Ahrefs runs one of the most active web crawlers on the internet — its AhrefsBot crawls about 8 billion pages per day, making it the third most active crawler after Google and Bing. Dmitry Gerasimenko founded the company in 2010, and it’s remained privately held and bootstrapped, headquartered in Singapore.
The platform is best known for its backlink index, which is widely considered the most accurate in the SEO industry. Its Site Explorer tool lets you analyze any website’s backlink profile, organic keywords, and traffic estimates. SEO professionals rely on Ahrefs for link building campaigns, content gap analysis, and competitive research.
Ahrefs’ Content Explorer tool indexes over 14 billion web pages and lets you search for any topic to find the most shared and linked-to content. Keywords Explorer covers search data from 10 search engines including Google, YouTube, Amazon, Bing, and Baidu.
The company has been notably transparent about its business. It publicly shared that annual recurring revenue hit $100 million in 2022, all without a sales team or outbound marketing. Growth has come almost entirely through content marketing and word of mouth — the Ahrefs blog and YouTube channel are widely respected educational resources in the SEO world.
In a surprising move, Ahrefs announced Yep, its own search engine, in 2022. The idea was a 90/10 ad revenue split favoring content creators, though the project hasn’t gained significant traction. The company also released free webmaster tools and a WordPress SEO plugin, signaling ambitions beyond its core paid product.
