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Anyone finding ahrefs for seo visibility pointless now?
Posted by on May 14, 2026 at 2:11 pmIn the past, ahrefs has been my go to for understanding a websites general SEO visibility: Rankings, keywords, top pages etc. Especially when benchmarking against competitors or having a rough idea of how well your sites performing without tracking thousands of keywords.
Since Google removed the num=100 parameter in September. Using ahrefs for this data in 2026 is now useless. Whist ahrefs have tried to combat this among with every other sas SEO tool, they have now stopped crawling keywords as frequently, not by days or weeks but by months!
As an example, for one of our websites we have seen organic traffic decline in ahrefs since December 2025. When investigating the keywords lost/declined, 75% of them haven’t been recrawled since early February and account for over 60% of that lost traffic. That’s 3 months without a keyword recrawl.
Meaning ahrefs has no idea if our visibility has since improved after loosing those rankings.
I then started tracking all of those lost/declined keywords and found that quite a few with relatively high demand had returned or improved since the last crawled date.
If I can’t rely on this data for one of our own sites, how can I trust it for others when competitor benchmarking.
Is there any other tools that provide more reliable site visibility metrics post Googles keyword tracking update??
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1 Reply
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Google Analytics and Google Search Console. They’re the only true source of traffic data. Ahrefs is better for finding opportunities versus tracking rankings and traffic.
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If you’re ranking at #67 you might as well be ranking at 0. there’s no need to track out to 100 places.
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The delay with crawlers like Ahrefs is a known issue; they can’t re-index the entire web in real-time. We had the same frustration monitoring Reddit for keywords, so we built an alerter that taps directly into a streaming API instead of relying on periodic scans.
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Your framework is spot on; finding true pain signals is everything.
We hit this wall with keyword alerts being 99% noise, so we ended up building a simple NLP pipeline to score posts based on ‘pain-driven’ language vs. generic questions.
Its a dance…but its not impossible..Good luck
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Ahrefs can be wildly off. Especially in niche categories. We have keywords they report back as less than 10 searches monthly that have hundreds of hits/mo.
I wonder if Ahrefs shares your keyword data if you connect your GA and GSC? That’s the only way they can make it reliably accurate.
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Same frustration here. The crawl frequency issue has made Ahrefs visibility scores pretty unreliable for anything time-sensitive. GSC is the only source I fully trust now for actual ranking movement, even if the interface makes you want to throw your laptop.
Semrush has been slightly better on recrawl frequency in my experience but not dramatically so. For competitor benchmarking specifically, combining GSC data with manual spot checks on target keywords has been more reliable than leaning on any third party tool right now.
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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.
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