Free Ahrefs Account: How to Get Ahrefs Webmaster Tools for Your Website

You can get a free Ahrefs account by signing up for Ahrefs Webmaster Tools (which Ahrefs now also presents as Ahrefs Free) and verifying a website that you own. It gives you Site Audit, Site Explorer for your own site (backlinks and organic keywords) and Web Analytics. It does not include Keywords Explorer or competitor analysis, which are paid. Updated October 2026.

While Google Webmaster Tools, now called Google Search Console, has long been free for webmasters and site owners to study site analytics, this free Ahrefs account brings another level of insight into your site’s backlinks and organic traffic.

What you get with a free Ahrefs account

• Site Audit: finds technical and on-page SEO issues on your own website, with a health score.
• Site Explorer: shows the organic keywords your site ranks for, your top pages and your backlink profile.
• Web Analytics: a privacy-focused traffic analytics tool that uses no cookies by default.

What is not included: Keywords Explorer, competitor website analysis, and analysis of domains you have not verified are paid features.

I have used Ahrefs for a while to assess my site traffic, remove bad backlinks, find broken links, assess core web vitals and page speed, and do a good SEO site audit.

Free Ahrefs Webmaster Tools vs paid Ahrefs

If you have not used Ahrefs before, you should definitely try it. The paid plans currently start at $29 per month for Starter and $129 per month for Lite, with higher plans above that, and Ahrefs offers 20% off on annual billing (check Ahrefs’ pricing page for current prices). But if you only want data about your own websites, you can get it free by signing up for an Ahrefs account and using Ahrefs Webmaster Tools.

Getting started: Ahrefs Free Account

Simply sign up for Ahrefs and start a new project.

Then you can import from the Google Search Console, which verifies ownership automatically. Ahrefs describes this as the quickest way to verify multiple websites at once, and it lets you add multiple websites in one go. The site must be added in the same mode (with or without www) in both Search Console and Ahrefs.

You can also add your websites manually, but then you need to add each site one at a time in a project.

I think importing from Google Search Console into Ahrefs is the best way, not only to import website data seamlessly but also because it helps you assess site traffic and organic keywords the way Google sees them. The other ways to verify ownership are:

• DNS record: add a verification text record to your domain’s DNS settings. It can take up to 48 hours to work.
• HTML file: upload the verification file to your site’s root folder.
• HTML tag: add a meta tag to your homepage’s head section.

Keep the verification file, tag or record on your site, because Ahrefs checks it again on later crawls. Ahrefs does not list Bing Webmaster Tools as a verification option.

So this is the best way to get a free Ahrefs account.

Ahrefs free account limits

I often wonder why Ahrefs gives away free accounts to site owners, but their strength lies in keyword research data, which is still paid. The data available for your own website is still enough to run an effective SEO audit and look for Google penalties.

While using the free Ahrefs backlink checker and technical SEO tools to improve my search rankings, I got this alert.

When I browsed my free account usage limits at that time, I found these, which might help you. The major ones were 1,000 rows per report and 100,000 rows per month, so use the limit carefully, as simple sorting can use up the free limit quickly. These screenshots are older, and Ahrefs changes its limits, so check the usage page in your own account.

Ahrefs currently lists these limits for the free tools: Site Explorer shows up to 1,000 backlinks and keywords at once, Site Audit has 5,000 crawl credits per project each month, and Web Analytics is capped at 1 million events per month for each project.

So why spend on paid keyword research tools like SEMrush when you can create a free Ahrefs account today for your own sites? Or see how small businesses are using group buy SEO tools to counter this expensive SEO software.

Frequently asked questions

Is Ahrefs free?

Ahrefs Webmaster Tools (Ahrefs Free) is free for websites you own and can verify. The full Ahrefs toolset is paid.

Can I use the free Ahrefs account to check competitors?

No. Competitor website analysis and Keywords Explorer are paid features. The free tools work only for sites you verify.

How do I verify my website in Ahrefs?

The quickest way is to import your site from Google Search Console. You can also verify with a DNS record, an HTML file or an HTML meta tag.