How Ahrefs Site Audit Crawls: Credits, Crawl Rate and Where It Stops

Ahrefs Site Audit crawls your site from Ahrefs’ servers with the AhrefsSiteAudit bot and charges one crawl credit for each internal HTML page that returns 200 OK; redirects, errors, images, CSS, JavaScript files and external URLs are free. Lite includes 100,000 credits a month, Standard 500,000 and Advanced 1,500,000, and every verified project gets its first 5,000 credits a month free on any plan. A crawl stops at whichever limit you set first: maximum internal pages or maximum crawl duration.

Everything below was checked on 31 October 2026 on Ahrefs’ own pages: the pricing page, the help article on how Site Audit credits are spent, the help article on Site Audit settings, the AhrefsSiteAudit bot page and Ahrefs Webmaster Tools.

How many crawl credits does each Ahrefs plan include?

Plan	Monthly price	Crawl credits per month	Projects
Ahrefs Free (Webmaster Tools)	$0	5,000 per verified project	Unlimited verified sites
Starter	$29	Not listed	Not listed
Lite	$129	100,000	5 unverified, unlimited verified
Standard	$249	500,000	20 unverified, unlimited verified
Advanced	$449	1,500,000	50 unverified, unlimited verified
Enterprise	$1,499	Not listed	Not listed

Source: ahrefs.com/pricing and Ahrefs Webmaster Tools, checked on 31 October 2026. Ahrefs says paying annually saves “up to 17%” but doesn’t show annual prices on the page. Extra users are $40 a month on Lite, $60 on Standard and $80 on Advanced. Enterprise requires an annual commitment.

Which URLs use Ahrefs crawl credits?

From the help center: “Only internal HTML pages that return the 200 (OK) HTTP status code consume your monthly Crawl Credits as they’re crawled.”

URL type	Uses a credit?
Internal HTML page, 200 OK	Yes
Redirect (3xx)	No
Client or server error (4xx, 5xx)	No
Images, CSS, JavaScript files	No
External URLs	No

This is a fairer rule than counting every fetched URL. A site full of redirects and broken links costs the same as a clean one with the same number of real pages.

The free allowance stacks with your plan: “For each verified project, the first 5,000 crawl credits per month spent to crawl this project is free,” and the article says this applies on all plans. So a small site you’ve verified can be audited without touching your plan’s pool. A 3,000-page site you own costs nothing; a 3,000-page client site you haven’t verified costs 3,000 credits a crawl.

How do you stop a crawl from using all your credits?

Set Max number of internal pages in project settings. Ahrefs says this caps the credits a crawl can spend, though the number of URLs crawled can still be higher, since redirects, errors and resources aren’t capped.

The settings article describes two limits that work together: maximum internal pages and maximum crawl duration. “The crawler stops at whichever limit is hit first.” It also lists URLs the crawler excludes, including pages deeper than 16 levels from the seed and URLs longer than 2,048 characters.

How fast does Ahrefs Site Audit crawl?

Ahrefs publishes two very different numbers. The AhrefsSiteAudit bot page, written for site owners, says the bot is limited to “30 URLs per min max.” At that rate, 100,000 pages takes a little over 55 hours. The Site Audit product page, written for buyers, says “Up to 170k URLs crawled each minute” and “Increase the crawl speed.” Neither page explains when each figure applies. My reading is that 30 a minute is the polite default and the higher speeds need you to raise the setting, probably on a site you’ve verified, but Ahrefs doesn’t say so, so check the speed options in your own project before planning around either number.

The bot page adds a detail that matters on JavaScript sites: crawl-delay “cannot be followed when rendering JavaScript,” because rendering a page can trigger several asset requests at once.

Where does Ahrefs Site Audit start and stop?

Behavior	What Ahrefs documents
Seeds	Sitemaps listed in robots.txt, and URLs that have external backlinks in Ahrefs’ index
JavaScript	“Execute JavaScript” toggle in project settings, recommended for JS-heavy sites
robots.txt	Obeyed by default; only verified owners can let the bot ignore it or switch to the mobile user agent
User agent	AhrefsSiteAudit/6.1, desktop and mobile versions
Depth	Pages deeper than 16 levels from the seed are excluded
Limits	Max internal pages and max crawl duration; first one reached wins

Seeding from backlinks is a real advantage. Ahrefs can find pages that nothing on your site links to but other sites do, which a crawler that only follows your internal links will miss.

When is Ahrefs Site Audit the right tool, and when isn’t it?

It’s the right tool when you already pay for Ahrefs, your sites fit inside your monthly credits, and you value the backlink data next to the audit. The credit rule is generous, verified sites get a free allowance, and the reports are good.

It stops fitting when:

• you audit large unverified client sites and the credits run out mid-month,
• you can’t raise the crawl speed on a client site and need it audited today,
• you need raw crawl data to script against rather than reports in a browser, or
• the only part of Ahrefs you use is the audit.

For those cases a desktop crawler has no credits at all. bseoa runs on your machine, renders JavaScript with headless Chrome, lets you set concurrency and rate limits yourself, and stores every crawl in a local SQLite file. It’s $279 once with no page limit, and the 14-day trial has every feature. It has no backlink index, so it can’t seed from external links the way Ahrefs does; feed it your sitemap instead.

Further reading

See the full matrix on bseoa vs Ahrefs and every vendor’s price on SEO tool pricing. I’ve also written about why Ahrefs Site Audit is good and a dedicated crawler is better and the truth about Ahrefs vs Semrush site audits. If AhrefsSiteAudit is the bot you’re seeing in your logs, AhrefsBot and SemrushBot explains how to control it.

-Sethers