Reports builder by Ahrefs

Showing you how to make the most out of Ahrefs. Mostly through: how-to videos, product updates, webinars, and brochures.

Want to keep your team and clients in the loop about your SEO wins and progress? Say hello to reports.

How reports work

Our report builder allows you to create your own reports using widgets from Ahrefs’ Site Explorer and Rank Tracker data.

To add your first report, click on Create report. Or the Create dropdown on the left menu.

Once created, you’ll have a blank canvas where you can add widgets from: existing projects, portfolios, and custom targets.

To add a widget, click on the Add widget button.

Depending on the type of widget, you can customize its:

Heading name
Target URL + path
Volume
Location
Time period
Data granularity
Comparison date

NOTE

For projects and portfolios, widgets that feature competitor comparisons will fetch data from the main competitors added during the project setup.

Competitors can be further edited as well. If there are none added, you will need to specify them in the widget settings.

Congrats, you’ve now added your first widget! Once you add more, you can rearrange them with a simple click and drag.

Use cases

With so many widgets to choose from, here’s a bunch of reports you can start with:

1. Monthly SEO report

This is a classic report where you summarize important metrics that reflect a client website’s organic search performance, backlink profile strength, and website health score.

Its main purpose? To share useful insights on how your SEO efforts add up for a given time period.

Target: Client website

Tool: Site Explorer

Widgets to include:

Summary: Last 30 days
Organic search - Organic traffic: Last 30 days
Organic traffic by location: Last 30 days
Top organic keywords: Winners/Losers [country]
Top organic keywords: New/Lost [country]
Backlink profile: All widgets

2. Monthly competitor analysis report

Wouldn’t it be great if you could gather intel on your competitors on auto-pilot without pulling outdated data from different sources? Let’s be honest, nobody uses that spreadsheet anyway.

Instead, group a bunch of competitors into a portfolio and create a report with the following settings:

Target: Portfolio (top 10 competitors)

Tool: Site Explorer

Widgets to include:

Top organic keywords: Winners/Losers [country]
Top organic keywords: New/Lost [country]
Referring domains: By follow type

This allows you to proactively monitor your industry as a whole and make strategic moves that increase your brand’s visibility over your competitors’.

For example, we’ve just noticed that one of our competitors has climbed up the rankings from position #5 to #1 for the keyword “serp features monitor”. We’re not even ranking in the Top 10 for it, so we might consider covering the topic.

3. Dashboard for brand monitoring

Let’s face it, C-level executives prefer dashboard reports for a big-picture view of the search landscape. Middle managers can also use these type of “search dashboards” to get more SEO resource buy-in for large marketing and SEO campaigns.

For this type of report, focus on widgets that paint the big picture:

Target: Client website

Tool: Site Explorer

Widgets to include:

Organic traffic competitors: Last 6 months
Referring domains competitors: Last 6 months

Judging by the last screenshot, it seems like one of our competitors had a sudden traffic spike. All that’s left is to investigate what was the cause and whether or not we can still capitalize on it.

4. Monthly regional rankings report

If you operate globally and manage local content, a monthly regional rankings report could serve as your success barometer.

Only this time, we’ll focus on widgets from the Rank Tracker tool, which monitors rankings across 190+ locations on both desktop and mobile.

Target: Regional websites

Tool: Rank Tracker

Widgets to include:

Top keywords: By traffic
Device: Desktop

In the example above, we’ve monitored all desktop rankings for our five international blogs. But you can get more creative and compare the desktop vs. mobile rankings for a complete picture.

NOTE

You can add widgets from different projects, portfolios, and targets in the same report.

Limitations and upcoming features

While in beta, Reports are free for all paid plans – including legacy ones.

Currently, you can only add widgets from Site Explorer and Rank Tracker. Each workspace allows up to 50 reports and 200 widgets, with a maximum of 50 widgets/report.

In the future, they will support:

Headings and paragraphs for better formatting
Sharing and scheduling reports for clients, via email (you can only share them with your team now)
Site Audit widgets for website health monitoring

Have any use cases in mind or suggestions for improvements? Share them with us by clicking on the Suggest a feature button inside the report builder.