Backlink Auditing: Can Ahrefs Outperform SEMrush?

In the SEO world, backlinks are a cornerstone of authority. High-quality links can push your rankings to the top, while toxic or broken ones can silently drag your website down. For any business that relies on organic search traffic, regular backlink auditing is not optional—it’s essential.

Among the many SEO tools available, Ahrefs and SEMrush are two of the most widely used for backlink analysis and cleanup. But when it comes to auditing and improving link profiles, which one truly leads the way?

This article explores how a health and wellness brand used both Ahrefs and SEMrush in tandem to uncover and clean up backlink issues—proving that using the right tool at the right stage makes all the difference.

The Backlink Problem: A Silent Traffic Killer

The health and wellness brand had been steadily growing its online presence through blogs, expert interviews, and social media promotions. Yet, over several months, their organic traffic plateaued—and then began to decline.

At first glance, nothing seemed out of place. Their content was updated, the site was mobile-friendly, and page speed was within acceptable limits. That’s when the SEO team decided to investigate off-page SEO, specifically their backlink profile.

Broken or toxic backlinks can result in:

• Lowered trust from Google
  
  

• Manual penalties
  
  

• Wasted crawl budget
  
  

• Poor user experience from dead links
  
  

To audit their link health, the team turned to Ahrefs and SEMrush.

Step One: Discovering Broken Links with Ahrefs

The team started with Ahrefs, known for its massive backlink database and fast link updates. Using the Site Explorer and Broken Backlinks features, they scanned their domain and found:

• Dozens of backlinks pointing to URLs that had been removed or redirected incorrectly
  
  

• External links with 404 errors due to changed slugs or removed pages
  
  

• High-authority sites still linking to outdated content
  
  

Ahrefs provided not only the broken URLs but also the referring domains, anchor texts, and first/last seen dates. This granularity allowed the team to prioritize which links to fix or redirect based on link strength and relevance.

They immediately set up 301 redirects for internal content that had moved, and reached out to a few high-value referring domains to request link updates.

Step Two: Identifying and Disavowing Toxic Links with SEMrush

Once broken links were addressed, the next step was to clean up toxic backlinks—those from spammy, irrelevant, or low-quality domains that could trigger penalties.

The team imported their domain into SEMrush's Backlink Audit Tool, which assigned a toxicity score to each inbound link. The tool grouped links by type and flagged domains that:

• Were from PBNs (private blog networks)
  
  

• Had been deindexed or marked as spam
  
  

• Contained suspicious anchor text (like pharma or adult terms)
  
  

What made SEMrush especially useful here was its Google Disavow integration. The team could review and tag links for removal or disavow directly from the platform. SEMrush even grouped toxic links by category (malware, unrelated niche, mirror sites), speeding up the review process.

They exported the final disavow file and submitted it to Google Search Console, ensuring that Google would ignore those links in future ranking decisions.

Post-Audit Results

After implementing the changes:

• The site regained some of its lost keyword positions within a few weeks
  
  

• Overall domain health improved in both Ahrefs and SEMrush scores
  
  

• Referral traffic from broken backlinks turned into real, active sessions thanks to redirects
  
  

Perhaps most importantly, the brand’s trust signals—such as dwell time, bounce rate, and return visitor rate—began to rise again, suggesting that the cleanup had a user experience benefit as well.

Strengths and Use Cases of Each Tool

Both tools were instrumental, but in different ways. Ahrefs was superior for raw data, especially for identifying broken links and analyzing backlink trends. Its database updates quickly and provides detailed context per link.

SEMrush, on the other hand, was more effective for backlink risk assessment. Its toxicity scoring system, combined with easy disavow file generation, made it the perfect cleanup companion.

The takeaway? You don’t necessarily have to choose between them—if you can use both, each serves a distinct purpose in a comprehensive backlink audit.

Final Thoughts

Backlink profiles are dynamic. Over time, even the best websites accumulate broken, outdated, or harmful links. Failing to audit and clean them can slowly erode your search engine trust—often without warning.

In the case of the health and wellness brand, combining Ahrefs for discovery and SEMrush for cleanup led to restored rankings and renewed traffic growth. For teams managing SEO in-house, this strategy can be a powerful framework for long-term success.

So, does Ahrefs outperform SEMrush for backlink auditing? Not exactly—but it absolutely complements SEMrush. The best results often come from using them together, playing to each tool’s strengths, and turning data into action.