Enable PageSpeed Insights
When setting up a new crawl or within the project settings for an existing crawl, you can now enable PageSpeed Insights to get page speed data for your pages.
You’ll need to get a free API key from Google and then enter the code in the box.
Click the “Get a Key” button and follow the steps.
You’ll receive your own API key which you will need to copy and enter into your project settings under the CWV section.
We’ll verify the key you enter and if everything looks good you should see a notice with a green check mark that says Valid:
or we’ll show an Invalid error and a link to Retry if there’s a problem:
Save your settings and you’ll get PageSpeed Insights data the next time you run a crawl. Changing the settings while a site audit crawl is already running will not get you the data.
Note that the data you get will depend on whether you have selected the desktop or mobile version for the crawler. If you want mobile PageSpeed Insights data, make sure to select the Mobile AhrefsSiteAudit User Agent.
Where to find the metrics
In Site Audit, you’ll want to go to Page explorer and click “Manage columns.”
Select the metrics you want to see and click Apply. If you click the box for “PageSpeed Insights” it will select all the metrics.
This will add the selected columns to Page explorer for you to view or export. We retrieve some fields related to Lighthouse (lab data) and others for Core Web Vitals (field data). The full list includes:
PSI API status
CrUX CLS
CrUX CLS category
CrUX FID (ms)
CrUX FID category
CrUX LCP (sec)
CrUX LCP category
CrUX INP (ms)
CrUX INP category
CrUX CLS distribution
CrUX FID distribution
CrUX LCP distribution
CrUX INP distribution
Lighthouse Performance score
Lighthouse CLS
Lighthouse TBT (ms)
Lighthouse LCP (sec)
PSI API error message
Lighthouse CLS error message
Lighthouse TBT error message
Lighthouse LCP error message
Lighthouse mobile issue
Lighthouse mobile issue details
You can hover over any of the metrics to show tooltips with more details and also refer to our article on CWV for more information.
Some data may be missing from the reports. There are a few reasons for this including:
An error with the API request. Check the “PSI API status” and “PSI API error message” columns to see the reasons.
PageSpeed Insights data may not be available for all pages. Less popular pages may have no data or only partial data in CrUX (Chrome User Experience Report) which is the source of PageSpeed Insights data and comes from users of Chrome who opted to share data.
To see which pages have this data, as well as visually see the speed performance across all your pages, you can use the charts in the Site Audit Performance report:
About the API quotas
Because we’re pulling data from the connected PageSpeed Insights API, your account is subject to a couple of limits put in place by Google. At the time of writing these are the current limits put in place:
You can use the PageSpeed Insights API dashboard to monitor your usage.
Ahrefs will stay within the default queries per minute limit, but on larger sites you may exceed the queries per day limit. If this happens, you have a couple options.
You can schedule smaller crawls on different days to get the data you need.
If you are exceeding your quota, you can request higher limits.