Majestic vs Ahrefs: a link index against a full SEO suite (2026)

By Jan Suski. I go deep on every review, checking every number against its source and digging up details other coverage misses, a habit from six years of SEO and link building for tech companies. Bylines at Surfer, Brand24, and Senuto. How the scoring works.

Published 17 October 2026Prefer this source on Google

Majestic is the cheaper tool for backlink analysis alone, meaning backlinks and the links behind them: $49.99 a month for its Lite plan against $129 for Ahrefs Lite, per both vendors' pricing pages checked 17 October 2026. Ahrefs is the tool to buy if the same seat also has to cover keyword research, rank tracking, site audits and organic traffic estimates, because Majestic sells none of those as a full product.

This Majestic vs Ahrefs comparison is for link prospecting teams, SEO services agencies and in-house teams deciding which of the two SEO tools to pay for. Every price, index count and plan limit below comes from majestic.com, ahrefs.com or help.ahrefs.com, read on 17 October 2026 unless a different date is given.

The two vendors count their data in different units, and one of Majestic's two indexes stopped updating in 2024. Both facts change which tool gives the more complete backlink profile for a website. The choice is hard to undo: Ahrefs' FAQ says it doesn't issue refunds in general, and Majestic's money-back window closes after seven days.

Majestic vs Ahrefs: a quick overview

Ten rows, all from the vendors' own pages. The cells hold what each one sells, so a row reading the same on both sides got cut.

↑ COMPARISONMajestic focuses on links, Ahrefs sells the whole SEO workflow

Majestic focuses on one data set: the links between pages on the web. Its own homepage says Majestic-12 Ltd was incorporated in October 2004, and the product has been a backlink checker and link analysis tool for its whole life. Every Lite plan feature this tool lists on the Majestic pricing page is a link report: Site Explorer, Link Graph, N-grams Near Links, Related Sites and referring domains, IPs & subnets.

Ahrefs is a full suite of SEO tools with a link index inside it. Its big data page lists six indexes, for backlinks, keywords, content, organic search traffic, paid search traffic and AI visibility, and the paid plans bundle Site Explorer, Keywords Explorer, Site Audit and Rank Tracker. A team can run an SEO campaign from the first keyword ideas to the monthly rank report without opening other tools, which is why digital marketing teams buy it as their main tool.

So the two products overlap on one screen, and Ahrefs is the jack of all trades of the pair. Both call it Site Explorer, and both use it to view backlinks, referring domains and anchor text for any website or domain. Past that screen, Majestic offers depth on links and Ahrefs offers more features across the rest of an SEO strategy.

↑ COMPARISONFresh Index, Historic Index and the Ahrefs crawl

Majestic publishes two indexes with live counters on its homepage. One holds links seen in the past 120 days. The other holds "all backlinks we've seen since 2006". Ahrefs publishes one backlink index and states its size in backlinks and pages.

The units don't line up, and neither vendor converts them. In a nutshell, Majestic counts URLs, crawled and found. Ahrefs counts 35 trillion backlinks, which its big data page labels backlink history records and its Site Explorer page labels live backlinks, plus pages crawled per minute, so published figures alone can't say which index is bigger.

Ahrefs crawls faster by its own numbers. Its big data page says the backlink index is "updated with fresh data every 15–30 minutes" from a crawl of 5 million pages a minute, and it lists 286 million domains after vetting. The page's only date stamp, "Data supplied as of May, 2024", sits under a supercomputer ranking for Ahrefs' own hardware, and the index counts carry no date of their own.

↑ COMPARISONThe gap between Majestic's two indexes

Majestic's older index ends on 26 March 2024 and its newer one starts on 19 June 2026. A link first seen in, say, January 2025 and removed before June 2026 sits in neither date range. That's a 27-month window with no link history, read straight off Majestic's own counters.

For forensic link analysis on a penalty or a migration from 2024 or 2025, that gap is a red flag. For anything older, the archive still holds 21.7 trillion URLs found back to 2006, which is the deepest dated archive either vendor publishes.

↑ COMPARISONTrust Flow, Citation Flow and Domain Rating: how each scores link juice

Both vendors compress a site's backlink profile into a 0 to 100 score, and both scores estimate the link juice a website passes along the links it gives out. They weigh it differently, and neither vendor calls its number a Google ranking factor.

• Trust Flow: "a score based on quality, on a scale between 0-100", per the Majestic glossary. It rises when links come from websites close to Majestic's seed set, so link juice from a spam farm barely moves it.
• Citation Flow: "a score between 0-100 which helps to measure the link equity or 'power'" of a URL, driven by the quantity of links. Majestic pairs the two as the Flow Metric.
• Domain Rating: Ahrefs' help article says each domain "splits its rating equally amongst the domains it links to", and the result is scaled into 0 to 100. URL Rating does the same for a single web page.

The practical difference is in the ratio. A site with Citation Flow far above Trust Flow has a lot of links from weak sources, and outreach teams use that gap as a first filter for paid link networks and spam signals in a link profile. Domain Rating gives one number with no quality split, so a high DR built on low-quality external links reads the same as one built on news sites, even though the link juice behind the two is worth different sums.

Read between the lines of Ahrefs' own description. The DR help article says DR "correlates with Google rankings pretty well" and that URL Rating correlates better. Majestic makes no ranking claim for Trust Flow either. Treat both as link authority estimates from multiple factors inside a private crawl, and none of them as something Google reads.

↑ COMPARISONTopical Trust Flow

Topical Trust Flow is the one metric with no Ahrefs counterpart. Majestic's homepage says it scores a site against the best sites in "over 800 categories", and the glossary puts it "on a log based scale between 0-100". A gardening website scoring high in Home/Gardening and near zero in Business tells a link builder more about relevance than any single domain score, and it's the fastest relevance check in link building outreach.

Semrush Authority Score, the third number buyers see

Semrush's Authority Score works on another principle. The Semrush knowledge base says it is "calculated from eight weighted factors" covering link power, estimated monthly organic traffic and six spam indicators, on a 1 to 100 scale. It's the only one of the four scores here with traffic inside it, so a site can lose authority score after a Google update without losing a single link.

Backlink analysis: Site Explorer against Site Explorer

Majestic's Site Explorer is built around where links sit. Ahrefs' Site Explorer is built around organic search data with backlinks beside it. Both list all the backlinks they hold for a domain, filter links by referring domain, anchor text and link type, and flag new and lost links. Neither shows all the backlinks Google knows about, since each tool sees only what its own crawler found.

Row limits decide how much of a complete backlink profile you can pull. Majestic Lite shows 5,000 Site Explorer rows and Pro shows 30,000. Ahrefs Lite caps a report at 2,500 rows and Standard at 30,000, per the pricing grid our Ahrefs pricing report read on 4 October 2026. For the website with the most backlinks in its niche, both entry tiers truncate the list, and the most backlinks a single Lite export returns is 5,000 on Majestic against 2,500 on Ahrefs.

Reviewers comparing the two in this SERP call Majestic's interface dated and its Site Explorer less interactive. Exploding Topics' side-by-side test found Ahrefs easier to move around in, and says Majestic's proprietary Flow Metric vocabulary takes new users a while to get up to speed on.

What the overview screen shows for one domain

Type a domain into Majestic's Site Explorer and the summary leads with Trust Flow, Citation Flow, external backlinks, referring domains, referring IPs and subnets, switchable between its two indexes. Ahrefs' overview leads with Domain Rating, URL Rating, backlinks, referring domains, organic keywords and organic traffic. Same domain, two different first questions.

For backlink analysis, the referring domain count tells you more than raw backlinks. A sitewide footer link repeats on every page of the linking site, so one referring domain can account for as many links as that site has pages. Both SEO tools group links by referring domain and show new and lost backlinks by date.

• Reports both tools sell: backlinks, referring domains, anchor text, new and lost links, top pages by links, outbound links.
• Reports only Majestic sells: link placement on the page, topical scores across 800+ categories, Clique Hunter, Network Neighbourhood.
• Reports only Ahrefs sells: organic keywords for any domain, top pages by traffic, Content Explorer, a broken backlinks report.

↑ COMPARISONLink placement, link graphs and neighbourhood mapping

Majestic's Link Context report answers a question Ahrefs doesn't ask: where on the referring page does the link sit? Majestic's glossary says it gives "detailed information on the location and text around a link", which includes the link density of the block around it. A footer link among dozens of outbound links and an in-body link with two neighbours show up as different rows.

Majestic launched the report in September 2019, per its homepage timeline. Its graph view draws the links between a site and the domains linking to it, and the Pro plan adds Network Neighbourhood for the sites sharing an IP address or subnet with a domain. That's the toolkit people mean when they call Majestic better for neighbourhood mapping and for exposing link networks.

Ahrefs covers the same ground through filters. Its backlink reports sort external links by DR, traffic of the linking page, dofollow or nofollow and first-seen date, and the broken backlinks report on Standard turns a rival's dead pages into link building targets. It shows broken links and lost links; it doesn't map hosting neighbourhoods.

Bulk backlink checker and Clique Hunter

Every Majestic plan includes the bulk backlink checker, which returns Flow Metrics and link counts for a list of URLs at once. Ahrefs' equivalent, Batch Analysis, starts on Standard at $249 a month.

Clique Hunter is Pro only. The glossary says "the analysis can be performed with a maximum of ten websites", and it returns the domains linking to several of them at once, a fast list of link prospects your competitors share. By hand, that search is a needle in a haystack. Ahrefs sells the same idea as its Link Intersect tool.

↑ COMPARISONKeyword research, organic traffic and rank tracking

Keywords are where the two products part ways, and where the lion's share of Ahrefs' extra cost goes. Ahrefs' index holds 28.7 billion keywords across 217 locations, per its Keywords Explorer page, and its big data page puts 2.7 billion of them in the United States. Keywords Explorer returns search volume, keyword difficulty scores, the top 10 search results for each of those keywords and, from Standard up, search intent labels and AI keyword suggestions.

Majestic's keyword tools come out of its link index. The Majestic keyword generator builds keyword suggestions from text it has crawled, anchor text included, so a keyword generator fed by links surfaces the phrases other websites use when they link.

The Keyword Checker returns "a 0 to 100 Search Volume score" per term. That's a relative score for keywords you already have, with no monthly search figure and no search intent analysis behind it, enough to rank a particular phrase against its variants and short of a full keyword research tool.

• Organic traffic: Ahrefs estimates organic traffic from 546 million keywords in 185 locations, then shows which keywords send each page its visits. Majestic publishes no estimated traffic figure.
• Rank tracking: Ahrefs Rank Tracker covers 750 keywords on Lite and 5,000 on Advanced, updated weekly. Majestic's Pro plan lists a Rank Tracker fed by Google Search Console, so it reports positions for verified sites only.
• Site audits: Ahrefs Site Audit runs on 100,000 crawl credits a month on Lite. Majestic sells no site audits.
• Content: Ahrefs' Content Explorer, from Standard, searches 23 billion pages for content strategy and content marketing research. Majestic's Search Explorer is pitched for "a quick list of topical URLs".

For an agency that has to do keyword research, create content, run competitive analysis and report rankings in one login, Ahrefs does a better job on everything outside links and kills two birds with one stone in a single seat. Majestic users who need new keywords and keyword difficulty pair it with other SEO tools, and that pairing is the price to compare.

↑ COMPARISONAhrefs pricing against what Majestic offers per plan

Majestic offers three plans, all in US dollars and excluding VAT. Ahrefs publishes six price points, Free and Enterprise included. Both discount an annual subscription by the same amount, two months free: $499.99 a year for Majestic Lite against $599.88 paid monthly, and $1,290 for Ahrefs Lite against $1,548, which Ahrefs words as "save up to 17%".

Read the table by backlink history and the gap is wide. Majestic Pro's $999.99 a year opens records of backlinks back to June 2006. Ahrefs needs Enterprise at $14,990 a year for unlimited history, and Advanced at $4,490 stops at five years.

Read it by job and the picture flips. Ahrefs Lite at $129 includes Keywords Explorer, Site Audit and Rank Tracker; Majestic Pro at $99.99 plus a separate keyword tool costs more than $129 the moment that tool passes $29.01 a month. Ahrefs Starter at $29 is the cheapest door into either tool, with 200 credits and no annual option, per Ahrefs' launch post, and 200 credits is a drop in the bucket for daily competitor checks.

Light users have one more route. Majestic's free backlink checker and the Majestic Million, a list of "the million domains we find with the most referring subnets", cost nothing. Ahrefs Free opens Site Explorer and Site Audit for sites you verify, with 1,000 backlinks visible, which covers your own site and nobody else's.

Majestic's free tier is limited to those free tools, and the plan grid lists no free subscription. The SEO tools pricing report puts both price cards beside those of eight other SEO tools.

↑ COMPARISONLeaving either tool: refunds, exports and a frozen index

Majestic is the easier one to back out of. Its pricing page says "Lite and Pro plans have a 7-day money-back guarantee for new customers", limited to a first subscription. Ahrefs' pricing FAQ sets the opposite in stone: "Ahrefs does not issue refunds in general" and "We never run discounts", and it can decline a monthly refund after any material activity on the account.

• Exports: Majestic Lite has no raw data exports; Pro and API do. Ahrefs exports 500,000 rows a month on Lite and 4 million on Advanced.
• API: Majestic sells full API access only on the $399.99 API plan. Ahrefs Connect meters API use on every self-serve tier, 100 rows per request on Lite.
• Seats: the devil's in the details here. An Ahrefs team of three on Lite pays $209 a month. Majestic's next tier with more than one user is the five-seat API plan.
• Index freshness: the older index's date range hasn't moved since 2024, a bitter pill to swallow for anyone auditing links from 2024 or 2025.

Ownership is plain on both sides. Majestic-12 Ltd has run the index since 2004, and Ahrefs Pte. Ltd. holds the copyright on ahrefs.com.

Majestic vs Semrush, the third option buyers check

Majestic vs Semrush and Majestic SEO vs Semrush draw their own searches, and the answer follows the same shape as the Ahrefs pairing. Semrush is a suite of 55+ tools, per our Semrush review, with a backlink index of 43 trillion backlinks across 808 million domains.

Interface is the other half of the Semrush case. Style Factory's Majestic SEO vs Semrush test calls Semrush's interface cleaner and Majestic's more cluttered, and Semrush sorts its tools into eight toolkits, from SEO and Local to Traffic & Market.

History is where the comparison turns. Semrush's historical data article says monthly SEO data reaches back to January 2012 in nine core databases, and it needs a Guru subscription or Semrush One Pro+ at $299 a month. Majestic's archive reaches 2006 on the $99.99 Pro plan, for links only.

For buyers on the fence between the two, Semrush SEO starts at $139 a month, per the Semrush pricing breakdown, and Adobe now owns it, covered in Adobe's Semrush acquisition. Buyers already weighing Semrush against traffic tools can read Semrush vs Similarweb.

↑ COMPARISONWhich one to buy

Buy Majestic if links are the whole job. Teams vetting link prospects, auditors tracing a site's backlink profile back to 2006, and anyone filtering link networks by the gap between the two Flow scores get the most link-specific data per dollar at $99.99 a month. Accept the 27-month hole between its two indexes before you rely on its backlinks for 2024 or 2025.

Buy Ahrefs if one subscription has to run the whole SEO strategy. Keyword research, rank tracking, site audits, organic traffic estimates and backlink analysis on new links sit in one login from $129 a month, on an index Ahrefs says refreshes every 15 to 30 minutes.

Running both SEO tools gets you the best of both worlds. Ahrefs Lite plus Majestic Pro costs $228.99 a month, and it adds topical scores, link placement data and backlinks history back to 2006 to everything Ahrefs does. The competitive intelligence SEO tools ranking scores both on one rubric, and the DataForSEO pricing report covers teams that want backlink data through an API without seats.

Frequently asked questions

Majestic SEO vs Ahrefs: which has more backlinks?

Neither vendor counts backlinks in the same unit, so the most backlinks claim can't be settled from published numbers. Majestic lists 21.7 trillion URLs found in its Historic Index and 553.9 billion in its Fresh Index; Ahrefs lists 35 trillion backlinks, labelled live backlinks on its Site Explorer page and backlink history records on its big data page. For links seen in the last 120 days, compare Majestic's Fresh Index with Ahrefs directly on your own domain.

Is Majestic still updated?

The Fresh Index is. Majestic's homepage showed it updated hours before our 17 October 2026 check. The older archive shows a last update of 3 May 2024 and a date range ending 26 March 2024.

Are backlinks still relevant in 2026?

Both vendors build their headline metrics on them. Ahrefs says Domain Rating "correlates with Google rankings pretty well", and Semrush puts link power inside Authority Score. Neither metric is a Google ranking factor, and neither vendor says it is.

How do you use Ahrefs for free?

Verify a site you own and Ahrefs Free opens Site Explorer with 1,000 backlinks visible, plus Site Audit with 5,000 crawl credits a month per project. Competitor domains need a paid plan, starting with Starter at $29 a month.

Who are Ahrefs' main competitors?

Among other SEO tools, Semrush is the closest suite, from $139 a month. Majestic competes on backlink data alone, and SpyFu competes on price, covered in our SpyFu review.

Which is better for link builders, Majestic or Ahrefs?

Majestic, for backlink analysis before outreach. Trust Flow against Citation Flow, topical scores by category and link placement data give more to judge a website by than one domain score. Ahrefs wins on prospecting volume, with traffic data on each page that links out, the keywords it ranks for and the backlinks pointing at it.

Which tool suits a digital marketing team?

Ahrefs. A digital marketing team needs keywords, rankings for those keywords, rank reports, site audits and backlinks in one tool, and Ahrefs Lite covers all of them for $129 a month. Majestic adds more features only on the links side, so it works as a second tool for the person running link building and checking links.

Can Majestic do competitor research?

On links, yes. Clique Hunter and Compare Sites on the Pro plan line up the backlinks, links and referring domains of up to ten websites. For keywords, organic traffic or search results positions on those keywords, Majestic has no report, and Ahrefs or Semrush fills the gap.

Sources: Majestic figures come from majestic.com, its plans page and its glossary; Ahrefs figures from ahrefs.com/pricing, its big data and Site Explorer pages and its help center, all read 17 October 2026, with Ahrefs' annual prices taken from the same pricing page on 4 October 2026. Neither vendor publishes an index count in the other's unit, a refund rate, or customer counts by plan.