How to add your first project

The first step after you’ve activated your Ahrefs account is to add a project.

A project is any domain, subfolder, or URL that you want to track automatically over time.

There are two ways to add your first project:

Import your project via Google Search Console (GSC)

This is the fastest way and the option we recommend.

To do so, hit the Import from GSC button, choose the Google email address your website is associated with, and then follow the on-screen instructions.

In under a minute, you should be able to import multiple websites directly into Ahrefs.

NOTE 📝

In addition, your GSC data will be available in the Dashboard and Rank Tracker tools, where you can monitor your performance data for longer than the 16 months as limited by GSC itself.

Add your project manually

If you’d prefer to define your project settings in more detail, click on the “Add manually” button to start the manual process containing five steps:

1. Scope

Scope defines the boundaries of your project and is dependent on two factors:

• Project URL

• Mode

For example, if we type in “ahrefs.com” and choose “Subdomains” mode, the scope of the project is the entire ahrefs.com root domain.

However, if we type in “ahrefs.com/blog” and choose “Path” mode, the scope of the project will be only pages that belong to that path. Hence, subdomains (like “www.ahrefs.com”) and other URLs not included in the path (like “ahrefs.com/site-audit/”) will be excluded.

2. Ownership

Once you’ve set the scope and name of your project, it’s time to verify its ownership.

This allows you to input more granular crawling settings in the next step of the process, like:

• Increasing the crawl speed

• Adjusting the number of parallel requests

• Instructing our crawler to ignore your robots.txt file

You can verify your website by using one of the four methods from above.

NOTE 📝

If you're having any issues with the other three methods, check out our tutorial on how to verify ownership.

3. Site Audit

Here, you’ll have the option to customize three types of project settings:

• Schedule – Set the frequency of the crawls.

• URL sources – Define your seed URLs. By default, we crawl your website from your project’s URL and automatically detect sitemaps.

• Crawl settings – Set speed settings, limits, and exclude certain links from your crawls (we’ll touch more on this in the Site Audit module).

4. Rank Tracker

At this step, add the keywords you want to monitor rankings for, along with their location.

NOTE 📝

You can track the same keywords for multiple locations. This will consume two keywords from your tracked keywords allowance.

5. Competitors

The last step of the manual process is to define your competitors. These may not necessarily be your direct competitors.

We automatically detect and suggest competitors based on the number of common keywords they have with your target, but you can also add them manually if you have specific competitors in mind.

This data will then feed Rank Tracker’s competitor reports and compare your target’s rankings, share of voice, and other important metrics against your competitors’.