as “anonymous,” representing a massive blind spot in keyword analysis.

This innovative feature matches GSC data with Ahrefs’ Organic keywords report to surface those hidden terms, complete with traffic data, search volume, and country statistics. This revelation of previously invisible keyword data can uncover significant opportunities for content optimization and keyword targeting that were previously impossible to identify, making it a game-changer for comprehensive SEO analysis.

GBP Monitor

 Local SEO tool for Google Business Profiles that helps businesses optimize their local search presence and dominate local rankings. This tool tracks changes to your Google Business Profiles across both Search and Maps, allowing you to accept or reject edits with a single click.

Available on all paid plans with no limits, GBP Monitor helps you maintain accurate and optimized business information, monitor competitor local SEO strategies, and ensure your business appears prominently in local search results. This is particularly valuable for businesses with physical locations or those serving specific geographic areas, as local search optimization becomes increasingly important for driving foot traffic and local customer acquisition.

Content Inventory

 – An upcoming tool designed to perform comprehensive content audits that will help identify underperforming content, surface outdated materials, and uncover high-potential content opportunities. This tool will enable content marketers and SEO professionals to systematically evaluate their existing content portfolio, identifying pieces that need updates, optimization, or removal.

By analyzing content performance metrics, search rankings, and user engagement data, Content Inventory will provide actionable insights for improving overall content strategy and maximizing the SEO value of existing content assets.

Other Additional Tools Worth Mentioning

Dashboard/Portfolios

 Comprehensive project management and overview tools that provide a centralized view of your most important SEO projects and allow monitoring of up to 1,000 URLs as a cohesive unit. The Dashboard integrates key metrics from Ahrefs’ core tools with trend graphs and Google Search Console data, giving you a high-level overview of your SEO performance at a glance.

Portfolios enable you to group and monitor website performance for competitor analysis, content tracking, and client reporting, making it easier to manage multiple projects or track competitor movements across entire market segments. These tools are essential for agencies managing multiple clients or businesses tracking various competitors and market segments.

Alerts

 A sophisticated notification system that keeps you informed about critical SEO changes through automated alerts for backlinks, mentions, rankings, and other important metrics. This feature ensures you never miss important developments in your SEO landscape, whether it’s new backlinks pointing to your site, mentions of your brand, significant ranking changes, or competitor movements.

You can customize alerts based on your specific needs and priorities, receiving notifications via email when important changes occur, allowing you to respond quickly to both opportunities and threats in your SEO environment.

API Access

 100+ flexible API endpoints that unlock Ahrefs’ full data capabilities for custom integrations and automations. The API provides access to data from Site Explorer, Keywords Explorer, SERP Overviews, and Site Audit endpoints, enabling developers and advanced users to create custom dashboards, internal tools, and automated reporting systems.

This powerful feature allows businesses to integrate Ahrefs data into their existing workflows, create custom analytics solutions, and automate repetitive SEO tasks. The API is particularly valuable for agencies and enterprise users who need to scale their SEO operations or integrate Ahrefs data with other business intelligence tools.

Looker Studio Connectors

Specialized integrations that allow you to incorporate Ahrefs data directly into Looker Studio for enhanced reporting and analysis of SEO performance. Available for Site Explorer, Keywords Explorer, and Rank Tracker data, these connectors enable you to create sophisticated, custom dashboards that combine Ahrefs SEO data with other business metrics and data sources.

This integration is particularly valuable for businesses that rely on Looker Studio for their business intelligence and want to incorporate comprehensive SEO data into their broader analytics ecosystem, enabling more holistic performance tracking and decision-making.