Ahrefs
Updated 2026-10-02Bootstrapped, Singapore-based SEO platform extending into AEO from its own web crawler. Customers include IBM, LinkedIn, Uber, Adidas, and Shopify. No outside funding. Recent releases: the Letaido agent workspace, doubled API and MCP limits on all plans, and an Adaptive traffic model that accounts for AI Overviews.
Three scores, refreshed weekly from live market signals rather than a once-a-year analyst report. Presence is how established a vendor is in the market right now. Velocity is how fast they are shipping, raising, and winning customers. Agent Readiness is how easily your own agents can build on them through an API, MCP server, SDK, or CLI. Scores are relative across the vendors we track; the raw inputs ship in the downloadable dataset.
The Solution & Approach
Ahrefs is an SEO platform built on its own web crawler. The core is Site Explorer, Keywords Explorer, Site Audit, and Rank Tracker. In 2026 it pushed that base into AEO. Brand Radar tracks brand visibility across six AI platforms, Custom Prompt Tracking adds metered prompt checks, and the Brand Radar API returns citation state (mentioned, cited, found but not cited, not found) as a queryable field rather than a dashboard number.
The category argument comes from CMO Tim Soulo. Ahrefs already owns the crawler, so AI-visibility data is a marginal query against existing infrastructure, not a new data cost. He has made the case directly against pure-plays like Profound. Ahrefs backs it by giving data away: a free Firehose web-mentions API and a free llms.txt generator built on analysis of 137,000+ domains. In August 2026 it also published how its AI prompt volumes are derived, a Google keyword volume multiplied by a platform-usage ratio. Most of the category has not disclosed its method.
In August 2026 Ahrefs started selling the workflow as well as the data. Letaido, from $99/month, is the agent workspace that previously ran Agent A internally, with always-on hosting and connectors to Slack, HubSpot, WordPress, and Notion. In September it doubled API and MCP limits on every plan. Soulo's stated reason: "The bottleneck isn't code anymore, it's quality data."
Best for
SEO-led teams that want AI-visibility tracking on the same dataset they already use for search, and teams building their own agents that need broad web data through an API or MCP.
Pricing & trial
Published seat-based tiers from a $29/month Starter plan to $1,499/month Enterprise (annual), with a free Webmaster Tools tier and metered AEO add-ons (Brand Radar AI Index $199 to $699, Custom Prompts $50 to $250); no general free trial is listed. ahrefs.com/pricing. Pricing.
Agent Experience
How you build on this platform (or wire it into your own agents):
One of the stronger build-on options in AEO: a documented API (Standard and up), an official remote MCP server for Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, Claude Code, and Copilot Studio (Lite and up), a free Firehose mentions API, and API and MCP limits doubled on all plans in September 2026.
Reference customers
IBM, LinkedIn, Uber, Adidas, Shopify.
Case studies & customer stories
- Ahrefs on automating its own data-content refresh with Letaido: 14 posts updated monthly, at least 20 hours saved per month source
Recent moves
- 2026-09-22Doubled API and MCP limits on all plans, arguing that data, not code, is now the bottleneck for marketers building their own tools. source
- 2026-08-12Launched Letaido, a standalone agent workspace from $99/month with native Ahrefs data, always-on hosting, and connectors to Slack, HubSpot, WordPress, and Notion. source
- 2026-08-11Shipped Adaptive, a Site Explorer traffic model that factors in 15 SERP features including AI Overviews. source
- 2026-08-08Added Brand Radar reports to Report Builder's AI visibility widget, carrying over tracked prompts, tags, and project scope. source
- 2026-08-06Rebased Brand Radar prompt volumes from raw Google search volume to a figure adjusted by each AI platform's usage relative to Google. source
- 2026-07-30Site Explorer's Top Pages report began showing how many AI responses each page appears in, across platforms. source
Company, Financials & Funding History
Founded in 2010 by Dmytro Gerasymenko, who remains CEO. Headquartered in Singapore, bootstrapped, and still private.