Free Ahrefs alternative

Ahrefs Webmaster Tools already gives Site Audit away for a website you have verified you own, so if the site is yours and you want all of it crawled, go and use that. EngineeringScore is for the other case: one URL, including a URL you do not control, read in a single pass for headers, cookies, page weight, SEO tags and accessibility. Smaller question, no account, no ownership check.

What we don't replace

The reason most people open Ahrefs at all: the backlink index, Keywords Explorer, Rank Tracker and Content Gap. Its Webmaster Tools page says Ahrefs Free covers three tools, Web Analytics, Site Audit and Site Explorer, and points at its Starter plan for extended access to Site Explorer, Site Audit, Keywords Explorer and more.
Crawling your site. The Ahrefs Site Audit page says Site Audit crawls all your website's pages and scans for over 170 technical and on-page SEO issues; we read the single page you give us and follow none of its links.
A health score you can watch over months. The Ahrefs Webmaster Tools page offers monitoring your website's Health Score over time, and its Site Audit page describes always-on audits crawling a website around the clock and comparing code or text changes between crawls. Nothing here remembers your last scan.
A configured crawl. The Ahrefs Site Audit page describes setting crawl speed and crawl depth, turning JavaScript rendering on, choosing a mobile user agent, segmenting a crawl by subdomain or subfolder, and crawling staging or credentialed sites. We read one page as an anonymous visitor, signed out, with nothing to configure.
Applying the fix for you. The Ahrefs Site Audit page describes Patches, which it says publishes SEO fixes to a website live, individually or in bulk, with no developers needed. We tell you what to change and the changing is yours.

What we replace

Checking a page you have not verified and may not own, if Ahrefs Webmaster Tools is the part of Ahrefs you are using. That product offers free website analytics, technical audit and SEO metrics for your verified websites, and its FAQ says analysing unverified, competing websites is what its subscription plans are for. We have not tested every free tool Ahrefs publishes, and some of them do accept a URL without verification, so this is a limit of Webmaster Tools rather than of Ahrefs as a whole. Paste any public URL here and it gets scanned.
Response headers, HTTPS and redirect behaviour, and the cookies the page actually set, read out of a real browser load rather than out of the source, together with page weight, on-page SEO tags and an accessibility run on the same URL.
A one-off look with no project to create and nothing left running. One URL in, one report out, in about a minute, with no site added to a dashboard and no crawl to come back to.

Where Ahrefs is stronger

Ahrefs gives the overlapping job away, and gives away more of it than we do. Its Webmaster Tools page lists Ahrefs Free as covering an unlimited number of verified websites with 5,000 Site Audit crawl credits per month per project. For a site you own, that is a genuine crawl at no cost, which is more than this scan is.
Ahrefs covers ground we do not attempt. Its Site Audit page groups over 170 issues under headings including Core Web Vitals, duplicates, indexability, localisation, links, redirects, images, JS, CSS, robots, sitemaps and structured data, and says structured data is checked against over 190 Google and Schema.org validation requirements.
Ahrefs measures what real visitors experienced. Its Site Audit page says the tool measures the CrUX and Lighthouse performance metrics of your pages; a single synthetic load from one machine, which is what we run, produces no field data, and it produces no Core Web Vitals of any kind either, because we do not measure them. Our own speed test page says both in as many words.
Ahrefs crawls faster and deeper than anything here. Its Site Audit page claims up to 170,000 URLs crawled each minute, says the crawler executes JavaScript, and describes a Page explorer and Link explorer exposing over 250 data points per page.
Ahrefs closes a loop we leave open. Its Site Audit page describes Patches for publishing fixes live and an IndexNow integration for getting updated content indexed sooner; we hand you a report and stop there.

Where we're stronger

Any public URL, with no account and no proof that you own it. That is the whole difference in scope: a page on a site you are evaluating, have inherited, or are arguing with is a page this scan will read.
Where a header only helps if its value is right, exactly two are read for the value and the rest are not, and this page is not the only place that says so. On a site served over HTTPS, HSTS has to clear a max-age of 15,552,000 seconds, so max-age=0 is not counted as HSTS enabled. Referrer-Policy is resolved the way a browser resolves it, walking a comma-separated fallback list and keeping the last token it recognises, then failing on unsafe-url. Content-Security-Policy is settled by which header name delivered it, enforced or report-only, with no verdict on the directives inside. X-Content-Type-Options and clickjacking protection pass on presence: any non-empty value clears them, and nosniff and DENY are never actually compared for.
Each finding is written to be acted on without opening a second tab: what the check looked at, what it found there, why that matters, and the change that resolves it, with a dedicated guide linked where one has been written.
The limits are published rather than buried. Each of our free tool pages has a section stating what that scan cannot see, and the speed one says in as many words that our load time is unthrottled and cold-cache, an ideal case rather than a slow connection.
- Learn more about load time →

Sources

Every claim about Ahrefs on this page was read on 2026-07-28 from Ahrefs's own public pages. Their product changes and this page does not change with it, so treat the date as the claim's expiry, not its publication.

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