A cheaper alternative to Ahrefs for checking on rivals

If you keep an eye on competitors, you probably open an SEO tool for the same few questions: who started linking to them, what new searches they rank for, and where they beat you. A cheaper alternative to Ahrefs for that habit is one that charges per check instead of per month. This comparison sets seogeoaeo.ai against Ahrefs on cost per rival check, and is honest about what you lose.

Prices were taken from both vendors' pages in October 2026.

The monthly rival check, priced two ways

Picture a common routine: once a month, you look at three competitors. For each one you want their strongest backlinks, their top Google keywords and the keywords they have that you do not.

On seogeoaeo.ai, each of those is one tool run:

The Indie plan is $29 a month for 2,000 credits, so this routine uses under a third of it. The rest can go on checks of your own site, such as a home page check at 67 credits. If a run fails, the credits are returned.

On Ahrefs, the same routine needs a plan that shows a useful slice of a competitor's data. Starter, at $29, caps reports on unverified sites at 250 rows, shows only 25 rows in Top pages, and has no exports. Lite, at $129 a month, lifts that to 2,500 rows and gives 1,000 credits per user. Each report you open costs a credit, and each filter, date change or mode switch costs another.

So the realistic comparison for this routine is $29 against $129 a month.

What each lookup shows

seogeoaeo.ai's Backlink Finder returns the 100 strongest sites linking to a domain, a spam score and strength rating for each, and the 50 link texts they use. Domain Overview, at 50 credits, gives a quick estimate of a rival's keyword count, organic visits and the number of sites linking in. Keyword Gap covers searches the rival ranks for on Google's first two pages where your site does not rank at all.

Ahrefs, with its own index, shows far more rows, plus history: 6 months on Lite, 2 years on Standard.

Side by side

Finding the rivals in the first place

Sometimes the hard part is knowing who to watch. seogeoaeo.ai's Competitor Finder, at 38 credits, lists the sites that rank in Google for the same keywords as yours and splits them into close competitors and large general sites by how much their traffic overlaps. Run it once a quarter, and the list of domains for your monthly check stays current. It covers search competitors only, not businesses you compete with offline or through ads.

What the cheaper route cannot do

This matters for anyone whose real goal is to notice change.

• No history. seogeoaeo.ai keeps your saved runs, but it does not chart how a rival's link profile moved over time. You compare this month's run with last month's yourself.
• No rank tracking. It will not track your positions or a competitor's day by day.
• Top slice only. 100 linking sites is the head of a big site's profile, not all of it.
• Credits reset. Unused monthly credits do not roll over, though top-ups bought on top of a plan never expire.

If you need to know the week a competitor's links jumped, or track positions daily, Ahrefs is the better tool and worth the higher price.

A sensible setup

1. Connect your own site to Ahrefs Free, the free tier formerly called Ahrefs Webmaster Tools, for your links and a Site Audit.
2. Add Google Search Console for real queries.
3. Use seogeoaeo.ai's per-run competitor tools for the monthly rival check.
4. Save each month's results so you can compare them by hand.

That covers most of what a light Ahrefs user does, for about a quarter of the Lite price.