An Ahrefs alternative for links — and for citations
All the link work you actually do weekly — profile, competitor gap, prospecting, broken-link recovery, monitoring that re-checks every seven days — from $49 a month. Plus a second authority graph that no link index contains.
When ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude or Perplexity answers a question in your market, it quotes specific sources. We capture them. That is a prospect list defined by influence over the answer your buyer reads — and you cannot crawl your way to it, because it is not published as a hyperlink anywhere.
We do not match a dedicated link crawler on raw index size, and this page says so plainly. If index depth is the product you are buying, buy it.
- The citation graph, which no link index has. The sources four AI engines quote when answering questions in your category — an outreach list ranked by influence over the answer, not by authority score.
- Link Opportunities, enriched. Domains linking to your competitors but not to you, with link type, spam signals and on-page placement — 60 reports a month on Agency.
- Monitoring every 7 days on every paid plan. New links, lost links and status changes, not whenever someone remembers to re-run a report.
- Rankings, audits and AI visibility in the same subscription. Links stop being a separate tool with a separate invoice.
- Blank cells where the data is genuinely missing. Unsourceable is labelled, not modelled — so a prospect list is a prospect list, not a wasted afternoon.
Four numbers worth checking
The claims on this page that you can actually hold us to.
Link work, job by job
Organised by the task rather than the feature list, because "has backlink data" is true of both products and tells you nothing. Our column carries the actual monthly allowances.
| The job | Ahrefs | SignalSumo |
|---|---|---|
| See who links to a domain | A large, mature link index | Backlink profile reports — 35/month on Pro, 75 on Agency |
| Find prospects worth pitching | Yes, via their index | Link Opportunities: domains linking to your competitors but not to you — 20 reports/month on Pro, 60 on Agency |
| Compare against competitors | Yes | Backlink gap — 20 reports/month on Pro, 50 on Agency |
| Recover broken and lost links | Yes | Broken-link reports — 15/month on Pro, 50 on Agency |
| Watch new and lost links | Yes | Re-checks every 7 days on every paid plan; 10 monitored domains on Pro, 25 on Agency |
| Know which sources AI cites | Not what the product is built around | Core product. Every scan records the sources cited, across four engines |
| Rank tracking and site audit too | Yes, in the same suite | Yes — 750–2,000 keywords, crawls of 10,000–100,000 pages |
| Raw index size | The larger index — genuinely. | Smaller. We would rather say so than claim a parity you would discover in week two |
| Published price | On their pricing page | $49 Mid · $99 Pro · $249 Agency, per month |
No prices, index counts or crawl figures are quoted for Ahrefs anywhere on this page. Those move, and a stale number about another company’s product is worse than none. Every SignalSumo figure is checkable inside the plan you are on.
Links are one authority signal. Citations are the other one now.
A backlink is a public vote you can crawl. A citation inside an AI answer is a private vote that decides whether a buyer ever reaches a page to click a link at all. They are different graphs, and only one of them shows up in a traditional link tool.
The link graph, done for weekly work
Profile analysis, competitor gap, prospecting and broken-link recovery, with monitoring that re-checks every seven days rather than whenever you remember to look.
Link Opportunities is the one most teams open first: it intersects the referring domains of the competitors you name, subtracts your own, and hands back the sites that already link to your rivals — with the link type and placement, not a guessed traffic figure.
The citation graph, which nobody indexes yet
When an engine answers a question in your category, it names brands and it cites sources. We record both, per engine, per scan — so you can see the handful of domains that keep being quoted into answers about your market.
That list is a link-prospecting target list of a new kind: not "who has authority", but "who is already inside the answer". Traditional link tools cannot see it, because it is not on the open web as a hyperlink.
What you give up, stated once and clearly
Comparison pages usually bury this. It belongs near the top, because it is the thing that decides the question for a third of the people reading.
Index depth
A dedicated link crawler that has been running for years will show you links we do not have. For a link audit sold on completeness, or for reconstructing what happened to a domain in 2019, that depth is the product and we are not a substitute for it.
What we cover well is the live picture: who links now, who linked and stopped, who links to your competitors, and what broke.
Their metrics as a shared language
If your reports, your client conversations and your team's instincts are all calibrated to one vendor's authority metric, that shared vocabulary has real value and switching costs you some of it.
We report link quality with our own signals and say what each is built from. Better epistemics, worse familiarity — an honest trade, not a free win.
Link allowances by plan
The backlink-specific limits, exactly as configured. Everything else — rank tracking, audits, AI visibility — is included at the tier limits published on the pricing page.
| Monthly allowance | Free | Mid $49 | Pro $99 | Agency $249 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Backlink profile reports | 2 | 15 | 35 | 75 |
| Backlink searches | 3 | 25 | 35 | 100 |
| Competitor gap reports | 1 | 10 | 20 | 50 |
| Link opportunity reports | — | 10 | 20 | 60 |
| Broken-link reports | — | 5 | 15 | 50 |
| Monitored domains | — | 1 | 10 | 25 |
| Monitor re-check interval | 30 days | 7 days | 7 days | 7 days |
The free plan is not a trial — it does not expire, and two profile reports a month is enough to judge the data on a domain you already know well.
A blank cell is worth more than a plausible number
Every link tool meets metrics it cannot obtain for a given domain. The convention is to model something believable and print it, because an empty cell looks like a broken product and a modelled one looks like data.
We print the empty cell. A metric we could not source is labelled unsourceable. A page we could not fetch says so. An outage reads as an outage rather than a zero that quietly drags an average down.
In link work that distinction is not philosophical, it is your week. An estimated authority figure sends you pitching domains that were never worth pitching, and you will not find out until the replies do not come. Every row we hand you is a row we could actually verify.
The same rule runs through the rest of the product: the content score withholds points it cannot measure rather than estimating them, and every AI edit shows its exact score change before you accept it.
How to test this properly in an afternoon
Do not compare feature lists. Compare both tools on a domain whose link profile you already know by heart — yours.
Run your own domain
Use the free backlink check. You know what should be there, so you will spot what is missing far faster than any review can tell you.
Then run a competitor
Open Link Opportunities against two rivals. The output is a pitch list, so judge it on whether you would actually email those sites.
Ask the engines the same question
Run a free AI visibility scan and look at the cited sources. That list does not exist in a link tool, so there is nothing to compare it against.
Keep both for one cycle
If the overlap turns boring, you have your answer. If it does not, you spent one month of a $49 plan finding out.
Historical link data does not transfer between platforms in either direction. Monitoring starts from the day you add a domain.
Where Ahrefs is the better answer
Index size and history. A larger, older crawl finds links we do not, and keeps years of them. If completeness or historical reconstruction is what you are paying for, that is the correct purchase and we would rather you made it.
Bulk research. If your workflow is thousands of domains a month, our per-plan report allowances will constrain you before the data quality does.
A shared metric with clients. An industry-standard authority number that everyone in the room already trusts is worth something real, even when a better-explained metric exists.
What we would say instead of "switch": run the free AI visibility scan alongside whatever you use. The citation list is not something a link index can give you, and it costs nothing to look.
- Index size is the product. If you sell link audits on raw volume, the larger crawler wins and should.
- You need years of historical link data to prove a trend or reconstruct a penalty timeline.
- Your clients have standardised on their metrics as a shared language, and re-educating them costs more than the licence.
- Bulk link research at scale — thousands of domains a month — is your core workflow.
Questions people ask before switching
Is SignalSumo's backlink index as large as Ahrefs'?
No. A dedicated link crawler that has run for years will surface links we do not have, and we would rather say that here than let you discover it in week two. What we cover well is the live, actionable picture: who links now, who stopped, who links to your competitors but not you, and which links broke.
What is Link Opportunities and how is it different from a gap report?
A gap report tells you which domains link to competitors and not to you. Link Opportunities takes that intersection and enriches each row with the link type, spam signals and where on the page the link sits, so the output is a prospect list you can act on rather than a list you then have to research. Pro includes 20 reports a month, Agency 60.
How often does link monitoring re-check?
Every seven days on every paid plan — new links, lost links and status changes. The free plan re-checks every 30 days. Pro monitors up to 10 domains and Agency up to 25.
What does "AI citations" mean for link building?
When ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude or Perplexity answers a question in your category, it draws on specific sources and we record them. Over time you get the set of domains that keep being quoted into answers about your market — an outreach target list defined by influence on the answer rather than by an authority score.
Can SignalSumo replace Ahrefs completely?
For teams whose link work is prospecting, monitoring and competitor comparison, usually yes — and you also get rank tracking, site audits and AI visibility in the same subscription. For index-depth research, historical link forensics or bulk analysis, no, and the honest limitations section says why.
How much does SignalSumo cost?
Mid is $49 a month, Pro $99 and Agency $249, plus a free plan requiring no card. We do not publish competitor prices here because they change; check their current pricing page directly.
Do I lose my historical link data if I move?
Historical data does not transfer between SEO platforms in either direction. Monitoring begins when you add a domain, so if you plan to switch, add your domains a few weeks before you cancel elsewhere and let the history start accumulating in parallel.
Is there a free backlink check I can try first?
Yes — the backlink checker runs on any domain, and the free plan includes two backlink profile reports a month with no card and no expiry.
Does it flag toxic or spammy links?
Link rows carry spam signals and placement context, and the profile view separates what is worth attention from what is noise. We report the signals we can source and mark what we cannot, rather than producing a single toxicity percentage whose derivation you cannot inspect.
Which is better for agencies?
It depends on what you sell. If you sell link audits on completeness, the larger index. If you report on link growth, prospecting and now AI visibility, our Agency plan includes 25 projects, five seats, white-label PDFs, embeddable widgets and 60 opportunity reports a month at $249.
Go deeper
Check the links, then check the citations
One takes a domain and no account. The other answers a question your link tool has never been asked.
Run a free backlink check