---
title: "How Ahrefs Site Audit Crawls: Credits, Speed and Limits"
description: "How Ahrefs Site Audit spends crawl credits, which URLs are free, credits per plan, the 5,000 free credits per verified project, crawl speed and stop limits."
image: "https://www.blackseoanalyzer.com/static/images/black-seo-analyzer-og-image.png"
canonical: "https://www.blackseoanalyzer.com/en/blog/how-ahrefs-site-audit-crawls"
language: "en"
---

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

By [Seth Black](https://www.blackseoanalyzer.com/en/about) · Published November 01, 2026

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](https://ahrefs.com/pricing), the help article on [how Site Audit credits are spent](https://help.ahrefs.com/en/articles/3119402-how-are-site-audit-credits-spent), the help article on [Site Audit settings](https://help.ahrefs.com/en/articles/9082329-how-should-i-configure-my-site-audit-settings), the [AhrefsSiteAudit bot page](https://ahrefs.com/robot/site-audit) and [Ahrefs Webmaster Tools](https://ahrefs.com/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](https://ahrefs.com/pricing) and [Ahrefs Webmaster Tools](https://ahrefs.com/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](https://help.ahrefs.com/en/articles/3119402-how-are-site-audit-credits-spent): “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](https://help.ahrefs.com/en/articles/9082329-how-should-i-configure-my-site-audit-settings) 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](https://ahrefs.com/robot/site-audit), 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](https://ahrefs.com/site-audit), 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](https://www.blackseoanalyzer.com/en/free-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](https://www.blackseoanalyzer.com/en/vs/ahrefs) and every vendor’s price on [SEO tool pricing](https://www.blackseoanalyzer.com/en/seo-tools-pricing). I’ve also written about [why Ahrefs Site Audit is good and a dedicated crawler is better](https://www.blackseoanalyzer.com/en/blog/ahrefs-site-audit-is-good-a-dedicated-crawler-is-better) and [the truth about Ahrefs vs Semrush site audits](https://www.blackseoanalyzer.com/en/blog/ahrefs-vs-semrush-site-audit-truth). If AhrefsSiteAudit is the bot you’re seeing in your logs, [AhrefsBot and SemrushBot](https://www.blackseoanalyzer.com/en/blog/ahrefsbot-and-semrushbot) explains how to control it.

-Sethers

About the author

[Seth Black](https://www.blackseoanalyzer.com/en/about)

Seth is a software engineer and engineering leader who builds bseoa, a Rust-based technical SEO crawler with a GUI and CLI. He writes about the crawling, rendering and indexing problems he runs into on real sites.

[LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/seth-black-tx/) · [GitHub](https://github.com/sethblack) · [YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/@SethBlack)

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I use AI to generate images for my posts and for general editing, updates, and ironically SEO purposes. I used to draw all of the images for my personal blog (taleas) myself, but as the volume of content I produce has increased, I've turned to AI tools to help create visuals that complement my writing. I go out of my way to generate images that look strange, and don't represent real people. If you ever want to chat about my use of AI, please reach out.

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