Ahrefs Site Audit: what it checks, what it costs, and how Docket compares
The short answer: Ahrefs Site Audit is the website crawler inside Ahrefs, a keyword and backlink platform. It runs in Ahrefs' cloud, and its page says it “scans for 170+ issues” and sorts them into errors, warnings and notices. It spends one crawl credit for each internal page it reads: 100,000 a month on Lite ($129), 500,000 on Standard ($249) and 1.5M on Advanced ($449), as read on 28 October 2026. The paid plans that include it run from $29 to $449 a month, and Ahrefs Free runs it only on sites you verify you own. Docket is a one-time Mac app whose whole job is the audit: 99 checks, ranked by impact against effort, $59 once and no crawl credits. If you also need keyword volumes and a backlink index, you need Ahrefs.
- Ahrefs suits someone who does keyword research and link building and wants the audit inside the same account.
- Docket suits someone on a Mac who wants to audit any site, a client's included, with a ranked list of fixes and no crawl credits.
Ahrefs Site Audit credits: what spends one, and what they cost
The short answer: an Ahrefs Site Audit crawl credit is spent each time the crawler reads one internal HTML page that returns a 200 status. Redirects, error pages, images, CSS and JavaScript files and links to other sites do not spend one. Credits come with the plan: 100,000 a month on Lite at $129 a month, 500,000 on Standard at $249, 1.5M on Advanced at $449. Ahrefs does not publish a price for buying more crawl credits. Docket has no credits: it is $59 once.
Read from Ahrefs' pricing page and help centre on 28 October 2026. The last column is arithmetic on those prices: the first month in which paying that plan monthly has cost more than Docket's one price.
| Plan | Price a month | Site Audit crawl credits a month | Plan price per 1,000 credits | Costs more than Docket from |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ahrefs Lite | $129 | 100,000 | $1.29 | month 1 |
| Ahrefs Standard | $249 | 500,000 | $0.50 | month 1 |
| Ahrefs Advanced | $449 | 1.5M | $0.30 | month 1 |
The price per 1,000 credits is the whole plan's price spread over its credits. It is not what Ahrefs charges for Site Audit on its own: the same plan also covers the keyword and backlink tools, so read it as an upper bound on what the audit costs and not as a rate Ahrefs publishes.
- What spends a credit. Ahrefs' help centre article How are Crawl Credits in Site Audit spent? (dated by Ahrefs 3 September 2026) says only an internal HTML page that returns a 200 (OK) status spends one. It lists redirects, pages that return an error, images, CSS and JavaScript files and links to other sites as free to crawl.
- A free allowance. The first 5,000 crawl credits a month spent on a project whose ownership you have verified are free, on every plan.
- When the credits run out. Pay-as-you-go additional credits are off by default. If you turn them on, you are charged automatically when use passes the plan's limit, and what you buy lasts 3 billing months. In their article on usage-based pricing and on the pricing page, we found no rate for extra crawl credits, so we cannot tell you what a re-crawl past the limit would cost.
Paying monthly, Ahrefs Lite costs more than Docket's one price from month 1, Standard from month 1 and Advanced from month 1. That compares two different things: Ahrefs also sells keyword and backlink data that Docket does not have, as the sections below say.
At a glance
Read from Ahrefs' own pages on 28 October 2026.
| Plan | Monthly price | Site Audit crawl credits a month | Max pages per project | Projects on sites you have not verified |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ahrefs Lite | $129 | 100,000 | 25,000 | 5 |
| Ahrefs Standard | $249 | 500,000 | 50,000 | 20 |
| Ahrefs Advanced | $449 | 1.5M | 250,000 | 50 |
| Docket | $59 once · or 4 × $14.75 | None | No page limit | Any site |
$59once
For Macs with Apple silicon or Intel, macOS 12 or later, and 64-bit Windows
On a Mac? Get the Mac version.
On your phone?
Black Friday price, all of November: Docket SEO $29.50 once. From 1 December it’s $59, or 4 × $14.75. Buy applies the code FOUNDINGDOCKET for you; if the checkout shows $59, enter it under ‘Have a discount code?’.
Screaming Frog is $279 a year. Ahrefs plans with Site Audit run $29–$449 a month. Docket is $59 once. Screaming Frog’s price read 4 November 2026, Ahrefs’ 28 October 2026.
30 days, no conditions, no questions asked. Refund policy
Intel Mac? Get the Intel version
Where you can point Site Audit depends on the plan. Ahrefs Free (which Ahrefs says is the same account as the original Ahrefs Webmaster Tools) runs it only on sites you verify you own. The paid plans that include it run from Starter at $29 a month to Advanced at $449. Docket audits any site, including a client's, a prospect's or a competitor's. If you need keyword volumes and a backlink index, Docket cannot replace Ahrefs and does not try. That data has to be bought, not built.
What Ahrefs has that Docket can never have
A crawled index of the web. That is what powers keyword difficulty, search volume, backlink profiles, and competitor content gaps. Building it costs tens of millions of dollars a year in infrastructure. Docket audits what is on your site and how it is configured; it has no opinion about what people search for, and any tool claiming otherwise without an index behind it is guessing.
Ahrefs also crawls in the cloud, which matters if you want scheduled audits running while your laptop is closed, or a team looking at the same data.
Where the audit itself differs
Ahrefs' Site Audit page says it "scans for 170+ issues" and sorts them into errors, warnings and notices "so you know which ones to fix first". Docket goes one step further in the same direction: every finding is ranked by impact against the effort of fixing it, with an estimate of how long the fix takes, so the output is a sequence rather than three buckets.
The cloud model also brings metering. Ahrefs' pricing page lists a monthly crawl-credit allowance per plan (100,000 on Lite, 500,000 on Standard, 1,500,000 on Advanced), so the audit you run is shaped partly by what you can afford to spend on it. Docket runs on your machine with no per-crawl cost, so auditing a client site twice in a day costs nothing.
And three areas are not listed among the checks on Ahrefs' Site Audit page: per-crawler AI search access, landing-page conversion, and marketing tracking coverage. That is what their page does and does not advertise, which is not the same as proof the product cannot do it. If you need one of these, ask them rather than taking this page's word for it.
Ahrefs content audit, exports and Looker Studio
Content audit. Ahrefs does not sell a product called Content Audit: our check of its pricing and Site Audit pages on 28 October 2026 found no such name. The job is split. Site Audit crawls your own pages, and its page lists finding duplicate content among its checks, “Be it title tags, meta descriptions, headings, or low-quality content pages”, as read on 28 October 2026. Content Explorer is an index of what other people have published. The pricing page also lists AI Content Helper and AI Content Grader, and an AI Content Inventory marked “Soon”; none of them is called a content audit. This page tested nothing beyond what Ahrefs publishes. For the steps of a content audit, with or without Ahrefs, see how to do a content audit.
Exports and Looker Studio. Ahrefs' FAQ says Site Audit overview reports export as PDFs through the built-in Print option, and that most raw data exports come as CSV files. The pages behind each issue export one issue at a time: Ahrefs' help article on exporting Site Audit says “there's currently no way of exporting detailed list of all issues with specific pages in a single go”. For dashboards, Ahrefs has a Site Audit connector for Looker Studio: its help article says the connectors need the Advanced plan or higher, and that the Site Audit connector consumes no credits. Export rows are also one of the units Ahrefs' pay-as-you-go credits buy, next to crawl credits. Docket's exports are a PDF report and CSV and JSON files, and none of them is metered.
Side by side
| Docket | Ahrefs | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | $59 once · or 4 × $14.75 | $29–$449/mo, and free for sites you verify you own |
| Sites you do not own | Any site, no project limit | Not on Ahrefs Free; 5, 20 or 50 projects on Lite, Standard or Advanced |
| Keyword & backlink data | None | Its main product |
| Rank tracking | No | Yes |
| Crawl limits | Your machine, your limits | Credit-metered by plan |
| Data location | Crawl runs on your Mac; five optional checks fetch data unless --offline | Cloud |
| Ranked action plan | By impact against effort | Errors, warnings and notices |
| AI crawler audit | Per-crawler | Not listed as per-crawler |
| Conversion audit | Yes | Not listed |
| Team access | No team accounts; one licence covers up to 3 computers at a time, Mac or Windows | Yes |
The metering problem, concretely
Cloud auditing is priced per crawled URL, and that changes how you work in a way that is easy to miss until you hit it. Ahrefs' Lite plan lists 100,000 crawl credits a month, and a credit is one internal page crawled, as set out above, so a monthly allowance means re-auditing a client site after a fix, then again after the next fix, draws down a budget that a larger client might need.
The practical effect is that people run fewer audits than they should. You verify a change once rather than iterating, and you hesitate before crawling a prospect's site to win the work. Docket has no equivalent constraint: the crawl happens on your laptop, so running it twenty times in an afternoon costs nothing but time. For agencies doing pre-sales audits that difference compounds quickly.
Two limits, not one, and the second is a bill
Re-read on 2026-10-28: the credit allowances are unchanged, but they are not the only ceiling. Each plan also caps pages per project: 25,000 on Lite, 50,000 on Standard, 250,000 on Advanced. A monthly credit budget and a per-project page cap constrain different things: the first limits how often you can re-crawl, the second limits how large a single site can be before it will not fit in one project at all.
And the credit figure is a billing threshold as well as a cap. Ahrefs' own FAQ: "Once you enable additional pay-as-you-go credits and data, you'll be automatically charged when consumption exceeds your plan's limits." That is opt-in, and it is worth knowing which way yours is set before a large re-crawl rather than after. Running out and running up a bill are different outcomes, and only one of them stops.
Docket has neither limit, because neither is a thing a local crawler needs: there is no allowance to draw down and no project size to exceed. The bound is the page and depth caps you choose, and the fifteen-minute crawl deadline the tool applies to respect the site it is reading.
The reverse is also true and worth stating. Because Docket runs locally, closing the laptop stops a scheduled audit, and there is no shared workspace for a team to look at the same results. If either of those matters, cloud is the right architecture and the metering is what you pay for it.
Docket on a real site: ours
Ahrefs sorts what it finds into errors, warnings and notices. Docket ranks every finding by impact against effort. This is what that looks like on a real audit of our own site.
Docket's findings for that site, 10 in all (2 medium, 4 low and 4 notice), come out as a ranked list. This is the order it gave, with the ones that name nobody else:
- Medium: No advertising pixels installed. Small effort, 1 page.
- Medium: 1 orphan page has no internal links pointing to it. Medium effort, 1 page.
- Low: 3 groups of near-identical colours in your CSS. Medium effort, 3 pages.
- Low: Only 1 recognised profile in sameAs. Trivial effort, 1 page.
- Low: 1 page promises one thing in search and another on the page. Small effort, 1 page.
- Low: 1 link uses non-descriptive anchor text. Medium effort, 1 page.
- Notice: Missing 1 baseline security header. Trivial effort, 1 page.
- Notice: 1 marketing and analytics tool detected. Trivial effort, 1 page.
- Notice: One AI visibility control cannot be checked from outside, including by Docket. Trivial effort, 1 page.
1 more name other companies or sites, a cookie-consent finding among them, and are left out here as they are in the public sample report.
When to pick Ahrefs instead of Docket
- You do keyword research or link building. You need an index, and Ahrefs or Semrush is how you get one. Docket has no keyword or backlink index and does not try to build one.
- You want audits running while your laptop is closed, or a team looking at the same results. Ahrefs crawls in the cloud. Docket's schedule runs only while the app is open, and it has no shared workspace.
- You are on Linux, or want it in a browser. Docket's desktop app runs on Macs and 64-bit Windows only.
- You want the audit and a plan, once, on your own machine. That is Docket, for $59 once.
Plenty of people run both: an index tool for research, and a local auditor for the work.
Checked 28 October 2026. The factual claims about this product were read from its own pages on that date: Site Audit "scans for 170+ issues", and "segments issues into errors, warnings, and notices, so you know which ones to fix first" (source); Ahrefs Free includes Site Audit "For verified websites", and Ahrefs says of Ahrefs Free and Ahrefs Webmaster Tools: "They’re the same account" (source); Site Audit lists finding duplicate content, "Be it title tags, meta descriptions, headings, or low-quality content pages" (source); Site Audit is among the tools on the $29 Starter plan (source); monthly prices Starter $29, Lite $129, Standard $249, Advanced $449; projects on sites of unverified ownership 5 on Lite, 20 on Standard, 50 on Advanced (source); crawl credits are listed per plan: Lite 100,000, Standard 500,000, Advanced 1.5M per month, and max pages per project of 25,000, 50,000 and 250,000 (source); only internal HTML pages that return a 200 (OK) status spend a crawl credit; redirects, error pages, images, CSS and JavaScript files and links to other sites do not, and each verified project's first 5,000 crawl credits a month are free on every plan (source); pay-as-you-go purchases of report credits, export rows, crawl credits and API units last three billing months, and pay-as-you-go additional credits are disabled by default; no price for extra crawl credits is given (source); Site Audit overview reports export as PDFs through the built-in Print option, and most raw data exports come as CSV files (source); Ahrefs offers a Site Audit connector for Looker Studio; the connectors need the Advanced plan or higher, and the Site Audit connector consumes no credits (source). Products change and pricing changes; if something here has gone out of date, tell us and it will be corrected. Everything else on this page is a comparison of approach, not a claim about their roadmap.
Docket is a one-time purchase for macOS: no account, no crawl credits, and the crawl runs
on your machine. Five optional checks fetch data it cannot produce alone; --offline
turns all five off. Download Docket →
$59once
For Macs with Apple silicon or Intel, macOS 12 or later, and 64-bit Windows
On a Mac? Get the Mac version.
On your phone?
Black Friday price, all of November: Docket SEO $29.50 once. From 1 December it’s $59, or 4 × $14.75. Buy applies the code FOUNDINGDOCKET for you; if the checkout shows $59, enter it under ‘Have a discount code?’.
Screaming Frog is $279 a year. Ahrefs plans with Site Audit run $29–$449 a month. Docket is $59 once. Screaming Frog’s price read 4 November 2026, Ahrefs’ 28 October 2026.
30 days, no conditions, no questions asked. Refund policy
Intel Mac? Get the Intel version
Common questions
What is Ahrefs Site Audit?
The website crawler inside Ahrefs. It runs in Ahrefs' cloud, and its page says it scans for 170+ issues and sorts them into errors, warnings and notices. It spends one crawl credit for each internal page it reads. Ahrefs Free runs it only on sites you verify you own, and the paid plans that include it run from $29 to $449 a month, as read on 28 October 2026.
How much does Ahrefs Site Audit cost?
Ahrefs sells Site Audit as part of its plans, not on its own. Ahrefs Free includes it for verified sites. The paid plans that include it run from $29 to $449 a month, and the Lite plan at $129 a month gives 100,000 crawl credits. Extra credits have no published price. Docket is $59 once, with no credits.
What is a crawl credit in Ahrefs Site Audit?
One internal HTML page that returns a 200 status, crawled once. Ahrefs' help centre says redirects, error pages, images, CSS and JavaScript files and links to other sites do not spend credits, and that each verified project's first 5,000 credits a month are free.
How much do extra Ahrefs Site Audit credits cost?
Ahrefs does not publish a price for extra crawl credits on its pricing page or in its help centre articles on crawl credits and usage-based pricing, as read on 28 October 2026. Pay-as-you-go additional credits are off by default, and if you turn them on you are charged automatically when use passes your plan's limit.
What does the Ahrefs Site Audit tool check?
Ahrefs' Site Audit page says it scans for 170+ issues and segments them into errors, warnings and notices. Docket runs 99 checks across thirteen areas and ranks every finding by impact against effort.
Is the Ahrefs site audit free?
Partly. Ahrefs Free includes Site Audit for verified websites, meaning sites you prove you own. Auditing a client's or a competitor's site needs a paid plan, where the number of projects on unverified sites is capped by plan. Docket's free version shows your score, how many problems each area has and the top problem in full, on any site, with no key.
Does Ahrefs have a content audit?
Not under that name. Our check of Ahrefs' pricing and Site Audit pages on 28 October 2026 found no product called Content Audit. Its Site Audit page lists finding duplicate content, in title tags, meta descriptions, headings or low-quality pages, among its checks, and this page tested nothing beyond what Ahrefs publishes. Docket's content checks cover thin pages, competing pages that target the same search, language mismatches and missing authorship, and rank them with everything else.
Can you export an Ahrefs site audit or send it to Looker Studio?
Yes to both. Ahrefs' FAQ says Site Audit overview reports export as PDFs through the Print option, and most raw data exports come as CSV files. Its Site Audit connector for Looker Studio needs the Advanced plan or higher and consumes no credits, per Ahrefs' help article. Docket's exports are a PDF report and CSV and JSON files, and none of them is metered.
Can I run an Ahrefs website audit on any site?
Not on every plan. Ahrefs Free runs Site Audit only on sites you verify you own. The paid plans allow projects on sites you have not verified: 5 on Lite, 20 on Standard and 50 on Advanced. Docket audits any site, a client's included.
Is there a one-time alternative to Ahrefs Site Audit?
Docket is a one-time purchase for macOS: $59 once. It audits any site with no crawl credits. It does not replace Ahrefs' keyword and backlink data.
Can Docket replace Ahrefs?
Only for the site audit. Ahrefs' keyword volumes, difficulty scores and backlink data come from a crawled index of the web, which Docket has no equivalent of and does not claim to.
Does Docket have crawl limits like Ahrefs?
No. Docket runs on your machine, so there are no crawl credits and no per-audit cost. The only limits are the page and depth caps you set.