Summarize this article with AI

Pull the same site through Majestic and Ahrefs and you'll see two different link profiles. We ran 25 domains through both on 1 November 2026. Ahrefs' live referring-domain count landed anywhere from 1.44 to 17.52 times Majestic's referring-subnet count, and the two tools couldn't even agree on the pecking order for the vendors' own sites. Ask Majestic and Moz outranks Ahrefs. Ask Ahrefs and the order flips.

So the Majestic vs Ahrefs question isn't about raw numbers. It's about whose numbers you trust and which tool fits what you do. Here's the gist. Majestic is a backlink index with a few tools layered on. Ahrefs is a full SEO suite built around its own index, and the right pick leans more on your job than on any claim about index size.

What follows: the short-answer table, a breakdown of Trust Flow, Citation Flow, Domain Rating and URL Rating (what each one's actually built from), how the two indexes differ today, the 25-domain pull, what each tool does beyond links, November 2026 prices, and a free Search Console check you can run before paying either vendor.

Majestic vs Ahrefs: the short answer

Majestic is a backlink index with a few SEO tools built on top. Ahrefs is a full SEO suite built around its own backlink index. Need only backlink analysis? Majestic does it cheaper. Want more than that, like keyword research with search volume and keyword difficulty scores, rank tracking and site audits? Ahrefs rolls them into one tool, and you pay for the convenience.

Your job Pick Why
Vetting sites for link building or outreach Majestic Lite Trust Flow, Topical Trust Flow by topic, Bulk Backlink Checker, from $49.99/mo or $499.99/yr
Auditing a domain's long-term link history Majestic Pro or Ahrefs Standard+ Majestic's Historic Index goes back to 2006 (though its stats panel ends 26 Mar 2024); Ahrefs Standard holds 2 years, Advanced 5
Keyword research, rank tracking and site audits too Ahrefs One tool, several jobs; Lite from $129/mo or $1,290/yr
Agency running client SEO Ahrefs Standard or Advanced Content Explorer, larger report rows, Data Studio connectors on Advanced
API or data pulls on a budget Ahrefs API from Lite ($129/mo) Majestic's API plan starts at $399.99/mo or $3,999.90/yr
You only need links to your own site Neither first Search Console's Links report plus each tool's free tier (see the free check below)

The verdict in two lines. For link-only work at the lowest price, Majestic Lite wins. For a single tool that covers more of the job, Ahrefs Lite or Standard is the stronger pick.

Trust and disclosure. Metric definitions, index figures and prices come from Majestic's and Ahrefs' own pages, read 1 November 2026. The 25-domain comparison was pulled the same day from Majestic's free Majestic Million list and the Ahrefs API. We pay for Ahrefs (the Standard plan pulled these numbers) and have no Majestic subscription, so Majestic's numbers are the ones it publishes free. SEO Heatmap is our product and shows neither tool's data.

Majestic SEO vs Ahrefs: what you're actually comparing

Majestic is a UK company that traded as "Majestic SEO" from 2008 to 2014. It builds one product: a backlink index with its own Flow Metrics, a Fresh index, a Historic index, and link tools on top. Tools in the box: Site Explorer, Link Graph, Clique Hunter, Backlink History, Bulk Backlink Checker, Neighbourhood Checker. No site audit. No keyword-volume explorer of the Ahrefs kind.

Ahrefs builds a suite on its own crawler. Site Explorer for links and organic traffic data, Keywords Explorer, Site Audit, Rank Tracker, Content Explorer, plus newer features like Brand Radar. Its link index is one part of what you pay for, not the whole product.

So "which has better backlink data" is only half the question in Ahrefs vs Majestic. The other half is whether you need the rest of the suite.

Trust Flow vs Domain Rating: what each score measures

One of the top-ranking pages on this keyword admits it isn't sure what Trust Flow means, and another hands Majestic a "2:1 TF/CF ratio rule" that isn't on Majestic's current pages. Here's what each score actually measures.

Score Tool Scale Built from Level Watch out for
Trust Flow (TF) Majestic 0 to 100, logarithmic How closely a site is linked from a manually reviewed seed set of trusted sites URL, aggregated to domain Counts internal and external links
Citation Flow (CF) Majestic 0 to 100 Link quantity "regardless of quality" (Majestic's wording) URL, subdomain, domain A high CF with a low TF is spammy-looking, not spammy by definition
Topical Trust Flow (TTF) Majestic Per topic, 800+ topic pools Trust Flow scored per topic URL, subdomain, domain Use it to see which topics a site's trust comes from
Domain Rating (DR) Ahrefs 0 to 100, logarithmic Followed links only; first link per linking domain; each linker's rating split across the domains it links to Domain Relative to the whole database (a site's DR can fall without losing a link); Ahrefs says it doesn't account for backlink spam
URL Rating (UR) Ahrefs 0 to 100 PageRank-style; internal and external links; respects nofollow Page Different from DR and not interchangeable

A Trust Flow of 40 and a Domain Rating of 40 aren't the same thing, and there's no conversion between them. Majestic's own guidance is to compare like with like: homepage with homepage, never a page's TF against a site's.

None of these scores is a Google ranking factor. Majestic's own pages say Google doesn't use DR, DA or Trust Flow to rank pages.1 The DA there is Moz's Domain Authority, a third-party authority score built on the same idea. Ahrefs says DR and UR correlate with rankings; that's an Ahrefs claim, not Google's.

On the TF/CF gap, Majestic says the delta between the two scores is used by SEOs and domain traders to try to catch spammy-looking links. No fixed ratio rule is published, so a "no greater than 2:1" instruction is somebody's rule of thumb, not Majestic's.

A real reading. On 1 November 2026, Majestic's free showcase domain, udemy.com, read Trust Flow 84 and Citation Flow 68. Ahrefs the same day read Domain Rating 91 for that site. Three numbers on three scales for one domain. Which one matters to you? Depends on what you're asking.

Domain Rating leans on an old PageRank concept. A linking site's value gets divided across every site it points to. Our PageRank sculpting guide shows how that split works in Google's model and why nofollow no longer changes it.

The most detailed comparison ranking for this keyword still describes indexes that no longer exist: Majestic's Fresh Index as "the past 90 days" (it's 120 now) and Ahrefs' Live, Recent and Historical switch, which Ahrefs retired in May 2021 with Backlinks 2.0. Here's what each tool holds today.

View Tool What it holds How far back Plan
Fresh Index Majestic Links seen in the past 120 days, including links deleted in that window 120 days All plans
Historic Index Majestic All links found since June 2006. Majestic's stats panel on 1 Nov 2026 showed data to 26 Mar 2024, last updated 3 May 2024; its FAQ still says "once every month" 2006 onward, per the panel Pro and up
Live backlinks Ahrefs All live backlinks; the Backlink Checker page says the index refreshes every 15 minutes Current All plans
Show history selector Ahrefs A date selector in Site Explorer; the reach depends on your plan Lite 6 months, Standard 2 years, Advanced 5 years, Enterprise unlimited Lite and up

If a comparison tells you to toggle Ahrefs' Live, Recent and Historical indexes, it's written against an older product.2

Vendor-stated sizes, read 1 November 2026, labeled by what the vendor calls them:

  • Majestic Fresh: 549.9 billion URLs found from 188.6 billion crawled pages.
  • Majestic Historic: 21.7 trillion URLs found from 4.5 trillion crawled pages.
  • Ahrefs: about 35 trillion backlinks (its Site Explorer page labels this "live backlinks"; its Backlink Checker and Big Data pages label the same figure "historical records"), from about 493 to 494 billion pages indexed.

These are vendor claims in different units. A bigger number here doesn't mean better coverage of your niche. What matters is which domains each tool actually finds for the sites you care about, which brings us to the data.

We pulled both tools' numbers for the same 25 domains

Here's where the two tools agree, where they don't, and why. Every number below comes from one pull of 25 domains on 1 November 2026.

What we compared, and what we couldn't

Same 25 domains, same day. 10 picked by name (our site, the four vendors' own sites, the five domains behind the top competitor articles) and 15 picked by a fixed rule across Majestic Million ranks from 100 to 1,000,000. The rule was set before any Ahrefs number was pulled.

For each domain we read Majestic's referring subnets, referring IPs and Fresh-Index movement from the Majestic Million CSV (free, no account). From the Ahrefs API we read Domain Rating, live and all-time backlinks, live and all-time referring domains, and the live referring-domain list with each linker's IP.

What this run can't show: Trust Flow and Citation Flow for the 25 domains. Majestic's Site Explorer put every domain we asked about behind a Cloudflare "Verify to continue" check (not a login, just a human check), so TF and CF were only read for Majestic's weekly showcase domain, udemy.com. The main cross-tool comparison here is Majestic's referring subnets against Ahrefs' referring domains: same direction, different units.

The rank order mostly agrees

Across the 23 domains that appear in both sources (our site and one SEO blog aren't in the Majestic Million), the ranks line up well. Spearman rank correlation of Majestic's referring subnets against Ahrefs' live referring domains: 0.942. Against Domain Rating: 0.927. Live backlinks come in weakest at 0.878. Short version: sites near the top in one tool are near the top in the other, same at the bottom.

There's a catch baked into those numbers though. The sample reaches from Majestic rank 100 out to 1,000,000, so big versus small is easy to tell apart. The tools agree on big vs small. They don't always agree on close neighbors.

A close-neighbor example from the vendors themselves. In Majestic, semrush.com leads with 19,404 subnets, moz.com has 16,938, ahrefs.com 16,667. In Ahrefs, the three come back as semrush.com (137,658 live referring domains), ahrefs.com (117,931), and moz.com (96,883). Moz and Ahrefs swap places.

Biggest flips in the sample: complianz.io sits 7th by Majestic subnets but 3rd by Ahrefs referring domains and tied first by Domain Rating (93). A small SEO blog lands 22nd of 23 by Majestic's subnets (180). Ahrefs puts it 16th (3,154 referring domains). Vetting one specific site? Run it through both before you lean on either.

The counts don't, because they count different things

For the same site, Ahrefs' live referring-domain count ran 1.44 to 17.52 times Majestic's referring-subnet count (median 5.41). All-time against subnets: 2.32 to 62.64 times (median 21.54).

Why. A Majestic subnet is a Class C (/24) network of linking sites' IP addresses, so dozens of sites on one host or one network collapse into a single subnet.3 Ahrefs counts unique linking domains, not networks. Different unit.

To put both on the same unit, we counted /24 networks from Ahrefs' own referring-domain IPs for five smaller sites. Ahrefs had more /24s than Majestic for four of the five (1.17 to 2.61 times) and fewer for one. 61% to 77% of those linking IPs sat in Cloudflare's published ranges, which squeezes any subnet count on either tool.

Inside Ahrefs, the view you pick moves the count a lot too. cnn.com showed 539,940 live referring domains and 2,752,076 all-time. Pick a view, and name which one when you cite the number.

Then the counting rules. Majestic's External Inbound Links are "not limited to one link per referring URL".3 Ahrefs counts one link per page and folds parameter URLs into their canonical.4 So raw backlink totals are the least comparable number across the two tools. A published hands-on test ran the same site through both. Majestic came back with about 17.7 million backlinks against Ahrefs' 8.5 million, close to double. That gap likely says more about how each tool counts than about how much either sees.

A compact slice from the pull:

Domain Majestic referring subnets (Fresh) Ahrefs live referring domains Ahrefs Domain Rating
cnn.com 63,097 539,940 93
semrush.com 19,404 137,658 92
moz.com 16,938 96,883 91
ahrefs.com 16,667 117,931 91
complianz.io 14,753 203,753 93
majestic.com 4,286 16,260 83
docker.io 1,856 3,819 77
one small SEO blog 180 3,154 50
getseoheatmap.com not in the Majestic Million (at most 164) 833 1.4

A small, new site in both: ours

getseoheatmap.com isn't in the Majestic Million at all. The list's last row has 164 referring subnets, so Majestic's free list counts at most 164 subnets for us (and likely fewer). Ahrefs the same day returned Domain Rating 1.4 with 833 live referring domains, 1,024 all-time referring domains, and 1,468 live backlinks.

A couple of readings. First, Domain Rating weighs who links to you, not how many sites do. 833 referring domains and a DR of 1.4 aren't a contradiction: DR depends on how strong the linking domains are and how many other sites each of them links to, not on the count.

Second, 821 distinct referring IPs sat on 203 /24s, and 805 of those 821 IPs (about 98%) are in Cloudflare's published ranges. When many of the sites linking to you sit behind one CDN, referring-IP and subnet counts understate how many different sites link to you.

Ahrefs' monthly referring-domain history for our site: 0 through December 2025, 146 by May 2026, 833 by October 2026. A current count alone hides that curve.

Three rules out of the exercise. Compare sites inside one tool, not one tool's count against the other's. Trust the rank order more than the count. Say which view (Fresh, live, all-time) any number came from.

If link data is one part of a bigger SEO job, the suite question matters more than any score comparison.

Area Ahrefs Majestic
Keyword research Keywords Explorer with search volume, keyword difficulty and traffic potential (not in Ahrefs Free; Starter and up) No search volume database of the Ahrefs kind. Keyword Checker, N-grams Near Links, Search Explorer on Pro. The old Keyword Generator URL now redirects to N-grams Near Links.
Organic traffic data Site Explorer shows each domain's estimated organic traffic from search, with history No organic traffic estimates (Pro's Rank Tracker only imports your own Search Console data)
Rank tracking Rank Tracker, all plans, weekly updates Rank Tracker via Google Search Console on Pro: imports your own GSC ranking data
Site audit Site Audit (170+ issues), all plans incl. Ahrefs Free for verified sites Not available
Content research Content Explorer (16.9B pages, Standard and up), AI Content Helper, Content Kit add-on Link Context, Author Explorer, Post Popularity, Social Explorer
Link-specific tools Link Intersect (up to 10 competitors), Batch Analysis (2,000 URLs), broken backlinks, alerts Link Graph, Clique Hunter (up to 10 sites), Compare, Backlink History, Flow Metric History, Bulk Backlink Checker (400 pasted, 1 million uploaded URLs), Neighbourhood Checker
Browser extension SEO Toolbar (DR and UR with a free account) Backlink Analyzer plugin (basic metrics after a reCaptcha, no account needed)
Search Console integration GSC Insights (connect GSC; Ahrefs builds history from the connect date) Rank Tracker via GSC on Pro; Verified Domains imports pre-verified sites
Reporting / Sheets Ahrefs Data Studio connectors on Advanced and up Google Sheets add-on on any paid plan
API From Lite (unit-based), plus an MCP server API plans only ($399.99/mo and up); OpenApps (Screaming Frog etc.) on Lite and Pro

Where Majestic's link tools go deeper for backlink analysis: tiered link-graph visualization of a site's backlink profile, Clique Hunter on Pro (sites that link to several of the up to 10 domains you enter), and Topical Trust Flow for vetting a site by the topics its trust comes from.

Majestic vs Ahrefs pricing in November 2026

Prices from each vendor's own pricing page, read 1 November 2026, in US dollars. Majestic's figures exclude VAT; its page offers monthly, quarterly or annual billing. Ahrefs' pricing page shows monthly and annual. Both vendors price annual at about ten months of the monthly price.

Plan Monthly Annual Limits that decide
Majestic Lite $49.99 $499.99/yr Fresh Index only, 5,000 Site Explorer rows, 1 million analysis units a month, no API
Majestic Pro $99.99 $999.99/yr Adds Historic Index, Index Merger, 30,000 rows, 20 million analysis units
Majestic API $399.99 $3,999.90/yr Full API, 5 users, 100 million analysis units
Ahrefs Starter $29 Monthly billing only 200 credits/mo, Keywords Explorer and Rank Tracker, no add-ons
Ahrefs Lite $129 $1,290/yr 1,000 credits per user, 6 months of history, 2,500 rows per report, API and MCP from here
Ahrefs Standard $249 $2,490/yr Unlimited credits, 2 years of history, Content Explorer, 30,000 rows per report
Ahrefs Advanced $449 $4,490/yr 5 years of history, 75,000 rows per report, Data Studio connectors
Ahrefs Enterprise $1,499/mo Annual commitment From 3 users, 150,000 rows, uncapped API, SSO

Ahrefs says it doesn't run discounts and has no free trial of the paid plans. Majestic offers a 7-day money-back guarantee on Lite and Pro for new customers.5

Head-to-head on the cheapest way into each tool's link data. Majestic Lite ($49.99/mo or $499.99/yr) gets you the Fresh Index, 5,000 rows per report, 1 million analysis units a month, no API. Pay for Ahrefs Lite ($129/mo or $1,290/yr) and you get live backlinks, 6 months of history, 2,500 rows per report, API and MCP, along with Keywords Explorer, Rank Tracker and Site Audit. Links your only concern? Majestic Lite costs less and gives you the data you'll actually touch. If the suite matters, the gap pays for Keywords Explorer, Site Audit and the API.

For the full Ahrefs tier walk-through, see our Ahrefs vs Moz pricing guide. If paying for Ahrefs at all is the sticking point, our free Ahrefs alternatives guide sorts the realistic free options.

Which one should you pick?

Outreach teams and link builders. Start with Majestic Lite. Trust Flow and Topical Trust Flow let you vet sites by the topics their trust comes from, Bulk Backlink Checker handles outreach lists at volume (up to 1 million uploaded URLs), and the price is about a fifth of Ahrefs Standard. Pro adds the Historic Index if you also audit a domain's past.

Link auditors or anyone researching a site's long history. Majestic Pro for the Historic Index back to 2006, with the caveat that its stats panel ends 26 March 2024. If 2 years is enough, Ahrefs Standard. If you want 5 years and Data Studio connectors, Ahrefs Advanced.

In-house SEO or solo site owner. Ahrefs Lite or Standard. Links are one part of your job and a dedicated link tool duplicates work you'd rather do in one place. Lite's 6-month history and 1,000-credits-per-user cap are the limits to check before you commit; Standard lifts the credit cap, extends history to 2 years and adds Content Explorer.

Agency. Ahrefs Standard or Advanced for the suite, with Majestic Lite as a cheap second link index for vetting outreach prospects. The data pull above found domains each tool ranked differently in both directions, so a second index on a link-heavy process is a cheap backup.

Data or API work. Ahrefs API included from Lite, unit-based, 50 units minimum per request, 100 to 500 rows per request by plan. Majestic API starts at $399.99/mo for five seats. If you need link data and keyword or rank data from one API, Ahrefs is the one that offers both.

If you still can't decide, running both for a month is a defensible answer for a link-heavy team. The data pull showed the two indexes don't always rank close neighbors the same way, which matters when you're vetting an individual site.

Check either tool against Search Console before you pay

For your own site, Google's Search Console gives you a free sample of who links to you. Before paying a tool to find more, hold one or both tools' referring-domain lists against Search Console's.

Facts about Search Console's Links report that shape how you use it:

  • It's a sample. The help page says it isn't a comprehensive list.6
  • Sites are grouped by root domain (protocol, subdomains and subdirectories stripped).6
  • Tables cap at 1,000 rows.6
  • The landing-page export reaches up to 100,000 rows, either "latest links" (sorted by discovery date) or "more sample links" (a sample from Google's full set).
  • The report can include links that may have since been removed.6
  • It doesn't flag whether a link is nofollow.6

The check, in five steps:

  1. In Search Console, open Links and export Top linking sites.
  2. Export the same site's referring domains from your link tool. Ahrefs Free covers sites you verify (Site Explorer with 1,000 backlinks visible at once, Site Audit with 5,000 crawl credits a month). Majestic's free options are the Majestic Million list, the browser plugin after a reCaptcha, and a weekly showcase domain.
  3. Reduce both lists to root domains. Search Console already groups by root domain; a tool may list subdomains separately, so collapse them before comparing.
  4. In a sheet, mark which Search Console sites each tool found. With the tool's root domains in column A of a sheet named Tool, Google Sheets =IF(COUNTIF(Tool!A:A, A2)>0, "found", "missing") labels each Search Console row.
  5. Read the share found, then look at the misses. A high share means the tool sees most of what Google reports for you. Some misses can be links that are already gone, since Search Console keeps links that may have been removed.

What this tells you: coverage of the links Google reports for your own site, inside each tool. What this won't tell you: anything about link quality, or how the tools behave on sites you don't own.

New to pulling Search Console data past that 1,000-row cap? Our Google Search Console bulk export guide walks through both export routes and when each one fits.

What neither tool tells you

Both Majestic and Ahrefs tell you which links a site has. Neither tells you whether a new link, or a lost one, changed your clicks. Only Search Console has that part, and reading it week by week on a lot of pages is where most link-impact questions quietly die. Our SEO data analysis guide covers the full workflow for diagnosing a change in clicks.

That gap is what our tool, SEO Heatmap, handles. It's free for one Google Search Console property; Business covers 3 properties for $10/mo or $84/yr, and Agency goes unlimited for $25/mo or $180/yr. On the Pages heatmap, you can see each page's Search Console clicks grouped by week, month or quarter. Ran a link campaign? Lost a link? In the heatmap, pull up the target page, and the week the clicks jumped (or didn't) is right there in the grid.

Frequently asked questions

Neither is "more accurate" in any provable way. Both are web crawls, and both miss links. No public tool sees every link Google sees. Our 25-domain pull above showed the two agreeing on rough rank order (so big looks big in both), while the raw counts drift because each tool is counting something different.

Majestic's External Inbound Links aren't limited to one link per referring URL, so a page with five identical anchors to one target counts five times. Ahrefs counts a page as one link and rolls parameter URLs into the canonical. So the difference says more about how each tool counts than about what either one crawls. There's a cleaner way. Compare referring domains inside one tool at a time.

Is Trust Flow a Google ranking factor?

No. Trust Flow is a third-party score built from Majestic's own crawl, and Google doesn't use scores like it to rank pages. It's Majestic's measure of how close a site sits to a manually reviewed seed set of trusted sites. It's useful for comparing two Majestic numbers on two sites, not as a signal of what Google thinks.

Does Ahrefs have something like Trust Flow?

Not an equivalent. Two scores drive Ahrefs. Domain Rating is site-level, built on followed-link strength; URL Rating is page-level, PageRank-style. Both score on a 0 to 100 scale. Still, the inputs differ from Trust Flow, so DR 40 and TF 40 aren't the same thing. The scores section in the article breaks each one down.

Can I use Majestic for free?

Partly. Majestic publishes the Majestic Million (a daily CSV of the top million domains by referring subnets, no account needed), a free browser plugin for basic metrics after a reCaptcha, a weekly showcase domain in its Site Explorer, and a free Backlink Checker. Routine Site Explorer lookups sit behind a "verify to continue" check, and the free tier stays narrow, so expect to subscribe for regular link work.

Usually not, if backlinks are the whole job. For pure link work, Majestic Lite wins on price. Ahrefs' higher tiers mostly cover everything else the suite does. The price gap pays off when you also need keyword research, rank tracking, site audits or content research in one place. Same goes if a client reporting setup wants Ahrefs' Data Studio connectors.

Can Majestic handle keyword research?

Not in the Ahrefs sense. Majestic has Keyword Checker, N-grams Near Links and Search Explorer (on Pro), which pull keyword ideas from link profiles and index frequency, not a traditional search-volume database. The old Keyword Generator URL now redirects to N-grams Near Links. Need search volumes and difficulty scores at scale? Ahrefs or another suite tool is the fit.

What's the first thing to try before I pick one?

Try the free check from this article on your own site. Pull Top linking sites from Search Console, run the same domain through Ahrefs Free or Majestic's free tier, and see whose list lines up closer to Google's sample. Then let the work you actually do each week decide, not an index-size claim. Link-only workflow? Majestic Lite. Mixed SEO workflow? Ahrefs Lite or Standard.

Picked your link tool? The next question is whether the links you earn actually move clicks. SEO Heatmap shows each page's Search Console clicks week by week, free for one property, so you can line up a new link against the page it points to.

Sources (6)

SEO Heatmap Knowledge relies on primary sources: Google's documentation, web standards, peer-reviewed research, and vendors' own pages for their pricing and features. Our editorial standards

  1. Majestic. “Why Your Trust Flow Score May Change.”
  2. Ahrefs. “Introducing Backlinks 2.0.”
  3. Majestic. “Glossary: Link Building and Backlink Terms in SEO.”
  4. Ahrefs. “How Ahrefs Counts Links and Domains.”
  5. Majestic. “Plans and Pricing.”
  6. Google Search Console Help. “Links report.”
Alex Gorovenko

About the author

Alex Gorovenko

Founder of SEO Heatmap

Picking a link tool at renewal rarely turns on which index crawls more. It turns on who opens it Monday morning and what job they want done. I made SEO tool calls as a CMO for a 14-person team spread across content, paid, and web. The shortlist that holds up is built around the job on hand, not an index-size claim nobody acts on.