Ahrefs is a company in Singapore that sells search engine optimization (SEO) software. Its products include Site Explorer, Keywords Explorer, rank tracking and Site Audit. Its crawler, AhrefsBot, collects the web data that its tools use.
History of Ahrefs
Creator: Dmytro Gerasimenko, founder (per the Ahrefs media kit). Year: 2010.
Ahrefs is an SEO company. It is based in Singapore. Its legal name is Ahrefs Pte. Ltd. The copyright line on its website shows this. The media kit says the company was founded in 2010 by Dmytro Gerasimenko. The About page lists 149 teammates. It lists 27 locations. It says it helps people see and be seen on the web.
The Wikipedia article on Yep names Dmytro Gerasymenko as the founder of Ahrefs. The Ahrefs media kit spells the name Gerasimenko. In March 2019 he announced plans for a search engine. It would compete with Google. Search Engine Land reported this on 27 March 2019. Wikipedia cites that report.
Sridhar Ramaswamy's startup asked Ahrefs to use its search data. The data was for the Neeva search engine. He said he rejected the offer. He said Ahrefs planned to compete with Neeva through Yep.
Wikipedia says Ahrefs had invested US$40 million in Yep by August 2021. TechCrunch reported in June 2022 that the total reached US$60 million. In June 2022 it launched a beta version of its website.
The Ahrefs product list includes Site Explorer and Keywords Explorer. It includes the rank tracker, Site Audit, Content Explorer and Brand Radar. Brand Radar tracks brand visibility in large language models (LLMs). LLMs are artificial intelligence (AI) systems that generate text. The list groups the tools: search marketing, website performance and reporting.
Changelog and latest update
Yep is the sister search engine of Ahrefs. Wikipedia dates its announcement to March 2019. It dates the beta launch to June 2022. An image search and a news section came later. Yep promises to share 90% of its revenue with content creators.
The official robot page lists AhrefsBot. Its user agent is Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; AhrefsBot/7.0). It lists AhrefsSiteAudit with user agent version 6.1. The page says AhrefsBot obeys robots.txt and crawl delay. It says the crawler builds the database used by both Ahrefs and Yep.
The official product menu marks Bot Analytics with the label New. It lists Patches. Patches generates SEO fixes with AI for titles, meta descriptions, canonicals, redirects and alt text. The Patches page says it is part of the paid Max Project Boost add-on.
Latest update: Patches in Site Audit, 2024-12-04
The Ahrefs product roundup for November 2024 is dated December 4, 2024. It announces Patches. Patches are fixes that users create in Site Audit issue reports. A user can click "Patch it" for a title or meta description issue, enter new values and publish them. The feature is available with the Max project boost.
Usage examples
Ahrefs does not need code on your site. Site owners control its crawler with the robots.txt file at the root of the domain. The crawler identifies itself as AhrefsBot. The robot page says it obeys disallow rules and crawl delay. The three examples show a crawl delay rule, a full block and a log count of visits.
User-agent: AhrefsBot
Crawl-delay: 10
Disallow: /private/This robots.txt block asks AhrefsBot to wait ten seconds between requests. It also tells the crawler to skip the /private/ folder. The robot page says AhrefsBot obeys crawl delay and robots.txt. A delay reduces the load on a small server. The disallow line keeps the crawler out of the folder.
User-agent: AhrefsBot
Disallow: /This rule tells AhrefsBot not to fetch any page on the domain. The robot page says the crawler feeds the database for Ahrefs and Yep. With this rule, the crawler does not fetch the pages. So those pages do not reach that database through this crawler.
grep -c "AhrefsBot/7.0" access.log
grep "AhrefsBot/7.0" access.log \
| awk '{print $1}' | sort | uniq -cThe first command counts log lines with the AhrefsBot/7.0 user agent. The second lists each client address with its visit count. The client sets the user agent string. So a match shows the name the crawler declares. To confirm the source, compare the address with the IP lists on the Ahrefs robot page.
References
These sources are outside Websnoogie and were checked on 2026-10-12.
About Ahrefs
Ahrefs
The official About page of Ahrefs. It describes the company mission and the team, and it lists the headquarters in Singapore with 149 teammates and 27 locations. It also links to the product pages, the media kit and the careers page.
Ahrefs media kit
Ahrefs
The official media kit of Ahrefs, with the company logo and brand assets for press use. It gives a media contact for press inquiries. The logo file on this page is the source of the logo that the wiki uses for this term.
AhrefsBot
Ahrefs
The official page for the Ahrefs crawlers. It gives the user agent strings for AhrefsBot and AhrefsSiteAudit, the robots.txt token, the crawl delay behavior and the purpose of the crawler. It also explains how site owners verify the crawler by IP address.
Yep (search engine)
Wikipedia
The encyclopedia article on Yep, the search engine that Ahrefs launched. It names the founder of Ahrefs, gives the investment amounts from 2021 and 2022, and dates the beta launch to June 2022. Its citations include Search Engine Land and TechCrunch reports.
Generative engine optimization
Wikipedia
The encyclopedia article on generative engine optimization (GEO), the work of making content appear in AI-generated answers. The article lists Ahrefs and Semrush among the legacy SEO tools that marketers use for this work. It gives the context for the AI features of the Ahrefs product line.
Turn a crawl report into finished pages
You have to decide whether your site gets its problems fixed this month or next year. A crawl report from a backlink tool lists broken pages, slow pages and missing titles. Reading that list is the easy part. Someone still has to change each page, test it and keep the change working.
Websnoogie, LLC is not affiliated with Ahrefs and is not endorsed by it. We use crawl data as a checklist, then fix the pages ourselves. Local SEO with us costs $190 a month. That work covers titles, descriptions, headings and the broken links we find on your site.
Fixes you approve stay online, because our hosting keeps 99.999% uptime. A domain at $24.99 plus CMS hosting at $149 a year makes one bundle. You know that cost before the first page is changed.
Send us the crawl list you already have, and we will tell you which items matter for your customers. We sort those items by how much they cost your visitors, so the first fixes are the ones that matter most. Ring 402-813-4034 when you are ready, or open the $300 website below.
