Authority checker
Look up any domain's authority from our own link index, on a free account.
Read moreThe deciding question
Start with the one question that settles it.
Open your tool and look at what you did in it last month. If most of that time was spent on backlink reports, link prospecting, disavow work or analysing somebody else's link profile, stop reading: MrKeyword cannot do any of it, and a cheaper tool that does not do your job is not a saving.
If instead most of that time was spent checking rankings, looking up search volumes, running site audits and pulling numbers for a report, then you have been paying for a web-scale link crawl to do work that never touches it. That is the case this page is about.
The honest core
What an Ahrefs alternative can and cannot replace.
Three jobs a link-led suite is commonly used for, and what MrKeyword actually offers in their place.
Rank tracking → your own reported positions
Instead of checking live search results for your keywords, MrKeyword reads the impression-weighted average position Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools report for your verified property, and stores a daily copy. It is a measurement of what real searchers saw, across every device and location they searched from. It is not a live look at page one, and the product says so on every screen that shows a position.
Keyword volumes → Google Keyword Planner, live
Monthly demand is fetched live from the official Google Ads Keyword Planner API every time you search. Where Google gives a range, you get the range. Keyword difficulty is MrKeyword's own model and is labelled an estimate everywhere it appears — including where it declines to give a number at all.
Site audit → our own crawler, 60 checks
MrKeyword's crawler walks your site at no more than two requests a second, obeys
robots.txt, identifies itself asMrKeywordBot/1.0, and scores the site out of 100 with the formula printed next to it. Findings are grouped by how many pages each affects, and programmatic templates get their own thin and near-duplicate report.
What we do have on links
An authority score that shows its working.
MrKeyword computes MrKeyword Link Authority: a damped PageRank across followed, cross-domain links in its own index plus the open Common Crawl web graph, log-scaled 0–100 against the strongest domain seen. Link farms are down-weighted. It is a Derived metric, it carries a confidence level and an as-of date, and a domain we have not seen linked shows “No data” instead of a made-up number. It is comparable in spirit to DR or Moz DA and is not the same metric.
- Free to check on any domain, on a free account with no card
- Referring domains and backlinks from pages we actually crawled
- “No data” where we have not seen the links, never a guess
What a link tool cannot do
Operate from inside your editor.
MrKeyword runs an MCP server with 24 tools, so Claude Code, the Claude desktop app or Cursor can read a workspace and answer questions from your real data. For developers and AI power users this is the actual reason to switch: the SEO data stops living in a browser tab and starts being something you can ask about where you already work.
- 19 read tools and 5 that change things, opt-in
- Four ready-made prompts, including a weekly review
- 120 calls a minute per token, included on every plan
- A token reads one workspace and nothing else
With your AI assistant · Example
Which keywords dropped this week, and by how much?
Tools usedget_rank_summaryget_rankingsCost
The price difference, and why it exists.
MrKeyword is Free forever, $1 a month for Basic, or $5 a month per website for Pro AI. We are not going to print what Ahrefs costs — check their pricing page — but the reason for the gap is structural rather than clever: maintaining a web-scale link index is a large ongoing cost, and MrKeyword does not carry it.
What you pay for here is a small amount of API usage and crawling on your own sites. That is why the free plan can be genuinely free and permanent rather than a two-week sampler, and why an agency with ten client sites pays ten times $5 instead of buying a tier sized for somebody else.
Scope
What this does not do
The list of things this page is not claiming.
- No backlink index. Said once at the top and again here, because it is the whole decision.
- No competitor link, traffic or keyword analysis. MrKeyword reads properties you have verified.
- No SERP scraping. Positions are provider averages for a period, which is a different measurement from a live rank check.
- We do not quote Ahrefs' prices, limits or metrics. Check their own site; ours would be out of date the week we wrote it.
- Ahrefs is a trademark of its owner, used here to describe the comparison. No affiliation is implied.
Questions from Ahrefs users
Does MrKeyword have a backlink index?
No. This is the first thing to know and the reason most of this page exists. MrKeyword does not crawl the web to build a link graph of every site. It reports links its own crawler and the open web graph have actually seen, and shows “No data” rather than an invented score for anything it has not.
So what is the point for an Ahrefs user?
If your weekly work is links, none — keep Ahrefs. If your weekly work is rank tracking, keyword volumes and technical audits, and links are a quarterly check, you are paying a link-index price for a workflow that does not need one.
What about Domain Rating?
MrKeyword computes its own authority score, called MrKeyword Link Authority, from a damped PageRank over its own index plus the open Common Crawl web graph. It is comparable in spirit to DR or Moz DA and is not the same metric — the product says that wherever the score appears. You can try it on any domain with the free domain authority checker on a free account.
Can I check a competitor's backlinks?
Not usefully, and we would rather say so than sell a thin index as a full one. Competitor link analysis is exactly the job a dedicated link tool exists for.
What does MrKeyword do better?
Three things honestly: it uses your own Search Console and Bing data rather than modelled estimates, it exposes 24 MCP tools so your AI assistant can read the workspace directly, and it costs $0 to $5 a month per website. Whether that is “better” depends entirely on which job you are doing.
Is there a free version?
Yes, and it does not expire. Free covers 1 website, 25 tracked keywords, 100 audit pages and 10 keyword lookups a month, with no credit card.
Read next
Check it for yourself.
Check one domain, free.
The authority checker runs on the Free plan, which never expires and needs no card.
Get started free No credit card required.