When you log into your Ahrefs account, you can see your Dashboard with the overview metrics of your projects. These metrics along with the corresponding graphs are pulled from different tools within Ahrefs to give you an overall idea of your projects' performance. Here, you will see data from Site Audit, Keywords Explorer and Rank Tracker:
Numbers in black show the current state of the metrics (like the number of backlinks for a target according to the last update).
Numbers in red and green (deltas) by default represent a 30-day change in the metrics. You can switch between the date ranges by clicking on the Trends button.
Let’s dig deeper into each of the metrics metrics to see what each of them mean exactly.
Health Score
Data source: Site Audit
Update frequency: the last crawl depending on your project’s crawl settings.
Clicking on this metric will open up the most recent Site Audit crawl for this project.
From top to bottom:
Health Score - shows the overall health score of the target. Health Score reflects the proportion of internal URLs on a target site that don't have errors (learn more).
Crawled - the number of crawled URLs during the last crawl (learn more).
Redirects - the number of crawled URLs that returned one of the redirection 3XX HTTP status codes (learn more).
Broken - the number of URLs that reported an HTTP status code different than 2XX (success) or 3XX (redirect) during the last crawl.
Blocked - the number of URLs blocked by robots.txt during the last crawl.
Domain Rating
Data source: Site Explorer.
Update frequency: every 12 hours.
Clicking on this metric will open up Site Explorer > Overview report for this project.
Domain Rating (DR) shows the strength of a website's backlink profile compared to the others in our database on a 100-point scale. Learn more about DR in this article.
The line graph for this section shows the change of Domain Rating within the specified period of time.
Referring domains
Data source: Site Explorer.
Update frequency: every 12 hours.
Clicking on this metric will open up Site Explorer > Referring domains report for this project.
From left to right:
The latest total number of referring domains to the target URL.
The difference (delta) between the number of referring domains on the start date and the end date of the data range. For example, if the delta for this number is +1.1K for the last 30 days, this means that the target has 1100 more linking domains than 30 days before (note - bigger numbers like this one are rounded in the dashboard). Please note that the actual number of discovered referring domains during that period may be higher.
You can view the new and lost referring domains by clicking this number on the dashboard and exploring the Referring domains section of Site Explorer.
Backlinks
Data source: Site Explorer.
Update frequency: every 12 hours.
Clicking on this metric will open up Site Explorer > Backlinks report for this project.
From left to right:
The latest total number of backlinks to a target.
The difference (delta) between the number of backlinks on the start date and the end date of the data range. For example, if the delta for this number is +14.4K for the last 30 days, this means that the target has approximately 14400 more backlinks than 30 days before.
Please note that the actual number of lost or gained backlinks during that period may differ.
You can view the new and lost backlinks by clicking this number on the dashboard and exploring the Backlinks report in Site Explorer.
Organic traffic
Data source: Site Explorer.
Update frequency: every 12 hours.
Clicking on this metric will open up Site Explorer > Top pages report for this project.
From left to right:
Estimated monthly organic traffic from all ranking keywords in all countries (within the first 100 results in SERP) to the target. You can learn more about organic traffic in Ahrefs in this article.
The difference (delta) between the monthly volume of organic traffic on the start date and the end date of the data range. For example, if the delta for this number is -78.9K for the last 30 days, this means that the target has approximately 78900 less estimated monthly organic traffic than 30 days before.
The equivalent monthly cost of traffic from all keywords that the target ranks for if paid via PPC instead of ranking organically (learn more).
The graph shows the change in the volume of organic traffic for the specified period. You can see an interactive graph of day-by-day organic traffic estimations in the Overview section of Site Explorer.
Organic keywords
Data source: Site Explorer.
Update frequency: every 12 hours.
Clicking on this metric will open up Site Explorer > Organic keywords report for this project.
From left to right:
The latest total number of organic keywords in all countries that the target ranks for in the first 100 results in SERP. Please note that “latest” here refers to data seen at the latest time of update. A keyword can be updated in the Organic Keywords report anywhere between 3 days to 2 months, depending on the popularity (monthly search volume) of the keyword.
The difference (delta) between the total number of ranking organic keywords on the start date and the end date of the data range. For example, if the delta for this number is -26.1K for the last 30 days, this means that the target has a total of approximately 26100 fewer organic keywords ranking in the top 100 than 30 days before. If you wish to see a detailed position distribution and see all the new and lost keywords, there are two places you can see those:
The latest total number of organic keywords that the target ranks for in the first 100 results in SERP broken down by country. If you click on a number next to a country in this dashboard widget, you will see all the organic keywords a target ranks for in that particular country. Please remember that the data here is dependent upon the last update time (seen in the last column of the report).
The graph shows the change in the total number of organic keywords for all countries that the target ranks for in the first 100 SERP results. You can see an interactive graph of day-by-day keyword distribution in the Overview > Organic search section of Site Explorer. Additionally, you can filter that graph by country.
Tracked keywords
Data source: Rank Tracker.
Clicking on this metric will open up the Rank Tracker > Overview report for this project.
From left to right:
The current total number of tracked keywords for this project in Rank Tracker.
Tracked keywords ranking changes at the time of the last update. The number next to the green arrow shows the number of keywords that improved in rankings while the red arrow indicates declined positions.
Let’s consider the following example to understand how this metric works. Let’s say the metrics show today that one of your keywords improved in rankings. If the time of update for this keyword was 2 days ago, this means that this keyword actually improved in rankings 2 days ago, and today it may be in a different ranking position in SERP. To check the timestamp of the update, simply click on this metric or open Rank Tracker. Then in Rank Tracker, scroll down to the overview of your tracked keywords - the update timestamp will be shown in the last column.
At the bottom, you will see the changes in rankings broken down by ranking groups (the groups are: 1-3, 4-10, 11-50, 51-100). Detailed data for this metric is available in Rank Tracker.
FAQ
My project is set up and the crawl has finished. Why there is no data in the overview?
In some situations, you may come across a dashboard overview that shows N/A signs and zeros:
This usually happens with relatively new websites. If the target website of your project has been published just recently, it may have no backlinks and may not rank for any keywords yet, which explains why Ahrefs has no data on it at that time.
Once the target starts picking up backlinks and ranking for keywords within the first 100 results in SERP, the data will start to populate in your Ahrefs project.
To get more information about this, please see our article about the frequency of updating Ahrefs links database as well as this article on how you can help search engines discover your website faster.
Video tutorial: