# Ahrefs Webmaster Tools (free) + SEOFix: a $0–9 technical SEO stack for a site you own > Ahrefs Webmaster Tools (now Ahrefs Free) and Search Console cost $0. What each covers, where SEOFix adds fixes and verification, and a weekly routine. Source: https://seofix.ai/blog/ahrefs-webmaster-tools-free-seo-stack Published: 2026-10-28 Updated: 2026-11-02 Author: SEOFix Team Category: Guides Tags: Technical SEO, Guides Length: 1,811 words, 8 min read For a site you own, Ahrefs Webmaster Tools (renamed **Ahrefs Free**) and Google Search Console together cost nothing and cover most of what a small site needs. Ahrefs Free gives you your backlinks, the keywords you rank for and a site audit of 5,000 crawl credits per verified site per month. Search Console tells you what Google actually indexed and which pages get clicks. What neither does is turn the audit into a code change and check it afterwards. SEOFix adds that, for $0 (one free 500-page audit) or $9 a month (weekly audits of up to 10,000 pages). This post goes through what each tool covers, where they overlap, and the weekly routine we run. **Disclosure:** SEOFix is our product. Ahrefs and Google details are from their own pages, checked on 8 October 2026. We use Ahrefs ourselves, and nothing here is a reason to stop. ## What Ahrefs Free includes Ahrefs' [Webmaster Tools page](https://ahrefs.com/webmaster-tools) now says "Ahrefs Webmaster Tools is now Ahrefs Free". For verified websites it includes: - **Site Audit**: checks for "170+ technical and on-page SEO issues", with **5,000 crawl credits per verified project per month**. - **Site Explorer** for your own site: your backlinks and the keywords you rank for, with up to 1,000 rows of each visible at once. - **Web Analytics**: a cookieless analytics script, up to 1 million events per project. - **Unlimited verified websites** per account. The credits go further than the number suggests. Ahrefs' help center says ["only internal HTML pages that return the 200 (OK) HTTP status code"](https://help.ahrefs.com/en/articles/3119402-how-are-site-audit-credits-spent) use credits. Redirects, 4xx and 5xx responses, images, CSS and external URLs are free. A site with 4,000 live pages and a pile of redirects fits in one monthly crawl. A 2,000-page site gets two full crawls a month. ### Verifying your site Ahrefs [accepts four methods](https://help.ahrefs.com/en/articles/3275938-verifying-ownership-of-your-project-or-website): Google Search Console (recommended), a DNS record, an HTML file, or an HTML tag. Two practical notes from the same page: - With Search Console, the project must match the property's form: "if you added www.example.com in GSC and example.com in Ahrefs, you'll get an error." - DNS verification "can sometimes take up to 48 hours", and the proof has to stay in place: "Before each new crawl, we check if ownership is still valid." ### Where it stops The limits are about size: - **5,000 credits a month per project.** A site with 20,000 live pages can't be fully crawled on the free tier. Paid Ahrefs plans raise this: Lite has 100,000 credits a month and caps a project at 25,000 pages ([Ahrefs pricing](https://ahrefs.com/pricing)). - **1,000 rows at a time** in Site Explorer for backlinks and keywords. Fine for a small site, tight for one with a big link profile. - **Verified sites only.** Ahrefs Free shows data for sites you've verified. Research on other sites is what the paid plans are for. ## What Search Console covers Search Console is the only tool here with Google's own data, and nothing replaces it: - **Performance**: clicks, impressions, CTR and position per page and query. Google says collected data "should be available in 2-3 days" ([About Search Console data](https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/96568)). - **Page indexing**: which pages Google indexed and, for the rest, why not: "URL marked 'noindex'", "Crawled - currently not indexed", "Duplicate, Google chose different canonical than user" and others ([Page indexing report](https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/7440203)). - **URL Inspection**: Google's last crawl of a URL, its chosen canonical, and a live test. - **Links**: a sample of external and internal links. Google says it "isn't a comprehensive list of every link", tables stop at 1,000 rows and exports go up to 100,000 rows ([Links report](https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/9049606)). Ahrefs Free's backlink data is the better view of who links to you. Search Console's is the one Google uses. - **Validate fix**: Google's confirmation that it has recrawled and stopped seeing an issue. It ["typically takes up to about two weeks"](https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/9216203). ## What the two free tools don't do Between them, Ahrefs Free and Search Console tell you what's wrong. Getting it fixed is still your job: 1. **Find the code.** An audit lists 1,800 URLs with a title over 60 characters. They usually come from one template, such as the one rendering `/jobs/[slug]`, and someone has to work out which file that is. 2. **Make the change.** Edit the template, deploy. 3. **Check the live pages.** Recrawl the affected URLs, not the whole site, to make sure the deploy fixed every one of them, before you ask Google to validate. 4. **See if it mattered.** Compare clicks on those pages before and after. Ahrefs' paid plans and Search Console help with parts of this. SEOFix is built around the whole loop, and around handing steps 1 and 2 to a coding agent. ## Where SEOFix fits From our help center, with links to the details: - **Issues grouped by template.** Every issue gets a URL template from its path (`/jobs/senior-accountant-dubai` → `/jobs/[slug]`), and a fix task is one check code on one template ([fixing by template](https://seofix.ai/help/fixing-by-template)). Tasks are ranked by severity × pages × a Search Console traffic factor, and the top three are shown first. - **Agent fixes.** Each task comes with a fix prompt to paste into Claude Code, Codex or Cursor ([fix prompts](https://seofix.ai/help/fix-prompts)), and the MCP server has 37 tools, so an agent can list tasks, fix the template and verify ([connect your agent](https://seofix.ai/help/connect-your-agent)). - **Verify fix.** After the deploy, SEOFix refetches up to 200 of the task's affected URLs and reruns the checks, usually in seconds, at 1 credit per URL ([Verify fix](https://seofix.ai/help/verify-fix)). Site-wide checks (sitemaps, links, orphan pages) wait for the next full audit. - **Traffic from fixes.** When a task passes Verify fix, SEOFix records the affected pages' Search Console clicks and measures them again at 7, 14 and 28 days. - **Search Console in the audit.** With Search Console connected, SEOFix flags things like noindexed pages that still get impressions (`NOINDEX_RECEIVES_TRAFFIC`) and sorts pages Google doesn't index by URL pattern. What SEOFix doesn't have: backlinks, keyword data, Google rich-result validation or SERP titles. On our own 37,000-page site, Ahrefs Site Audit reported 2 rich-results errors and 19 pages whose title in Google differs from the page title. SEOFix can't see either. That's one reason to keep the Ahrefs audit running. ### What it costs | | SEOFix Free | SEOFix Starter, 10k tier | | --- | --- | --- | | Price | $0 | $9 a month ($90 a year) | | Audits | One free audit, up to 500 pages | 10,000 credits a month (1 per page, 0.2 for an unchanged page) | | Pages per audit | 500 | 10,000 | | Sites | 1 | 1 | | Scheduled weekly audits and email alerts | No | Yes | | Search Console sync | Weekly | Daily | | Verify fix | Needs a verified site and credits | Yes | From [plans and credits](https://seofix.ai/help/plans-and-credits). Unused credits stay in your balance. On Free, a 5,000-credit pack costs $9 once, if you'd rather pay for a few audits than subscribe. The arithmetic for a weekly audit: a 2,000-page site uses about 8,700 credits a month at full price (2,000 × 52 ÷ 12). Pages that answer `304 Not Modified` on repeat audits cost 0.2 credit, so a server sending `ETag` or `Last-Modified` leaves more room for rechecks. Above roughly 2,300 pages audited weekly, the 50k tier ($19) is the next step. ## Who does what | Job | Ahrefs Free | Search Console | SEOFix | | --- | --- | --- | --- | | Backlinks to your site | Yes (1,000 rows at a time) | A sample | No | | Keywords you rank for | Yes (1,000 rows at a time) | Yes (queries, with clicks) | No | | Site audit | 5,000 credits/month per site | No | 500 pages free; 10,000/month on Starter | | What Google indexed, and why not | Not listed | Yes | Uses Search Console's data | | Issues grouped by URL template | Not listed | No | Yes | | Agent fix prompts and MCP | Not listed | No | Yes | | Recheck affected URLs after a deploy | Not listed | Validate fix (up to ~2 weeks) | Verify fix (seconds) | | Clicks before and after a fix | Not listed | Manually, by date range | Automatic at 7, 14, 28 days | "Not listed" means the feature isn't on Ahrefs' description of the free tier. We haven't compared this list with paid Ahrefs plans, so don't read it as one. ## A weekly routine for a site you own About 30 minutes a week, and most of it is the fix itself. **Monday (SEOFix runs its weekly audit overnight):** 1. Read the alert email, if there is one. SEOFix sends it when the audit finds new errors or the health score drops 5 points or more ([monitoring and alerts](https://seofix.ai/help/monitoring-and-alerts)). 2. Take the first task in the Top 3. Give its fix prompt to your agent, or open the template yourself. Review the diff and deploy. 3. Run Verify fix. If it says `still_failing`, look at which URLs fail. It's usually a second template or a cached page. **Same session, in Search Console:** 1. Page indexing: look for new reasons or jumps in a reason's count since last week. If you fixed something Google reports, start **Validate fix** now that the pages pass. 2. Performance, last 7 days compared with the previous 7: any page that lost most of its clicks deserves a URL Inspection. **First Monday of the month, in Ahrefs Free:** 1. Run the Site Audit crawl and skim the errors SEOFix doesn't check (structured data validation, for one). 2. Look at your backlinks in Site Explorer. A backlink that points to a URL on your site that now returns 404 is worth a 301 redirect to the closest live page. **Every four weeks:** 1. Read the Traffic from fixes card. A fix with "no data" means Search Console had nothing for those pages, not that it failed. ## When this stack stops fitting - **The site outgrows the free crawl.** Past 5,000 live pages, Ahrefs Free can't audit the whole site in a month, and past about 2,300 pages SEOFix's $9 tier can't do it weekly. The next steps are SEOFix's 50k tier ($19, 12,500 pages per audit) or a paid Ahrefs plan. - **You need research on other sites.** Competitor backlinks and keyword research are paid Ahrefs (Lite is $129 a month), or another suite. - **You manage clients' sites.** SEOFix Starter is one site; Growth is 30. Ahrefs Free allows unlimited verified sites, as long as each one is verified. ## FAQ **Is Ahrefs Webmaster Tools still free?** Yes, under the name Ahrefs Free. You need to verify each site you add. **Do I need SEOFix if I have Ahrefs Free and Search Console?** Not to find issues. It's for the next part: one task per template, an agent that applies the fix, and a recheck that confirms it before you wait two weeks on Google. **Can I verify with Search Console in both tools?** Yes. Ahrefs and SEOFix both accept a Search Console property as proof of ownership, so one Google connection covers both. --- Start with the free 500-page audit at [seofix.ai](https://seofix.ai/), and connect Search Console so the Top 3 is ranked by your real traffic.