Ahrefs vs. Google Trends

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Ahrefs
Score 9.0 out of 10
N/A
Ahrefs is an SEO tool providers. Ahrefs Site Explorer provides a suite of tools including a component for backlink & on-page SEO analysis, online brand mentions tracking, and domain comparison tool for competitor analysis, etc. They refer to themselves as “the largest index of live backlinks.”
$99
per month
Google Trends
Score 7.3 out of 10
N/A
Google Trends is a search engine optimization software solution offered by .N/A
Pricing
AhrefsGoogle Trends
Editions & Modules
Lite
$99.00
per month
Standard
$179.00
per month
Advanced
$399.00
per month
Agency
$999.00
per month
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
AhrefsGoogle Trends
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
YesNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
AhrefsGoogle Trends
Considered Both Products
Ahrefs
Chose Ahrefs
The User Interface and usability of the tool makes it very pleasant experience to use on a regular basis. Keyword research and topical clustering on the fly is really easy with SERP overviews and competitor keywords/traffic insights. SEMrush is a little less user friendly and …
Chose Ahrefs
Ahrefs is easier to use, their features deliver understandable and logical recommendations, and in my opinion and most importantly — they list parent topics, which is huge when designing/redesigning a website.
Chose Ahrefs
It's competitive with SEMRush, Moz and other tools of that same ilk. It's great for serious SEO work - not at the Enterprise level - but at the small business, small agency level. I would not consider it competitive with BrightEdge, Conductor, SEOClarity, etc. - but it IS …
Chose Ahrefs
We found the user interface of Ahrefs slightly better than the rest. Also, the details involved in the outputs we more informative. For example, once an audit is done, the steps that are involved in fixing that issue are well explained in Ahrefs. Also, I found Ahrefs backlink …
Chose Ahrefs
Screaming Frog is a handy tool when it comes to performing technical SEO audits and improving technical aspects of SEO. But Ahrefs on the contrary is a strategic SEO tool that can help you do holistic SEO. This includes features like performing keyword research, building links, …
Chose Ahrefs
In my experience, Ahrefs and SEMrush are both powerful tools for improving SEO and content marketing efforts. However, I chose to use Ahrefs over SEMrush for a few reasons. Firstly, Ahrefs has a stronger focus on backlink analysis and identifying potential link building …
Chose Ahrefs
In my organizaion we are also using Semrush, but prefer Ahrefs as Semrush sometimes doesn't show keywords where there are low search rates.
Chose Ahrefs
With the digital initiatives we have currently underway, both are really valuable so we keep them both. The digital ecosystem changes so rapidly that only relying on one SEO tool is, in my opinion, not a great idea, as each has its own strengths and weaknesses. And the cost is …
Chose Ahrefs
Ahrefs provides more accurate and important data compared to other services. It has become a very trusted service among the SEO community and collected tremendous amount of data over the years of operation. Ahrefs is designed to meet the needs of a very demanding SEO expert, …
Chose Ahrefs
Ahrefs is one of the best platforms available in the market dealing in developing online SEO tools and free educational material for marketing professionals. It has all the best features related to SEO and gives all the performance and analytics based on digital presence.
Chose Ahrefs
Ahrefs is the most comprehensive tool we've used for providing SEO and performance analysis for our website clients. It's an essential part of our analytics stack, along with Google products. It doesn't require downloading and installing software, and it's more robust and user …
Chose Ahrefs
Ahrefs is more flexible for a large organization and overall has more features than competitors packed within a single tool. Other tools just don't have as much ability as the Ahrefs tool does. We also found the UI to be overall better on Ahrefs and easier to understand than …
Chose Ahrefs
Ahrefs has the best backlink data even compared to funded competitors. On top of that, their analysis and tutorials make it possible to get value easily. Monitoring your website, your competitors, and finding SEO opportunities is very easy and there are some sophisticated …
Chose Ahrefs
Ahrefs is my clear choice when I need to better understand the link profile of my clients' websites as its database is unmatched. However, when it comes to keyword research, it is second only to SEMrush. I wouldn't say that it's worse than SEMrush as each is focused on …
Chose Ahrefs
I used to use Moz a lot and it is also a great tool. However, I found the Ahrefs UI was much friendlier and easier to navigate. I also like the specific use cases shown in the Ahrefs blog, which are much easier to follow and implement when using the Ahrefs tool itself. This …
Chose Ahrefs
Ahrefs provides a lot more data, in a lot more detail - and tells you exactly why it matters.
Moz is a nice tool - the UI is easier to navigate and there are more prompts for new users - but anyone doing serious work will do better with Ahrefs.
Chose Ahrefs
Sadly we are coming [to] terms that even trough there are more and more options that Ahrefs has they are still incomplete or not working good enough. And the most important options (like frequent updates on rankings) are behind the most expensive membership.

Right now we mainly …
Chose Ahrefs
Semrush and BuzzSumo are also good tools. Semrush is hardcore and technical; if you outgrew Ahrefs as an SEO practitioner and were doing intense work for one big client, I'd highly recommend it. BuzzSumo is more for a social media manager; it provides huge shortcuts for …
Chose Ahrefs
Ahrefs has more features and more accurate data than its competitors. While both Moz and Majestic are great tools and can be used as complimentary to Ahrefs, if you have to choose one tool, definitely choose Ahrefs. It has the biggest database of links and better stats for …
Chose Ahrefs
Ahrefs Site Explorer gives us an easier way of obtaining backlinks when we're doing link building, whereas with other products I have a more difficult time finding viable backlinks. The keyword list you can export from Ahrefs is also a lot more clear than in other products …
Chose Ahrefs
The closest competitor to Ahrefs Site Explorer would likely be SEMRush. Ahrefs seems to have a significantly larger amount of data to work with. They claim that their service is powered by the second most active crawler in the world, next to Google.
Google Trends
Chose Google Trends
Overall I think that Ahrefs is a better product when it comes to really drilling down and getting all the data that you need in order to understand a given behavior or problem. Ahrefs is much more powerful in its feature set but does not have the same level of overall …
Chose Google Trends
They are both great tools. I prefer Google Trends because of the location capabilities and being able to go hyper-local. It does not however provide the details on cost and competition like SEM Rush does.
Chose Google Trends
Google Trends is probably the easier of the many other Google platforms to identify keywords. I haven't used other keyword platforms because I don't trust them—I rather use a tool directly from Google to evaluate popular keywords. That being said, Google Trends is very limited …
Chose Google Trends
I like using Google Trends because it gives you a clear visual of seasonal trends and compares multiple queries at once. However, I do prefer using other systems like SEMRush and Ahrefs because they are more detailed in the information they give you regarding your website and …
Chose Google Trends
It's not really an either/or thing — I use the complete "Google Marketing Stack" including Analytics, Trends, Keyword Planner, Search Console, etc. It's also essential to integrate some of their data, like making sure Google Search Console and Google Analytics are connected — …
Chose Google Trends
Google Trends provides insights that are only available through Google, however, it does not include other important trends such as those on social media or via their competitors.
Chose Google Trends
Google Trends is great used alongside a tool like MozPro. It complements the quantitive data found in the Moz Keyword Research Tool.
Chose Google Trends
I've used SEMrush, while more of a SEO Manager than keyword trend analyzer, it does have that option as it does relate to SEO management, but between the two, its nice to have the option in SEMrush, but Google Trends is better at doing the trend analyzing than SEMrush is.
Chose Google Trends
One of the most obvious reasons why I chose Google trends over other keyword research platforms is because it's free. At the same time, it also has the most relevant and easy-to-use features out of the bunch. Google Trends does not have as many features as SEMRush or BuzzSumo, …
Chose Google Trends
We used multiple platforms. Google Trends is just one of them! It's important to have multiple tools to check and reference back and forth. Google Trends is totally free for everybody so why not give it a try.
Chose Google Trends
I haven’t used any tools quite like Google Trends.
Chose Google Trends
Other Google products I have used would be Adwords. I would use this along with that program since they do entirely different things.
Chose Google Trends
Google Trends tends to be slightly more accurate than the other products, because Google has access to more user data for the algorithm to take into consideration when providing trends and information. We like this tool because it also aligns better with the Google tools we use …
Chose Google Trends
We use Google Search Console and Moz mostly for our website improvement, and Google Trends we use mostly to look for trends: what people are searching for now. Google Trends is free and has very clean, simple and understandable user interface, it gives lots of usable data for …
Chose Google Trends
We haven't tried anything apart from Google Trends.
Chose Google Trends
Google AdSense is much more detailed, but requires the user to be logged in and have an active Google Adsense account, sometimes it's quicker to just use Google trends.
Chose Google Trends
Google Trends has the biggest source of data and is the most accurate. It cannot be used without any other tool because of its own limits (keyword suggestion, semantical analysis, etc.).
Chose Google Trends
Google Trends is sometimes a helpful supplement to other analytics and advertising tools, but it is not very useful as a standalone analysis tool. We have seen much more benefit from the intelligence and audience information built in to our other core tools. Better predictive …
Chose Google Trends
Google Trends and Open Web Analytics are both similar and different. While both products allow a user to track the popularity of a given webpage or search term, Google Trends is more effective in providing content and suggesting trends. Furthermore, I liked the ability to use …
Chose Google Trends
Google Trends is a great place to start in the content curation, content research, blog post writing, and resource page creation process. It is not, however, a place to do serious SEO optimization. Tools like Moz, or Analytics SEO would be a better place to go after you do …
Chose Google Trends
They're different tools and thus have overlap, but still do quite different jobs. So there really is no exact comparison, in free to use tools, to Google Trends out there. If it could generate periodic reports it would be even better.

Other tools can be quite complimentary to …
Features
AhrefsGoogle Trends
SEO
Comparison of SEO features of Product A and Product B
Ahrefs
7.8
Ratings
1% above category average
Google Trends
8.4
Ratings
8% above category average
Keyword analysis9.50 Ratings10.00 Ratings
Backlink management8.50 Ratings4.60 Ratings
SERP ranking tracking9.40 Ratings10.00 Ratings
Page grader5.20 Ratings10.00 Ratings
Competitive analysis9.40 Ratings9.00 Ratings
Site audit / diagnostics7.90 Ratings7.00 Ratings
Site recommendations5.50 Ratings10.00 Ratings
Task management7.00 Ratings6.20 Ratings
SEO Channels
Comparison of SEO Channels features of Product A and Product B
Ahrefs
7.5
Ratings
1% below category average
Google Trends
10.0
Ratings
27% above category average
Local SEO8.30 Ratings10.00 Ratings
Social SEO6.10 Ratings10.00 Ratings
Mobile SEO6.10 Ratings10.00 Ratings
Global SEO9.60 Ratings10.00 Ratings
SEO Platform & Account Management
Comparison of SEO Platform & Account Management features of Product A and Product B
Ahrefs
8.9
Ratings
5% above category average
Google Trends
3.7
Ratings
78% below category average
Multi-domain support9.40 Ratings5.80 Ratings
Integration with web analytics tools8.40 Ratings1.60 Ratings
Best Alternatives
AhrefsGoogle Trends
Small Businesses
Nozzle
Nozzle
Score 10.0 out of 10
Nozzle
Nozzle
Score 10.0 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Advanced Web Ranking
Advanced Web Ranking
Score 8.2 out of 10
Advanced Web Ranking
Advanced Web Ranking
Score 8.2 out of 10
Enterprises
Dupli Checker (DupliChecker.com)
Dupli Checker (DupliChecker.com)
Score 8.5 out of 10
Dupli Checker (DupliChecker.com)
Dupli Checker (DupliChecker.com)
Score 8.5 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
AhrefsGoogle Trends
Likelihood to Recommend
9.7
(0 ratings)
10.0
(0 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
10.0
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Usability
9.2
(0 ratings)
8.0
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
8.8
(0 ratings)
6.4
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
AhrefsGoogle Trends
Likelihood to Recommend
It gives the best report to us which helps us to find the opportunity to build backlinks. Another main feature that makes Ahrefs a safe and sound approach to SEO is that it provides information about duplicate content, URLs, redirects along with other errors that can be dangerous to the website.
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Google Trends is appropriate in so many scenarios, but I definitely suggest it for content ideas and inspiration. Many people utilize it after already writing their content to add in popular phrases or words, but that is not enough. The platform should be used prior and during the content creation process so that you can use the data to see what your audience/customers are interested in at the moment and create the content based on their interests. It can help, but I find it much less appropriate to use it after your article, eBook, etc. is already written. Maximize on this useful tool by ensuring the topic you're writing about is relevant in the first place before simply adding in popular keywords. An article that's written based on what's trending will be far more successful than an article that solely has popular phrases added to it.
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Pros
  • Their backlink database is still one of the most up to date we've seen when compared to similar tools.
  • The user interface is very intuitive and easy to learn.
  • They provide you with a lot of great information and the ability to set a date range can really help you narrow things down.
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  • Allows you to search keywords and phrases in certain locations to see search volumes, this is huge and helps us be successful with our Google Ad campaigns.
  • Shows us insights into trending topics which allows us to stay in the know and apply any relevant trends to current clients.
  • Year in Search and Trending Topics provides us great inspiration for our ads
  • Being able to search in certain locations gives us a ton of help when setting up campaigns and doing our keyword research for clients.
  • Being able to compare multiple keywords or search terms side by side is extremely helpful.
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Cons
  • Ahrefs Site Explorer provides an overview of domain health and the issues that can be fixed, and sometimes the suggested "critical issues" can be an astronomical number and not accurate.
  • For certain features on Ahrefs Site Explorer, there can a more elaborate description/guide on how to utilize the feature.
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  • Top charts: would be nice to include top charts for the current month.
  • Explainers: would be good to have some information buttons next to graphics and charts to show in depth what criteria go into making those charts.
  • More images: would be interesting to see trending image searches.
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Likelihood to Renew
Their index is too vast to ignore when looking at a complete backlink profile. We find links in Ahrefs that do not appear in any other link detection tool. For this reason, it's a must for our agency to use for the foreseeable future. Plus, it's very affordable considering the data you get
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No answers on this topic
Usability
Ahrefs is very easy to use - you can jump right in and understand most of the assets. Overall, the dashboard snapshots give a very good picture of inbound link activity. For deeper analysis of historical trends, the system can become cumbersome, making it hard to do full work without exporting and reformatting the data.
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Google Trends is very easy to use. you just search for a certain keyword or phrase, and it tells you how often that keyword or phrase is searched, where in the world it is searched, and over the last decade, how often it is per year.
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Support Rating
Ahrefs has always been responsive when there's been a technical issue with the site. There are usually very little problems, but if there are, they announce it on their social media accounts which keeps its customers informed. Email support is prompt and the customer service people are very helpful, knowledgable and friendly.
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I haven't needed to use any support for Google Trends. However, I've used Google's support in general and it's a hit or miss. Usually, there's a long wait or they don't understand my problem. They are the only ones that can help, so sometimes I feel stuck. They prioritize paying customers for sure.
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Alternatives Considered
It's competitive with Semrush, Moz and other tools of that same ilk. It's great for serious SEO work - not at the Enterprise level - but at the small business, small agency level. I would not consider it competitive with BrightEdge, Conductor, SEOClarity, etc. - but it IS competitive and on par with the tools that are one level below those big enterprise tools.
Read full review
I've used SEMRush, while more of a SEO Manager than keyword trend analyzer, it does have that option as it does relate to SEO management, but between the two, its nice to have the option in SEMRush, but Google Trends is better at doing the trend analyzing than SEMRush is.
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Return on Investment
  • Ahrefs has helped save hours of work because it functions as an all-in-one SEO tool. Before Ahrefs, I would have to switch toolsets multiple times, compile the reports, then organize data. Ahrefs as an all in one helped managed the chaos that having too many tools create.
  • Backlink data is crucial to predicting content success. Ahrefs has provided us with better backlink data, allowing our predictions to be more accurate.
  • Ahrefs has helped us cut away from having another rank tracker subscription. Their rank tracking tool is good enough to not warrant a dedicated rank tracker, helping us save on costs.
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  • I can't really give a measurement of how Google Trends has directly contributed.
  • Since Google Trends is free I would have to say that it is all positive ROI.
  • I can say that Google Trends definitely makes it easier to accomplish my business objectives of delivering the most relevant and insightful advice to my clients regarding their SEO, Social Media Publishing, and Online Advertising.
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ScreenShots

Ahrefs Screenshots

Screenshot of Analyze backlinks and keywords of any website to find opportunities for your organic traffic growthScreenshot of Check your website for 100+ pre-defined SEO issuesScreenshot of Get relevant keyword ideas supported by accurate SEO metricsScreenshot of Find the most shared and linked-to content on any topicScreenshot of Track your and your competitors' search rankings