Ahrefs is one of the best SEO tools on the planet — and one of the most expensive. What most WordPress site owners don't know is that Ahrefs gives you a genuinely useful free tier for your own sites: connect your Google Search Console account and you unlock backlink and keyword data without paying a cent.
We walked through this live on a recent WP AI Success Hub call, analysing a member's real site — 880 backlinks from 72 referring domains, including spotting the spammy links worth ignoring. Here's how to set it up.
What you need first
- A free Ahrefs account (Ahrefs Webmaster Tools — AWT)
- Your site verified in Google Search Console (if you have WordPress + Yoast, you're probably already verified)
Connect Search Console to Ahrefs
Sign up at Ahrefs Webmaster Tools, choose Import from Google Search Console, and authorise your Google account. Ahrefs verifies you own the sites through GSC — no DNS records, no code snippets. Every property in your Search Console appears in Ahrefs a few minutes later.
What you get for free
- Backlink profile — who links to you, from which domains, with which anchor text
- Referring domains over time — is your link profile growing or shrinking?
- Keyword rankings — which queries you appear for and where
- Site audit — technical SEO issues crawled and ranked by severity
Don't panic about spam links
The first time you see your backlink list, you'll find junk — scraper sites, weird directories, links from domains you've never heard of. Almost every site has them. Google ignores most of this noise, and rushing to disavow links can do more harm than good. The useful move is to look at which real links you've earned and which pages earned them — that tells you what content is worth doing more of.
The catch (and it's fair)
The free tier only covers sites you own. For competitor research you need a paid plan — that's the trade. But for keeping an eye on your own link profile and rankings, the free connection is more than most WordPress site owners will ever need.
Want this set up on your site, live?
Inside the WP AI Success Hub we do this kind of thing on screen, on your actual site — twice-weekly live calls, a growing library of tutorials, and honest verdicts on which SEO tools are worth paying for (and which hyped "AI SEO" tools to avoid). Join for $27/month — founding member price, cancel anytime.