Can you do competitor research in ahrefs or just your own site?

Product Analyst

Competitor research is one of the primary use cases Ahrefs is built for, and in many ways it's more powerful for understanding what competitors are doing than for analyzing your own site, because the external view of competitor data is harder to get from free tools. The main workspace for competitor research is Site Explorer. You can enter any competitor's domain and immediately see their estimated organic traffic over time, which gives you a historical view of whether their SEO is growing, declining, or flat. The Organic Keywords report shows every keyword Ahrefs can detect the competitor ranking for, along with their ranking position, the estimated monthly search volume for each keyword, and the estimated traffic that keyword contributes. This is useful for two different analytical purposes: identifying keywords they rank for that you don't, which represents content opportunities, and understanding which keywords are driving the majority of their organic traffic, which tells you where their SEO strategy is concentrated. The Top Pages report within Site Explorer is particularly useful for content strategy. It shows which specific pages on a competitor's site receive the most estimated organic traffic and which keywords each of those pages ranks for. When you're building out a content calendar or deciding where to invest content production resources, understanding which types of content are generating actual traffic for competitors in your space is more actionable than keyword research conducted in isolation. Backlink analysis for competitors is a core function. The Backlinks report for any domain shows every site linking to it, which allows you to identify link sources you might pursue for your own domain. If a competitor has acquired links from ten industry publications you haven't approached, that's a prospecting list. If they've built links from a resource that links to multiple sites in your category, that's a pattern worth investigating. The Referring Domains report gives you a view at the domain level rather than the individual URL level, which is cleaner for identifying patterns. Content Gap analysis is a feature specifically built for competitive keyword research. You enter your domain and one or more competitor domains, and the tool shows you keywords your competitors rank for that you don't — filtered by their ranking position, search volume, and difficulty. This surfaces the most actionable content opportunities without requiring manual comparison across multiple reports. SERP analysis for any keyword shows which competitors currently own the ranking positions and how entrenched they are — their domain authority, the number of backlinks their ranking page has, the page's age, and estimated traffic. This helps you assess whether a keyword is realistically attainable given your site's current authority and content depth. The one practical note: Ahrefs's data is based on its own crawler and clickstream data modeling, and its traffic estimates are approximations rather than exact figures. The directional accuracy is good enough for strategic decisions, but treating the specific traffic numbers as precise measurements leads to overconfidence in the estimates. Trend direction and relative comparisons between pages are more reliable signals than the absolute numbers.