Ahrefs
Headquarters
SingaporeFounded
2010CEO / Founder
Dmytro GerasymenkoEmployees
201-500Funding
BootstrappedProducts
1 product listedAvg. AI Score
8.4/10Website
ahrefs.com/
Profile updated
About Ahrefs
Ahrefs was founded in 2010 by Dmytro Gerasymenko and is headquartered in Singapore. The company builds software for search engine optimization, providing tools that track backlinks, organic search rankings, and keyword data.
Its core products include Site Explorer, Keywords Explorer, Site Audit, and Rank Tracker, used by marketers, SEO professionals, and content teams to analyze websites and competitors. Ahrefs maintains its own web crawler and large index of backlink and search data, which underpins its analytics tools. The company also publishes SEO research and educational content through its blog and YouTube channel.
Ahrefs has grown without external venture funding, remaining privately held and bootstrapped since its founding. It has expanded internationally with offices beyond Singapore and built a large customer base among digital marketers and businesses of varying sizes.
Specialties
Financials
Dated, source-cited figures. Estimates are marked.
Products by Ahrefs
All products by Ahrefs reviewed by our AI panel of experts.
How Our Review Panel Scores Ahrefs
Six independent reviewer personalities assessed Ahrefs's product on their own terms. They landed within 0.5 points of each other, an unusually strong consensus.
Averaged across 1 reviewed product in our catalog. Scores are out of 10.
Competitive Landscape
Who Ahrefs competes with, and how they differ.
Broader all-in-one marketing suite covering SEO, PPC, content, and social media, whereas Ahrefs focuses more narrowly and deeply on backlink data and keyword research.
1 product reviewed on TopReviewedTargets small businesses and marketing generalists with a simpler interface and lower-priced plans, using its own Domain Authority metric versus Ahrefs' Domain Rating.
Positions as a budget-friendly alternative aimed at agencies and freelancers, offering white-label reporting at lower price points than Ahrefs.
Company Timeline
Key milestones in Ahrefs's history, with sources.
- Launch
Yep search engine beta launches
Ahrefs launches a beta version of Yep, a privacy-focused search engine that shares 90 percent of ad revenue with content creators, after investing $60 million of its own capital over three years of development.
searchengineland.com - Launch
Ahrefs Webmaster Tools launched
Ahrefs opens free access to parts of Site Audit and Site Explorer for verified website owners through a new free product, Ahrefs Webmaster Tools (AWT).
ahrefs.com - Milestone
Founder announces plan to build a search engine
Dmytro Gerasymenko publicly announces plans to build a web search engine to compete with Google, a project that later becomes Yep.
en.wikipedia.org - Launch
Keywords Explorer 3.0 released
Ahrefs relaunches Keywords Explorer on a new React, ReasonML and OCaml stack, adding keyword data from eight additional search engines beyond Google.
ahrefs.com - Launch
Site Audit tool launched after full rebuild
Ahrefs ships a completely rebuilt, cloud-based Site Audit crawler more than a year after retiring the earlier version, adding automated technical SEO issue detection to the toolset.
ahrefs.com - Launch
Keywords Explorer launches
Ahrefs releases Keywords Explorer, a keyword-research tool, expanding the product beyond backlink analysis into a broader SEO toolset.
ahrefs.com - Founded
Ahrefs founded by Dmitry Gerasimenko
Dmitry Gerasimenko builds a backlink-analysis crawler and launches it in Singapore as the first paid Ahrefs SEO product, self-funded with roughly $300,000 in personal savings.
startupgeek.com
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