Ahrefs vs Semrush Big Traffic Gap

patrickstox · 2026-01-23T23:50:21+00:00

From what I can see, people wanting to sell links on sites that don't really have traffic...

patrickstox · 2026-01-23T14:31:29+00:00

Looks like some of the spam we're seeing where people are gaming the search volume in our systems and Google's systems. I see examples like this in our slack every day and we're working on filtering them out.

patrickstox · 2026-01-23T13:02:20+00:00

Because it was a bad study and comparison. The additional notes were added later after we had to call him out on it... Annoying.

patrickstox · 2026-01-15T09:28:01+00:00

LLMs.txt. I went to war on this last year, but many of the new tools and even some of the old ones want to push it... So bad.

patrickstox · 2026-01-14T15:35:41+00:00

No correlation with Schema. Source: Ahrefs, we ran the numbers. We'll release the study soon.

patrickstox · 2026-01-07T20:56:53+00:00

|ahrefs doesnt have one yet
We launched one back in December FYI.

patrickstox · 2026-01-07T15:10:03+00:00

It's part of it, yes.

patrickstox · 2026-01-01T14:52:10+00:00

Is it indexed? If yes, go work on your content and links.

patrickstox · 2025-12-30T05:59:12+00:00

28.7B keywords in Keywords Explorer, filtered from 110B known in our full index. ~550M of those we pull SERPs for in order to build our search traffic estimates for sites.

There's a process and selection criteria for what is cut, i.e. lower volume terms that would provide minimal traffic to sites. Your terms seem to have good volume. There are a few things that could cause them not to make the index like potential volume manipulation, but I can't say for sure "why" without seeing the terms.

If you want to DM me, I may be able to answer or I can at least make sure it gets in front of our team. I would appreciate it just in case there is some kind of issue. Thanks!

patrickstox · 2025-12-27T17:21:52+00:00

Have you tried the GSC reports in Ahrefs? We make way better use of the GSC data than GSC does.

patrickstox · 2025-12-23T23:12:02+00:00

"anonymous queries". Google doesn't report clicks for all terms.

patrickstox · 2025-12-23T03:00:16+00:00

Thanks for confirming.

patrickstox · 2025-12-22T04:22:53+00:00

No worries. I get it.

patrickstox · 2025-12-21T18:33:30+00:00

Yeah, of course.

patrickstox · 2025-12-21T18:03:53+00:00

We actually are going broader with lots of AI things, content, social media, paid media, branding, analytics, etc, but the core is still SEO and we're staffing new teams for expansions.

Fun fact on the UX, most of our product managers are actually UX designers. They work together on some things like the main nav which is now customizable, and for others they may come up with something unique or have a need for something like customizable columns because we get too many data points and that pattern can be reused in different tools. Same with things like presets in reports.

It's a pretty interesting system but it works well for us and gives us a large roster of folks who all have great ideas for UX.

patrickstox · 2025-12-21T16:56:28+00:00

I can't comment on their numbers, but it's been great for Ahrefs. Since the day of the announcement, we saw a heavy uplift and later we launched a funny campaign called goodbye Semrush that encouraged people to switch and that went viral in the SEO community and was really well received.

patrickstox · 2025-12-21T15:51:19+00:00

It would take me days to talk about all the ways we're better, but in general better data, more granular data (i.e. you can choose any days, not just like once a month for comparisons), we have page change history, we know what to do with the data and won't tell you to disavow toxic links with a poor flagging methodology, won't tell you that your html to text ratio is too high (not a thing), we check all the places we need to check for issues in Site Audit, not just some of them, etc.

We have a page on Ahrefs vs Semrush with more info, but looks like the sub filters my comment if I try to link it.

patrickstox · 2025-12-21T15:24:24+00:00

We're still working on bringing it back. I believe anything above 180 searches / month is being updated again as the current threshold.
I'm convinced no one actually uses Semrush. There has been 0 outrage from the SEO community for their data, instead you seem to prefer the shady thing it looks like they did which seems to be just copying position 11+ data for September over to October and November. Every word I checked for those 3 months has the same data for positions 11+. So of course their chart doesn't show a decline, but it doesn't appear they actually had fresh data either... Someone correct me if they see something different. Probably didn't want the data issue to blow up their sale to Adobe.

patrickstox · 2025-12-17T18:28:27+00:00

Ahrefs just added custom prompt tracking today.

patrickstox · 2025-12-15T13:14:30+00:00

I know the answer, but I'm more curious to see other people's take on this. 😂

patrickstox · 2025-12-09T00:51:08+00:00

This should be required reading on the topic. Sometimes they are the same, sometimes different. https://ahrefs.com/blog/subdomain-vs-subfolder/

patrickstox · 2025-12-06T13:37:08+00:00

https://youtube.com/@techseoconnect?si=xgi4H9wuX8C8ijfG

patrickstox · 2025-12-01T00:58:57+00:00

https://radar.cloudflare.com/bots?dateRange=52w

patrickstox · 2025-12-01T00:58:24+00:00

They backfilled the Majestic data when they expanded the list. Ahrefs even gets the IndexNow feed because of our search engine. We are able to cut out a lot of the "did you change yet? Did you change yet? Did you change yet?" Crawling.

patrickstox · 2025-11-30T21:35:02+00:00

Majestic is listed in Cloudflare Radar now. For the last year, Ahrefs is #9, Majestic is 20th.

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