Ahrefs is a software company that develops online SEO tools and free educational materials for marketing professionals.Ahrefs all-in-one SEO toolset can help you with competitor, keyword, and content research, link building, website audit, rank tracking and mentions monitoring.Ahrefs provides maximum data and accuracy thanks to its database of 8 billion keywords and 421 billion indexed pages.
Ahrefs keeps getting more expensive each month. Now, they’ve also added a "credit" system, so if you pay around $150-160 per month, you can only use their search bar a maximum of 500 times. This, combined with poor customer support and consistently lagging behind on rankings, makes it ridiculous for the amount of money they charge. I’m not supporting Ahrefs anymore.
Ahrefs 回复2024-09-02
Hi Dennis,
We're sorry to hear you're not happy with your Ahrefs experience. We introduced the credit system in Q1 of 2022, and we've recently suspended it for new Standard plans and above.
If you've had a bad experience with our customer support team, please do provide more details for us so we can investigate internally. Thank you.
Forced us off the legacy plan by being accused of using up more credits than we were allowed to.
Truth be told, we have never been aware of any credits existing in the first place because we were using the platform quite conservatively. Yet, for some unexplainable reason, last month our credit usage went up 4x the usual and we were told to upgrade now or get our subscription deactivated.
As a customer, you are unable to see credits usage history so there is no way for us to verify whether we actually used that many credits or if something fishy was going on. Either way, upgrade-or-die.
We complained about the sales tactic to the support but decided to upgrade anyway reasonably assuming that a $20 upgrade wasn't that big of a deal.
Lo and behold. The new, upgraded plan did not include all of the features that we had previously.
In order to get the same features we would have to go for the $250 plan instead. Mind you, our original plan was only $99/mo.
You know what. No, thank you.
The question isn't the price, we pay $250 for our Semrush account, The question is how you treat us as your customers trying to squeeze us into a more expensive plan. Well, guess what, from this point on you will get $0/mo and a ruined relationship with us.
We will never recommend you to anyone and that's a loss you'll not recover from.
Also, waiting for their support to refund our latest payment, so we'll see how that goes.
Ahrefs 回复2024-09-02
Hi Mark,
Thank you for your feedback. We're sorry to hear you haven't been pleased with the transition from Legacy to the new plans. We'll let the whole team know about your experience and your thoughts.
I have been with Ahrefs for years, and I was pretty happy with their support and also pricing. However year by year it got more expensive, as a loyal client they kept my pricing the same. However a month ago my subscription got expired and I got no emails from them. Asking them to renew my subscription they refused to do so forcing me to pay their new plan which is way more expensive.
Ahrefs 回复2024-09-02
Hi Mike,
We're sorry to hear about your recent experience with Ahrefs. We'd like to understand more about your situation. All of our clients get renewal emails before their plans expire and when they are finally renewed. It sounds like this has worked for you in the past.
While we understand your frustration over losing your Legacy account, unfortunately we are no longer able to restore these once they have lapsed. We do sincerely apologize for the inconvenience.
Edited:
They have an overly complex credits system , which was hidden and not mentioned for the starter plan when signing up. This was not expected and essentially after I signed up at 8am, I'd used my full months credits within an hour. Close to £1 or more per search.
I requested a refund as this was not what I expected and while originally they said no, after a fair bit of effort they did understand and got me a refund, and I have since edited this review to reflect that.
Ahrefs 回复2024-09-02
Hi James,
Thank you for taking the time to leave your thoughts. We will take this back to the team to see how we can improve our communcation about the Starter plan and how credits are consumed.
They are thieves, I have paid for a "Standard account," and all I get is suspicious account activity, contact support and upon asking the support, they said you are using Ahrefs extensively, If I have paid for something, then I'll obviously use the way I want to use it!
And their support system lacks the most important thing which is "Support"!
Most of the time site is down, and no data is fetched; upon asking the support, they aren't doing anything!
And in response, they are saying that its for few hours, How many few hours? like 200 is few hours for you?
They are just lying to steal your money, never buying this Ahrefs again!
They are just there for the money and not the support they need to provide!
Now they have removed my "standard account" and demoting me to free account, remember renewal date was Aug 21, 2024!
They are thieves and scammers!
Stay away from them!
Ahrefs 回复2024-08-05
Hi there, thanks for taking the time to leave a review. These restrictions are automatically put in place when users show activity that goes against our ToS, including but not limited to, account sharing, data scraping, and executing unauthorized calls. You can find out more here: https://ahrefs.com/legal/terms#unauthorized-uses
When you spoke to support, you acknowledged that you had recently been using the service outside your normal usage. We do understand your frustration. However, please understand that these restrictions are only temporary (a few hours) and are in place to ensure the stability of our platform for all of our users. Without them, we run into the downtimes you mentioned in your review. Thank you for your understanding.
Really bad customer service. Payment with bank transfer or Paypal is not an option (any more). They simply refuse to help. We will move to another solution.
Ahrefs 回复2024-08-02
Hi there, we're sorry to hear that you had a bad customer service experience. Unfortunately, our current payment processor does not support PayPal and bank transfers are only supported on Enterprise accounts.
We apologize for any inconvenience, but there is no way for us to enable PayPal payments. Thank you for your understanding.
Recently, I've found Ahrefs to be quite frustrating to use. The functionality doesn't work as smoothly as it used to; I often encounter messages like "Couldn't fetch data" or the data fails to load altogether. Another ongoing issue is that Ahrefs data is not always accurate or real-time. For instance, keyword rankings are not consistently accurate and aren't real-time until you manually update them and wait for the fresh data to show, which is quite time-consuming.
Ahrefs 回复2024-08-02
Hi Amy, thanks for your feedback. We do apologize for the recent downtime we've experienced. Our developers have been upgrading our tech and this unfortunately caused some instability on the platform. This should be fixed now.
If you have additional feedback for our team, please don't hesitate to contact support via live chat or at [email protected].
It used to be the best tool. Now is barely usable. When you need it the most it will crash and keep loading. Since our business relies on many features they offer I will have to stay with them reluctantly but as soon as a better alternative comes around we are done.
Ahrefs 回复2024-07-25
Hi Alex,
Please accept our sincere apologies for the recent downtime. Migrating to more advanced technology can be challenging, and unfortunately we dropped the ball here.
We hope to regain your trust going forward.
1-Star Review for Ahrefs BAD organic traffic guesswork
1-Star Review for Ahrefs: Unreliable Organic Traffic Data and Unhelpful Support
Ahrefs Organic Traffic Data is a Joke and all the support do is REMOVE reviews they do not like!!
Let's be blunt: Ahrefs' organic traffic data is garbage. My clients website pulls in over 300,000 organic pageviews a month, yet Ahrefs shows a measly 800+. That's a massive discrepancy, and it renders their data useless for anyone serious about tracking organic traffic. They cannot continue to present their data as FACT when is IS NOT.
I know how the methodologdy works and the stats below do not include social media, newsletter. emails clicks etc. It's pure organic.
This is an issue for millions of users so not point asking what domain!!! or trying to ask for extra info to get honest 1 star reviews removed IE I could not find your name on our BLAH BLAH BLAH.
Limited Keywords? More Like Limited Usefulness
Their whole system seems flawed. Ahrefs seems to only track a tiny fraction of keywords, which completely misses the boat for websites with a diverse traffic source. It's like they're trying to measure the ocean with a teaspoon.
Support Makes Excuses, Not Fixes
Don't even get me started on their support. I tried to get some help with the inaccurate data, but all I got were excuses and requests for extra info. It feels like they're more interested in burying bad reviews than fixing their product.
Free Tier or Not, This is Unacceptable
Look, I understand there might be limitations with the free tier. But even then, the data should be somewhat close to reality. This is just straight-up bad, and frankly, a waste of time.
Final Verdict: Stay Away (Unless You Like Wild Guesses)
Unless you enjoy basing your SEO strategy on wild guesses, avoid Ahrefs for organic traffic data. Their system is deeply flawed, and their support is unhelpful at best. Look elsewhere for tools that actually provide reliable information.
NOTE: I am not seeking assistance, but sharing my experience.
I'm getting the "Couldn’t fetch data" error so often nowadays that the tool is barely usable. These errors completely kill the workflow, and you can never know when it's back to working properly. And when it does start working again, you have to spend your credits again just to get back to where you left off.
Nice of you to add the more affordable Starter pack, but it doesn't include the function of exporting keywords to a CSV?
Very disappointing.
Ahrefs 回复2024-07-25
Hi Artur,
We really want to apologize for the instability over the past week or so. We're trying to update and improve our tech, and unfortunately that caused some outages, which is unacceptable.
If you're on the Starter pack and find that you've consumed credits on a day where there are technical issues, please contact support at your earliest convenience. They'll be happy to help you out.
Again, please accept our apologies for the recent outages. We want our customers to have faith in our platform, and we know that we dropped the ball in a major way recently.
UPDATED: They have made it better since I wrote this...
The site was down for half a day, and the customer agent said, "We won't charge you for the use today." This made no sense, considering it was NOT working AT ALL, which shows the company's level of care for its users.
I have seen this company year or year squeeze people and offer nothing new worth noting...
Ahrefs 回复2024-07-25
Hi Tomas,
Please accept our sincere apologies for the recent downtime in Ahrefs. We know this is completely unacceptable, and we're working hard to ensure it doesn't happen in the future.
I'm also sorry to hear you were disappointed by your interaction with our customer support team. Could you please clarify what you feel a more appropriate response would have been than to clear any usage from your account on the day in question? Please let us know how you feel we could have handled this better so that our customer support team can provide better service in the future.
I'm also sorry to hear that you don't find the latest features and updates to be valuable. Please do let us know what you would like to see on our roadmap.
Another victim of the price hike - auto disabled my loyal customer Legacy account and said I can never get it back because it can't be reversed.
Ahrefs 回复2024-07-15
Hi Ash,
We're sorry to hear you were affected by the Legacy transition. As my colleague mentioned, we hope you'll reconsider. We do understand that any price increase is frustrating, but we need to adapt both limits and pricing to improve our infrastructure and the value that we provide to all of our clients. Thank you for understanding.
A nightmare. I was supposed to get a “part time” low income job, and I get involved in 4 days in a $16k debt. No one helped at that time, it was just “put the money and the profit will be huge” run fast from this “work” place.
Ahrefs 回复2024-07-25
Hi Rosa,
We're sorry to hear that you lost a significant amount of money. However, I don't believe your review is about our services.
We don't offer part-time jobs, and we don't require our employees to put up money out of their own pockets.
Again, we're sorry to hear that you had a bad experience with a company pretending to be an employer, and we urge you to report them to your local authorities.
Their price is very high and customer support is not helpful. I tried them for 1 month and then I had to cancel.
Ahrefs 回复2024-06-20
Hi Robert,
We're sorry to hear that you didn't have a good experience with our platform. We don't have any record of anyone with the name Robert White contacting customer support. Could you provide more details about what went wrong when you contacted support. Thanks!
I am using this service but facing an issue with the credit counter at the top of the page. It's expensive at $200 per month and comes with a lot of negativity.
Ahrefs 回复2024-06-20
Hi Andy,
We're sorry to hear that you're facing an issue with the platform. Have you tried to reach out to customer support either through the button on the bottom right-hand corner of any Ahrefs page or at [email protected]?
We'd be happy to help you out!
There's a lot of negativity about this company for some reason, but actually I've found them great. Its expensive for sure, but not as expensive as some of the others and I like the responsiveness, and the features.
Ahrefs 回复2024-06-20
Hi Richard,
Thanks so much for your kind words! We genuinely appreciate you taking the time out of your day to leave a review. We hope to count you among our customers for years to come.
Thanks again!
Not trustworthy. Appears to be faking (or at least heavily extrapolating without disclosure) the views a site received in an entire month, even if it has only been 2 days into that month.
1/5. Do not recommend.
Ahrefs 回复2024-06-20
Hi there,
We appreciate you taking the time to leave feedback, but it seems you might not be familiar with the way our platform works. We're very transparent about our data and methodologies.
If you would like to understand more about how it works in our toolset, you can visit: https://help.ahrefs.com/en/articles/1863206-what-is-organic-traffic-in-ahrefs-and-how-do-we-calculate-it
Hope that clears things up some.
What a complete scam company. Hide the credits. Over charge. No refunds. No warnings. You guys are straight up scammers.
And no ... don't be condescending and pretend you have plans for everyone, and I can switch to pay as you go. How about you make it DEAD OBVIOUS how much you are charging for your credits, and have a bit fat DEAD OBVIOUS credit counter on every page.
You are scammers, and you KNOW you are ...
Look at these reviews. Disgusting.
Ahrefs 回复2024-05-30
Hi Jonathan,
The credits counter is displayed at the top of every page. It was temporarily taken down, not because we were trying to hide anything, but because we are in the middle of revamping our system. It was put back up right away.
Please don't hesitate to contact customer support if you need further clarification.
Burying the credit total to induce more spend is one of the worst tricks I have seen. Avoid these guys like the plague.
Ahrefs 回复2024-05-14
Hi Tim,
Credit consumption has always been available in account settings. The intention wasn't to bury it to induce more spending. Our customers have the option to track their usage and adjust PAYG features (including turning it off completely) within their account settings.
Thank you for taking the time to share your thoughts about this change, however. Your feedback will be passed onto the rest of the team.
Vile company. They are so money hungry and disgusting. They hid the credit counter at the top of the page so you don't know how many credits you've been spending. I hope this company fails and something else takes its place (maybe SEMRush or some other smaller company that will eventually take it over)
Ahrefs 回复2024-05-14
Hi Rob,
Credit consumption has always been available in account settings. The intention wasn't to hide it so people can't track their usage. Our customers have the option to track their usage and adjust PAYG features (including turning it off completely) within their account settings.
Thank you for taking the time to share your thoughts about this change, however. Your feedback will be passed onto the rest of the team.
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