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Same experience here. Since the num=100 removal in September, ahrefs and semrush position tracking has basically become a lagging indicator. Refreshing SERPs at scale got roughly 10x more expensive for them, so crawl frequency collapsed accordingly.
For our own sites I moved almost entirely to GSC for visibility (positions, impressions, CTR by query/page) and just accepted that third-party numbers are directional at best now.
Competitor benchmarking is the harder part. SimilarWeb gives a rough traffic shape but no keyword-level data. AccuRanker and Nightwatch hold up better than ahrefs on tracked sets because they actually bill per SERP fetch rather than scraping top-100 in bulk, but you have to pre-define the keyword universe and pay per check.
The era of cheap, broad third-party visibility scores is over. GSC for your own sites, dedicated rank trackers for the keywords you really care about, and ahrefs/semrush mostly for backlinks and historical context now.
