Myth vs reality
Teams who automate publishing often start with the tool a marketer already pays for. Here is what holds up when that tool meets a cron job, and where it does not.
SEOBlogBot research team ·
| Myth | Reality |
|---|---|
| "Our Semrush seat already covers this." | A seat is built for a person in a browser. API access is a separate matter and plans differ, so check your own contract before you plan a job around it. |
| "Free means free to automate." | Free web checkers are made for manual lookups. A script on a schedule may break their terms or their markup. |
| "One tool should do everything." | Keyword, rank and traffic data live in the big suites. Link data at a low per-call price is a narrower job. |
| "A higher rating means a safer source." | A rating is a size signal on a log scale. It says nothing about whether a page is accurate. |
| "Daily data is required." | For a publishing gate, monthly freshness is usually enough. For rank tracking it is not. |
| "The number matches across tools." | Never. Semrush, Ahrefs, Moz and our rating use different formulas, so compare inside one source. |
They are fuller.
Ahrefs and Semrush offer keyword research, rank tracking and a crawl that is fresher than our roughly monthly refresh, and Moz has its long-running DA metric that clients may expect in reports. If the stakeholder asks for those, keep the seat and use it for reporting.
A pipeline asks smaller questions many times, and that is the pattern where per-call billing helps.
Prices change.
The figures we quote for Ahrefs, $129 a month for 200,000 API units with a floor of 50 units per request, come from the plan as we know it, so check the vendor's page before you sign anything. We do not quote Semrush or Moz API prices because we cannot confirm them for you, and a wrong number helps nobody.
Ahrefs API units are sold in plans from $129 a month for 200,000 units, at least 50 units per request. Ours bills a call at 0 to 3 credits.
bulk_dr takes up to 2,000 domains for one credit, which suits gates and archive sweeps.
Any language, any CI runner and even a browser script can call it. The runbook shows a workflow file.
Sometimes the answer is no.
If the only consumer of the data is a human reading a weekly report, a Semrush or Ahrefs login you already pay for is the simpler choice, and you should not add an API for the sake of it. Add ours when a script, not a person, needs the number at three in the morning.
A sensible split
Keep Semrush or Ahrefs for research and client reports, and put the repeated, mechanical link checks behind an API you can price per post. Read the cost table for numbers.
Yes. The domain, overview, stats and suggest actions are free and need no key. Paid actions need a key, and sign-up gives $100 of credit with no card.
No. Ours is round(100 x log(ref_domains+1) / log(2x10^7)), a public formula on our own index. Compare it with itself over time, not with other tools.