How to Automate Ahrefs

Ahrefs is where an SEO team looks at the web from the outside

Ahrefs runs its own crawler across the web. Its homepage promises to make a business discoverable in search and in AI answers, and Site Explorer is where that starts: it shows any domain's backlinks, the keywords it ranks for and an estimate of its search traffic, so an SEO team opens it on competitors as often as on the team's own site. Keywords Explorer and Rank Tracker sit alongside it, and Brand Radar tracks how often a brand appears in AI answers such as ChatGPT's and Google's AI Overviews.

The people in it most are the SEO lead, the link builder, the content editor and the agency account manager with a project open for every client. Site owners who only need their own data can use Ahrefs Free, which started life as Ahrefs Webmaster Tools and covers Site Explorer, Site Audit and Web Analytics for sites they verify.

A lost backlink means opening the page that dropped it

When Alerts reports a lost backlink from a trade publication, the link builder opens the linking page to see whether the article was rewritten or taken down, then finds the editor's address, writes a short email and logs the attempt in the link tracker. The same person reads each web mention the alert catches, looking for the ones that name the brand without linking to it.

After a Site Audit crawl, the SEO lead exports the new issues and turns them into developer tickets, one per type of fix, with the affected URLs pasted into each.

When Rank Tracker shows a fall, the lead checks Search Console, the page itself and the competitor now above it, each in its own tab. An agency also copies each client's numbers out of Site Explorer into that client's report when the month closes.

Letaido's connectors mark where Ahrefs' own automation stops

Alerts notify the team when a site gains or loses backlinks, when the web mentions a brand, and when Ahrefs sees a notable change in a keyword's position. Site Audit checks a site for more than 170 issues and exports them with fixing instructions. On a project with the paid Max Project Boost it also crawls continuously, sends email alerts on critical changes and lets Patches publish fixes straight to the live pages. Every plan from Lite upwards includes API and MCP access.

Letaido, Ahrefs' AI marketing platform, runs agents on Ahrefs data and connects to more than 35 marketing tools, among them Notion, Slack, HubSpot and WordPress. A team whose tools are all on that list should look there first.

Ahrefs' automation runs on its own data or through a connector. A client's reporting portal, a ticket board with no Letaido connector and a site owner's contact form are outside it, and the steps that happen there fall to a person with the login.

Every lost link can come with the linking page already checked

Six clients' lost links could reach the link builder already checked on the linking pages, with who edits each site and a short email to that editor waiting in the link builder's drafts folder.

Site Audit issues found over the weekend could be tickets on the developer's own board by Monday, grouped by fix, with the affected URLs and Ahrefs' fixing instructions attached. Pages on the site that return a 404 but still have backlinks pointing at them get a ticket naming the redirect each one needs.

When Site Explorer shows a competitor ranking for new keywords, the content lead could read a morning brief on the pages behind them. Editors could see internal links suggested for each new post, from older pages that already rank for its keywords.

Each client's report or portal would already hold that client's figures when the month closes, copied out of Site Explorer, where the account manager reads them today.

Outreach stays in the link builder's drafts folder until they send it

Ahrefs reports the lost link, and everything after that happens on other people's websites. WebRun is an AI agent that works a real Chrome browser, signed in as you. Inside Ahrefs it reads Alerts and Site Explorer within your plan's limits; outside it, it opens each linking page to find the contact and files the audit tickets on the developer's board.

Outreach emails sit in the link builder's drafts folder until the link builder sends them. Patches and the project settings in Ahrefs stay with your team, and a CMS change waits for the editor who owns the page.