Ahrefs vs Semrush: priced in rupees, judged on Indian SERPs

The short version, feature by feature

Both tools have been converging for a decade. Ahrefs added keyword and site audit tooling; Semrush rebuilt its backlink index. The remaining differences are real, narrower than either company's marketing suggests, and here's how they split on the work an Indian team actually does week to week.

What they actually cost in rupees

Both companies price in US dollars. Your bank does not. The number that matters is the landed cost — list price, plus the forex markup your card issuer charges on a foreign transaction, plus GST on that markup, plus whatever your GST position does to the invoice itself.

Most Indian cards charge 2% to 3.5% on foreign currency transactions, and 18% GST applies to that markup fee. A few forex-friendly cards charge close to zero. Check yours before you assume.

• Ahrefs moved to a credit model. Rows, reports and exports draw down a monthly allowance. A cheap plan you exhaust on day nine is not a cheap plan.
• Semrush's add-ons are the real cost. The base plan is the entry fee; local, trends and AI toolkits are billed on top, per month.
• Annual billing saves roughly two months on both. It also locks you in for a year, which is the wrong trade if you're still deciding.
• GST: as an imported digital service, 18% applies. A GST-registered business accounts for it under reverse charge and claims input credit, so the net cost is close to the landed number. If you're not registered, add 18% and mean it. Confirm your own position with your CA — not with a blog post.

Where both tools go blind: Hindi, Hinglish and city long-tail

This is the part that matters most in India and gets written about least. Keyword volume in both tools is modelled — built from clickstream panels, Google Ads data and extrapolation. That model is only as good as its sample.

The sample skews English, urban, desktop and browser-extension-installed. Which means Devanagari queries, transliterated Hinglish (sasta seo service, ghar ke liye solar panel price) and tier-2 city modifiers are under-sampled by construction. You will routinely see zero or no-data against queries that are obviously being searched, because the panel never saw them.

The failure mode is not that the tools lie. It's that a zero looks identical to an absence, and a junior strategist builds a content plan around the English terms because those are the ones with numbers next to them.

The fix is boring and it works: treat both tools as a starting hypothesis, then verify against sources that see real Indian queries.

1. Google Keyword Planner — free with an active Ads account. Ranges are wide unless you're spending, but it sees Hindi and regional queries the panels miss.
2. Your own Search Console query report — the single most under-used keyword tool in India. Filter to queries with impressions and near-zero clicks. Those are pages you already half-rank for.
3. Google Trends — useless for absolute volume, excellent for relative interest between a Hindi term and its English equivalent, and for seasonality.
4. Ask five customers what they typed. Not a joke, and free. Indian buyers search in phrasings no keyword tool has a row for.

Backlink index depth on Indian domains

Ahrefs runs one of the most active crawlers on the open web, and its link index is the reason most agencies keep paying. Semrush closed a lot of that gap after rebuilding its index, but on smaller and newer domains — which is most of the Indian web — Ahrefs still tends to surface links Semrush hasn't crawled yet.

Where both struggle is the long tail of Indian publishing: regional-language news sites, city directories, association pages, PDF press releases hosted on a college server. These get crawled slowly by everyone, so a genuinely useful link from a Marathi trade publication may not show up in either tool for weeks. Two consequences follow — don't judge a link vendor on what appeared in Ahrefs this week, and don't assume a competitor's link profile is complete.

Whichever tool you buy, treat its authority score as a sorting device, not a target. DA and DR are different metrics from different vendors, neither is used by Google, and optimising for one is how agencies end up buying links on sites with a strong score and no readers.

• Referring domains, not backlinks. One site linking a thousand times is one endorsement. Both tools default to the bigger, dumber number.
• Check the link, not the score. Open five referring pages. If they're a template with unrelated text and an outbound link block, that's a network, and it will cost you later.

Which one a two-person team should actually buy

At ₹22,000-odd a month each, buying both is a ₹5.4 lakh annual line item for a two-person shop. That is a junior hire. Pick one.

The decision isn't really about the tools. It's about which half of the job you sell.

The free and cheap stack that covers most of it

Before you commit ₹2.7 lakh a year, be honest about what you'd use. For most small teams, roughly two-thirds to three-quarters of the daily job runs on tools that cost nothing.

What the free stack genuinely cannot do is competitor backlink analysis at depth and multi-client rank tracking at scale. Everything else is negotiable.

• Google Search Console — free, and the only true record of your own queries, clicks and average position.
• Bing Webmaster Tools — free keyword research and site audit on Bing's own data. Underrated because it isn't Google.
• Ahrefs Webmaster Tools — free backlink data and site audit for domains you verify. It's Ahrefs' index, for your own site, at zero.
• Google Keyword Planner — free with an Ads account, and the best free read on Indian-language demand.
• Screaming Frog — free to 500 URLs, which covers a great many Indian SME sites entirely.
• Cheaper paid tiers — SE Ranking, Mangools, Serpstat and similar sit in the ₹2,500–₹9,000/mo band. Weaker link indexes, perfectly adequate rank tracking and keyword research.