Credits are consumed when using Ahrefs’ Dashboard, Site Explorer, Content Explorer, Keywords Explorer, Alerts and standalone tools like Batch Analysis.
Site Audit and Rank Tracker have their own credits and limits and do not consume credits.
Whenever you open a report, we consume 1 credit for that entire report. This includes all visible charts on the page.
Opening any report in Site Explorer consumes 1 credit. This includes reports under Backlinks profile, Organic search, Pages, Outgoing links, Paid search, Legacy reports, etc.
E.g.: If you open a website's Backlinks report in Site Explorer, then open its Organic Keywords report, this will consume 2 credits.
In addition, you will consume 1 additional credit each time you:
Use one or more filters
Set different dates
Open the SERP viewer or Historical graph
Sort the report (this allows you to potentially view new results that are beyond your plan's Max rows per report limit.)
How additional report credits are charged
Each user in your workspace can consume up to 500 credits.
Once a user exceeds 500 credits, they automatically start consuming additional credits from a pool shared by all workspace users.
These additional credits are chargeable in blocks of 500 per month. Any unused additional credits are not carried over to the next month. See pricing
Learn more about how users work in this article.
How export rows are charged
When exporting an Ahrefs report, one line of the exported .csv file equals one row:
The total number of rows you can export depends on your subscription plan.
If you consume additional export rows beyond your plan’s limit, they will be automatically charged in blocks of 1M rows. See pricing
Paying for additional credits and export rows
There are two ways to pay.
Pay-as-you-go
This is the default payment option. You’ll be automatically charged for the additional credits and export rows that the workspace has consumed.
Prepaid
If you’re on an annual subscription plan, you also have the option to prepay for additional data at a discounted rate. If you can predict the amount of additional data you’ll need, this is a good way to get some savings.
¹Here's a full list of tools that consumes reports per month:
Site Explorer
Keywords Explorer
Alerts
Content Explorer
Batch Analysis
Link Intersect
Google Data Studio