How to Create a Free Ahrefs Account and Connect Your Website

What the free account includes, and what it does not

In Ahrefs’ own words, the free account gives you “website analytics, technical audits, and SEO metrics for your website.” In practice that means three things:

• Site Audit. Crawls your site on a schedule and checks it for more than 170 SEO issues, from broken links to missing titles.
• Site Explorer for your own site. Who links to you, which keywords Ahrefs sees you ranking for, and your top pages.
• Web Analytics. A cookie-free visitor tracker showing traffic sources and key actions, which you can run instead of or alongside Google Analytics.

What it does not include is data about sites you do not own. Competitor research, keyword research at scale, rank tracking and AI search tracking are paid features. If your question is “why does my competitor outrank me?”, the free account will not answer it. If your question is “what is wrong with my own site, and who links to it?”, it will.

For reference, as of September 2026 the paid plans start with Starter at $29 a month for keyword and competitor lookups, then Lite at $129, Standard at $249 and Advanced at $449 a month, with up to 17% off if you pay annually. You can upgrade later without redoing any of the setup below.

Step one: create your free account

Go to the Pricing page on ahrefs.com and scroll to the bottom. Under Ahrefs Free (“Get Ahrefs data on your site and fix what matters”), click Get started, the button pictured below. That opens the Welcome to Ahrefs screen pictured at the top of this article. Choose Continue with Google, or type your email and click Continue with Email.

If you use email, Ahrefs sends a message titled “Activate your Ahrefs account”. Open it and click Confirm email. If it has not arrived within a few minutes, check your spam and promotions folders before signing up again.

The link takes you to a Complete your account form: your name, a password (at least eight characters, mixing numbers with lowercase and uppercase letters), your company size, your role, and where you heard about Ahrefs. The newsletter toggle is off by default. Fill it in and click Continue.

A tip before you go further: if your site is already in Google Search Console, the next step is much easier when your Ahrefs account can connect to the same Google account. And whichever way you sign up, use a login you will still control in five years, ideally on your business domain rather than a freelancer’s or a former employee’s. Losing the login is the most common reason people end up doing all of this twice.

Step two: import or add your website

Next comes Import or add your project, with two routes side by side. There is also a “skip and do this later” link underneath, but there is nothing to see in the account until a site is added, so do it now.

Import from GSC. This is the one to pick if your site is in Google Search Console. Ahrefs asks you to connect your Google account, lists every property you have there, and lets you tick the ones you want. Ownership is verified automatically, you can import several sites at once, and you can adjust each project’s settings afterwards. If you have not set up Search Console yet, it is worth doing first regardless of Ahrefs; I walk through it on every major platform in how to set up Google Search Console.

Add manually. One site at a time, configured as you go, with verification as a separate step. It opens a Create your first project screen.

Leave the scope on http + https, type your domain without the www, and leave the Subdomains option selected. Ahrefs itself recommends this combination because it captures the most complete backlink profile. Give the project a name you will recognize, ignore the Folder field unless you are adding many sites, and click Continue.

Step three: decide on Web Analytics (optional)

Ahrefs then offers to install its Web Analytics. It is a short script you paste into the <head> of your site, or add through Google Tag Manager, and then confirm with Verify installation. Ahrefs describes it as privacy-friendly analytics with no cookies and no personal data.

If you already run Google Analytics and are happy with it, click Continue without analytics. You can add it later from the dashboard. If you have no analytics at all, this is one of the easiest ways to start, and you will see visitor numbers next to your SEO data in one place.

Step four: verify you own the site

If you imported from Search Console, you can skip this: it is already done. If you added the site manually, the Verify ownership screen lists your options.

• Google Search Console (recommended). Connect the Google account that owns the site in Search Console and Ahrefs confirms it for you.
• DNS record. Add a TXT record wherever your domain’s DNS is managed (GoDaddy, Namecheap, Cloudflare, Squarespace Domains, Shopify and so on), with the host set to @. The most durable option, because it survives redesigns and platform changes.
• HTML file. Upload a small file to the root of your site. Hosted builders like Shopify and Wix usually do not allow it.
• HTML tag. Paste a meta tag into your homepage’s <head>. Easy on most builders, but a theme change can remove it and quietly un-verify you.

Once the record, file or tag is in place, click Recheck status. DNS changes can take anywhere from a few minutes to a day, so if it still says “Ownership not verified”, wait an hour and recheck rather than adding a second record. You can click Continue without verification to finish the setup, but Ahrefs will not show your site’s data for free until ownership is proven, so come back to it.

Step five: schedule your site audits

The last setup screen is Schedule site audits. Choose how often Ahrefs crawls your whole site: daily, weekly, monthly or one-time, plus the day, time and your time zone. Weekly is the default and a sensible choice; monthly is plenty for a small site that rarely changes. The Always-on audit toggle underneath is a paid feature, so leave it off. Click Finish.

Step six: make sure Ahrefs can actually crawl your site

This is the step almost everyone skips. Ahrefs collects its data with its own crawler, AhrefsBot. If your site blocks it, your reports come back thin or empty, and that looks exactly like a site with no authority. Check three places:

• robots.txt. Visit yourdomain.com/robots.txt. If you see User-agent: AhrefsBot followed by Disallow: /, or a blanket Disallow: / under User-agent: *, the crawler is blocked.
• Security plugins and firewalls. WordPress security plugins and some hosting firewalls block SEO crawlers by default.
• Your CDN. If you use Cloudflare or similar, make sure bot protection is not challenging verified crawlers.

Step seven: read your dashboard

Once the first audit has run, the Projects dashboard shows one row per site: Health Score (with how many pages were crawled, redirected, broken or blocked), Domain Rating, Referring domains, Total visitors, Organic traffic and Organic keywords. Tracked keywords stays empty, because rank tracking is not part of the free plan.

You can lose an evening clicking around from here. Three things are worth your first half hour.

The audit issues. Click the Health Score to open the audit. Treat the issue list as a to-do list, not a grade: some flagged items are deliberate, and the score is a summary of the list, not something Google uses to rank you. Fix errors first, then warnings, and leave notices until the rest is clean.

Referring domains. This number matters more than the backlink total, because one site linking to you two hundred times is still one vote. Open the list and scan it for sites you recognize, then for sites you have never heard of. The second group is where spam and scraper links live. Most of them are harmless and do not need disavowing.

Organic keywords, read with care. For small or new sites this is almost always an undercount. Ahrefs estimates rankings from its own keyword database, which favors searches with measurable volume, while small sites mostly rank for rare long-tail questions that are in nobody’s database. On our own site, Ahrefs has shown fewer than twenty ranking keywords while Search Console showed hundreds of queries a week. Neither tool is wrong; they measure different things. For your own rankings, trust Search Console.

Common setup problems

• No activation email. Check spam and promotions, and make sure you typed the address correctly on the sign-up screen.
• Verification failed. DNS has not propagated yet, the TXT record went on the wrong host, or the meta tag landed outside <head>. Wait an hour, then recheck.
• Empty or tiny reports. AhrefsBot is blocked (step six), or the site is new and has not been crawled much yet. Give it a few weeks.
• The site un-verified itself. A theme or platform change removed the meta tag or file. Switch to DNS or Search Console verification so it cannot happen again.
• Wrong version of the site. You entered the www version with subdomains turned off, or picked https only. Edit the project scope back to http + https on the bare domain.

How to use it alongside Google Search Console

Use Search Console for your own rankings, clicks and indexing. It is free, it is Google’s own data, and it sees the long tail that third-party tools miss, though even it can mislead in ways I covered in how Search Console misleads you. Use Ahrefs for what Google does not show you clearly: who links to you, the technical health of the whole site in one crawl, and, if you upgrade later, how you compare with the competition.

And do not panic at a low keyword count or a middling Domain Rating on day one. Both are estimates built from the outside. Watch the direction over months, not the number on the first morning.