A Majestic alternative you can call from a cron job
Three recipes for pulling competitor link data into a sheet, a warehouse or a dashboard, each with its cost in credits and its known gaps.
RankWiser research team ·
When a Majestic alternative makes sense
Picture the case. You open Majestic only to copy two numbers into a deck. Then a majestic alternative with a plain JSON endpoint saves the login and the copy-paste. It does not save you from a metric change.
Check one thing before you move. If a report quotes Trust Flow or Citation Flow by name, those are Majestic's own metrics and you will not find them here. Our DR comes from the count of referring domains in our own link index, and that is a different animal.
Teams who only need counts, anchors and a 0-100 score can switch. Pain is low. Compare Ahrefs and Majestic first if you are unsure. Run both sources in parallel for one month, keep the old column frozen, and start a new column labelled with the new source.
Recipe 1: score a competitor list
1
Put domains in a file
One bare domain per line, no https. Up to 2,000 rows.
2
Call bulk_dr
Join the lines with commas and POST them. Cost: 1 credit, whatever the row count.
3
Read the JSON
Every response carries ok. Authenticated ones also carry _credits, with the cost and your remaining balance.
4
Append with a date
Add a column for the pull date. Do not overwrite last month.
Request for recipe 1
bash
curl -s -X POST "https://rankwiser.app/api.php?action=bulk_dr&key=sk_live_..." \
-d "domains=$(paste -sd, rivals.txt)"
Recipe 2: who links to a rival and not to us
The intersect action costs 2 credits and takes 2 to 10 domains. Pair it with refdomains on your own site and subtract.
Our data refreshes about once a month. If you need a link seen within days of appearing, this is the wrong source, and no recipe fixes that. For that case, stay with the vendor that crawls daily.
Running both for a month
Do not cut over in one night. Pull both sources on the same day, write them into two columns and look at the rank order of your rivals. Absolute values will differ. Order often agrees.
If the order flips for two or three rivals, stop. Find out why before you decide. A site with many links from few domains looks strong on a raw link count and modest on a referring-domain score, which is how our DR is built. That difference is not a bug in either source.
When you are satisfied, freeze the old column with a note and a date. Then link the new column to the monthly snapshot setup so that it refreshes without anyone's login.
What to write in the migration note
Keep it short and dated. State the old source, the new source, the first pull date, and the reason. Add the formula for the new score so that a newcomer can reproduce it.
Also list what the new source does not cover: no Trust Flow, no Citation Flow, a monthly refresh. Readers forgive limits they were told about. They remember limits they discovered. Compare costs again with the Moz pricing table once the migration settles.