Ahrefs vs Linkwake

Ahrefs is a web and API platform for SEO research, including keyword research, rank tracking, site audits, backlink analysis and competitor research. It also provides content tools, AI assistants and MCP access. Content Explorer can find web mentions and link prospects, while AI Content Helper supports content improvement. The free plan provides site data and fixes with limited access to Site Explorer and Site Audit. Paid plans start with Starter at $29 a month. Lite costs $129 a month and includes five projects, 750 tracked keywords, 100,000 monthly crawl credits and one user; its Site Audit allowance has a 25,000-page project maximum. Annual payment saves up to 17%. Enterprise costs $1,499 a month and requires an annual commitment; it includes SSO, two-factor authentication, ISO27001 certification, access management, audit logs and unlimited additional users. Ahrefs says its web index contains 170 trillion pages, tracks 41.9 billion keywords and filters 28.7 billion keywords; AhrefsBot crawls 8 billion pages daily. Founded in 2010, the company is headquartered in Singapore. Multilingual support is available five days a week.

Linkwake tracks changes in referring domains across agency client portfolios. It compares Common Crawl releases to show domains gained, lost or retained, and identifies domains linking to competitors but not to a tracked site as possible outreach gaps. Users can organize domains into portfolios, follow movement on dashboards, and receive scheduled weekly or monthly CSVs or shareable client report links. Its source is Common Crawl’s web graph, which Linkwake says covers more than 100 million domains; data changes when releases arrive, roughly every 2–3 months. The focus is domain-level links, not keywords, page-level links or anchor text. The free plan costs nothing and includes five tracked domains, release-change comparisons, email digests and manual reports. Paid plans start at $24/mo. Starter lists 100 domains and three releases of history; higher plans offer more tracked domains, longer history, reports and API access. Common Crawl is not a complete web index, so missing relationships should be checked before outreach.