A 0-100 DR from referring-domain count, plus raw counts
Is the formula explainable to a CFO?
Closed recipe
Closed recipe
One public line of maths
How does API use get billed?
Units inside a subscription, from $129/month for 200,000 units, at least 50 units per request
Plans and API allowances; confirm on their site
Prepaid credit, $0.0001 per credit, no subscription
Cost of scoring 500 domains
Depends on units per row
Depends on plan
1 credit for up to 2,000 domains with bulk_dr
Keyword and rank data
Yes, the fuller suite
No, link-focused
No. Link data only
Freshness
Fast crawl
Fresh and historic indexes
Roughly monthly refresh
Reading the table without picking a winner
Ahrefs vs Majestic is never settled once. It depends on what the tile has to say, and on who reads it, so start there. See also the Majestic alternative recipes. If the answer is keywords and rankings, Ahrefs or Semrush wins and this page is not for you.
If the tile is purely about links, the question changes. Do you need a metric your SEO lead trusts for its own sake, or do you need a number that is cheap to pull and easy to defend in a meeting? The first favours the established indexes. The second favours something with a public formula, since you can show the working on a slide.
The honest weakness of our option is cadence. It is slow. Our link graph refreshes about once a month, so a competitor's big placement last Tuesday will not appear on Wednesday. Ahrefs crawls faster, and Majestic is known for its Trust Flow and Citation Flow metrics, which we do not copy.
One column, one vendor
Never put Ahrefs DR, Majestic Trust Flow and our DR in a single chart series. Each is a different recipe over a different crawl. Switching vendor midway creates a fake jump that somebody will blame on the team.
A cost line you can paste into the budget
Take a hypothetical team that tracks 60 domains: its own, 25 rivals and 34 partners. This is an example, not a customer.
A monthly bulk_dr call covers all 60. One credit, which is $0.0001, and the snapshot setup shows the schedule. Add a refdomains pull for ten key rivals at two credits per call and the month still rounds to a fraction of a cent. The $100 starting credit, 1,000,000 credits, outlasts any reasonable planning horizon.
Compare that with a subscription where a single 200,000-unit allowance at 50 units a request tops out at 4,000 requests. For a few reporting pulls you may not use it. For a product that calls link data on every page view, the maths flips quickly, and you should model it before you commit either way.
Our read
Keep the suite for research, tap the API for the dashboard
Many teams keep one big suite for the SEO lead and wire a cheap link-count source into the shared tile. That split keeps the expensive tool where the analysis happens and the cheap one where the numbers repeat.
Need keywords or rank tracking: Ahrefs or Semrush
Need Trust Flow itself: Majestic
Need a cheap, explainable link tile: RankWiser
Questions the table does not settle
Who owns the refresh? Whoever opens the tool each month. If that person is an SEO lead who leaves, the tile dies, so a scripted pull beats a person with a login. Write the owner's name next to the tile.
How will you handle a vendor change? Freeze the old column, start a new one, and note the switch date on the chart. A silent switch between Ahrefs DR and another score looks like a sudden gain or collapse, and finance will ask about it in the next review.
What happens in Google update months? Core updates, such as the one rolled out in March 2024, shift rankings but not link graphs. A link metric stays still while traffic jumps, which is useful: it keeps your tile separate from the noise.