What's happened to ahrefs?

It's literally broken since the num=100 was removed.

I get that they can't update with the same frequency, but..

I'm noticing on my sites that the page 2-10's are just disappearing since mid september when the change happened.

And I'm thinking, but how? Are the keywords just not ranking in the top 100 now..

So I exported some and put them manually in keyword.com

They're all there. Ranging from page 2 to page 9.

Is anyone else seeing this craziness on ahrefs? Surely after a month they would have fixed this instead of just showing sites as tanking.

Yes it's quite inaccurate.

And not just them, I see multiple tools still affected.

I think the problem with the Serp API continues.

yea not sure whats going on but have been notcing this too

Ahrefs hasn't been working properly half the time since I've started it using ages ago. There's always something broken there. And paying 4K EUR a year for this is really not making me too happy.

when your rank tracker freaks out worse than your actual rankings, you know something is off

Yeah, I noticed the same thing. When I checked our client sites manually, the keywords were clearly sitting on page 2 or even early page 3. But in Ahrefs, they’re shown as having completely dropped out of the top 100, and the data appears to be inaccurate now.

Hopefully, they fix this soon because right now, it’s giving a totally wrong picture of site performance.

sounds like they broke their own tool trying to save money on api calls

Nargil said:

Ahrefs hasn't been working properly half the time since I've started it using ages ago. There's always something broken there. And paying 4K EUR a year for this is really not making me too happy.

Click to expand...

Yeah it's really unacceptable for an enterprise level tool with enterprise pricing.

There's no reason at all this should be broken after a month.

Their margins shouldn't be that tight for scraping the serps.

An absolute worst case temporary fix would be :-

page 6-10 = once per month query
page 2-5 = 3x less frequent than before
page 1 = as normal

I'm using their AI citations plan, and that's at least pretty good. It matches up with what I see in my analytics and gives great insight into how to get traffic from the LLMs.

splishsplash said:

It's literally broken since the num=100 was removed.

I get that they can't update with the same frequency, but..

I'm noticing on my sites that the page 2-10's are just disappearing since mid september when the change happened.

And I'm thinking, but how? Are the keywords just not ranking in the top 100 now..

So I exported some and put them manually in keyword.com

They're all there. Ranging from page 2 to page 9.

Is anyone else seeing this craziness on ahrefs? Surely after a month they would have fixed this instead of just showing sites as tanking.

Click to expand...

Did you talk to their support?

kalpana007 said:

Did you talk to their support?

Click to expand...

I wouldn't waste my time.

They have no access to upper management's decisions/motives, and even if they did, they would just give the political answer to keep people happy/subscribed.

I stopped using Ahrefs about 2 years ago, but I remember that even then they weren't that reliable.

roydan said:

I stopped using Ahrefs about 2 years ago, but I remember that even then they weren't that reliable.

Click to expand...

Are you using semrush?

splishsplash said:

I wouldn't waste my time.

They have no access to upper management's decisions/motives, and even if they did, they would just give the political answer to keep people happy/subscribed.

Click to expand...

They are not concerned about bugs on their platform? And bug like this which impacts almost any user?

splishsplash said:

Are you using semrush?

Click to expand...

Yeah, but my use case is more toward keyword research.

Are only the keywords affected, or is there also an issue with other areas like organic traffic? We really rely on Ahrefs, so I hope they fix it soon.

roydan said:

Yeah, but my use case is more toward keyword research.

Click to expand...

I cancelled my semrush a while ago as I wasn't really using it, but with ahrefs issues I'm thinking about returning.

Do they have good AI visibility features?

For example, in ahrefs you can see this



Then if we click on chatgpt





You can filter by country and other things, and actually see the AI responses and citations.

The only thing I'm currently trying to work out is how and when llms like chatgpt search the web.

If you actually ask it or select web search they always do, but for me, for normal questions I get no citations.

I need to dig more into that, but if they reach a point where almost every question has citations, then that could change everything when it comes to AI traffic. (oh god, change everything. Even my brain is taking out the hype lingo)

If I was running OpenAI I know the exact strategy that could kill Google though. They are COMPLETELY MISSING THE BOAT with it. I don't want to say in public though as it's something I'm working on in one of my companies.

Guestwriting said:

Are only the keywords affected, or is there also an issue with other areas like organic traffic? We really rely on Ahrefs, so I hope they fix it soon.

Click to expand...

Well, both to an extent.

Most of the traffic figures come from page 1, but page 2 can influence quite a lot. page 3-10, not really.

Depends on the site, but missing page 2's can impact the traffic figures.

I never paid much attention to those anyway. I'm more interested in top 3's, page 1's, page 2's page 3-5 and 6-10 as groups.

splishsplash said:

Do they have good AI visibility features?

Click to expand...

It's an upsell that I didn't buy. I use another tool for that.

Honestly they introduced tons of upsells lately and it pisses me off. Local position maps, AI, etc.. super annoying.

Yeah, it's a mess. Ahrefs basically stopped looking past the first page or two of Google, so if you're not in that top tier, it now shows you as not ranking at all, even though you're still sitting there on page 5. It makes everyone's traffic look like it's tanking overnight, which is beyond frustrating.

roydan said:

It's an upsell that I didn't buy. I use another tool for that.

Honestly they introduced tons of upsells lately and it pisses me off. Local position maps, AI, etc.. super annoying.

Click to expand...

Ah nice. What's the tool?

If you want, let's compare a few sites and see how ahrefs AI visibility compares to the one you're using to see which is better.

Yeah, they are money-grabbing these days. That's fine if your quality is top-tier, but you can't money-grab and have all these issues.

Play ON said:

Yeah, it's a mess. Ahrefs basically stopped looking past the first page or two of Google, so if you're not in that top tier, it now shows you as not ranking at all, even though you're still sitting there on page 5. It makes everyone's traffic look like it's tanking overnight, which is beyond frustrating.

Click to expand...

Yeah it's silly.

The top 100 is needed to track overall progress.