Ahrefs and SpyFu are two competitor analysis tools built for different jobs. Ahrefs is an SEO suite built around a backlink index of 35 trillion records; SpyFu started in 2005 as GoogSpy (source: Wikipedia) to show which keywords competitors buy on Google Ads and how much they spend. SpyFu's base plan costs $39 a month, Ahrefs Lite $129.
On Google UK the first page for "ahrefs vs spyfu" opens with an AI Overview, then a Reddit thread, then SpyFu's own comparison of its tool with Ahrefs (checked on 10 October 2026). Almost everything below is measured on the US market. None of it answers the question that matters if you work in the UK: how deep do SpyFu's British data go, and how reliable are they? Here you'll find that answer, taken from both vendors' documentation, prices converted into pounds, the real cost of each tracked keyword, and the free alternative almost nobody mentions for checking competitors' ads.
Ahrefs vs SpyFu: the numbers side by side
These are the figures the two vendors publish on their own pages, checked in October 2026. They're marketing numbers that can't be verified from outside, but they're the only ones available and they give you the order of magnitude.
| Ahrefs | SpyFu | |
|---|---|---|
| Started as | a backlink index | a Google Ads archive (GoogSpy, 2005) |
| Keywords in the database | 29 billion (217 locations) | 13.1 billion "with advanced metrics" |
| Keywords in the United States | 2.7 billion | not published |
| Keywords in the UK | 1.4 billion | not published |
| Backlinks | 35 trillion records | over 1 trillion links |
| Domains analysed | 286 million | 152 million websites |
| Paid keywords | 9 million paid keywords, 7 billion ads | "20x" Semrush and Ahrefs |
| Countries covered | 217 locations | 32 in the help centre, 38 on the homepage |
| Updates | index updated every 15-30 minutes | rankings updated about once a month on average |
| Entry price | $29 (Starter), $129 (Lite) | $39 (Basic), $33 billed annually |
Two rows need a closer look. The first is paid keywords: SpyFu's homepage claims "20x" more paid keywords and ads than Semrush and Ahrefs, while the comparison on its own blog from June 2026 says "10x". Same vendor, two different multipliers. The second is updates: according to SpyFu's help centre, updated in December 2025, organic rankings refresh "on average once a month", more often for high-volume keywords and less often for the rest. Ahrefs says it crawls 5 million pages a minute.
What they cost in pounds
Both price in US dollars only; neither pricing page shows sterling. The conversion below uses the Bank of England daily spot rate for 8 October 2026, £1 = $1.3226. Prices exclude VAT.
| Plan | Monthly | In pounds | Billed annually | What matters in it |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| SpyFu Basic | $39 | £29.49 | $33 a month ($399 a year, £302) | 5,000 keywords tracked weekly, 6 months of history, exports up to 10,000 rows |
| SpyFu Professional | $79 | £59.73 | $58 a month ($696 a year, £526) | 15,000 keywords a week, 10+ years of history, unlimited exports, API |
| Ahrefs Starter | $29 | £21.93 | monthly only | reduced features, aimed at beginners |
| Ahrefs Lite | $129 | £97.54 | save up to 17% | 5 projects, 750 tracked keywords, 6 months of history |
| Ahrefs Standard | $249 | £188.27 | save up to 17% | 20 projects, 2,000 keywords, 2 years of history |
| Ahrefs Advanced | $449 | £339.48 | save up to 17% | 50 projects, 5,000 keywords, 5 years of history |
The entry gap is 3.3 times: $39 against $129. Over a year, with both on annual billing, SpyFu Basic costs about $891 less than Ahrefs Lite, roughly £674. We did the full sum for Ahrefs, with extra users, credits, UK VAT and add-ons, in our guide to Ahrefs pricing.
One detail SpyFu's price list shows in small print: Basic includes only 6 months of history. The long history SpyFu advertises, "18+ years" on the homepage and "10+ years" in the price list, comes only with Professional, and as we'll see in a moment, how much of it you can trust for the UK is a separate question.
SpyFu in the UK: what it really covers
Three different versions of SpyFu's geographic coverage are in circulation, and all three are easy to find.
- SpyFu's homepage claims 38 countries with SEO and PPC data.
- The help centre page "Which countries does SpyFu collect data in?", dated March 2026, lists 32, the United Kingdom included, and says there are no full results outside that list.
- A guide to SpyFu alternatives published by getspike.ai in June 2026 claims the data are "almost exclusively" for the United States and the UK.
For the UK, the most precise source is older. On 24 June 2008 Search Engine Watch reported that SpyFu had added UK data, quoting its creator: "UK data was the most-requested feature in the SpyFu.com forums." So the UK is SpyFu's oldest market after the US, and its British archive goes back about 18 years. Ireland and Italy, by comparison, only arrived on 1 June 2022, according to the SpyFu release notes.
The same release notes show the other side, and US comparisons don't mention it. In October 2021 SpyFu fixed a bug where "UK keywords were return[ing] US Estimated Clicks"; in March 2022 one where "UK Ad History was returning US data"; in March 2026 one where the ranking history for some UK keywords showed a blank page. Bugs get fixed, but if you're looking at an old UK estimate, it's worth knowing that for a period it may have been a US number.
Then there's depth. Ahrefs declares 1.4 billion keywords for the United Kingdom on its Big Data page; SpyFu publishes no figures by country. The test SpyFu uses to claim it has more keywords than anyone, published in February 2025, compares mostly US domains such as Best Buy (10 million keywords on SpyFu, 4.3 million on Ahrefs). There's a single UK case, Grain.com: 1,065 keywords on SpyFu, 823 on Ahrefs and 633 on Semrush. One domain. And the vendor ran the test itself.
How often they're searched in the UK
Some context we gathered ourselves from Google Ads data for the UK market (via DataForSEO, 10 October 2026): monthly average from September 2025 to August 2026.
| Search | Monthly searches in the UK | Range |
|---|---|---|
| semrush | 27,100 | 22,200 (August 2026) to 40,500 |
| ahrefs | 18,100 | 12,100 to 22,200 |
| se ranking | 4,400 | 3,600 to 12,100 |
| spyfu | 1,600 | 1,000 to 1,900 |
| ahrefs vs spyfu | 10 | steady |
Ahrefs is searched about 11 times as often as SpyFu. In the UK SpyFu is a niche tool, used mainly by people who run paid search. If you work only on Google UK you'll usually end up on Semrush, Ahrefs or SE Ranking, as we explain in our piece on Ahrefs alternatives.
Competitors' Google Ads: SpyFu's home ground
If the question is "which keywords is my competitor buying and how much are they spending", SpyFu is built for it and Ahrefs isn't. SpyFu shows ad history by keyword, the copy used over time and an estimate of the monthly budget. In May 2025 it expanded its Ad History archive with "8x more keywords" across all the countries it supports, according to the release notes. Ahrefs has a smaller paid index, 9 million paid keywords and 7 billion ads according to its data page, and uses it more to gauge the commercial value of a query than to rebuild a campaign.
Treat the spend estimates for what they are. SpyFu's help centre, updated in June 2026, says that costs, search volumes and clicks are "estimates that come from other sources", starting with Google's keyword tools, and that "when we're wrong, we're consistently wrong in an industry". The vendor's advice is to compare its estimate with the real spend of an account you know and scale the others accordingly. On low-volume niche queries the margin of error grows: to understand what a click really costs in your sector, start from cost-per-click data and Google Ads statistics before any tool's estimates.
The free alternative: Google's Ads Transparency Center
To see a UK competitor's ads there's a free, official tool: Google's Ads Transparency Center, launched on 29 March 2023. According to Google's announcement, signed by Alejandro Borgia, it shows the ads an advertiser has run, in which region, the last date they ran and the format. You can filter by the United Kingdom. It's hardly a secret: "google ads transparency center" gets about 1,000 searches a month in the UK, against 1,600 for "spyfu" (Google Ads data via DataForSEO, 10 October 2026).
It doesn't tell you which keywords trigger the ad or how much the advertiser spends, and that's exactly where SpyFu stays useful. But for a check on competitors' copy and offers before you set up a campaign, it's enough and it costs nothing. If you're weighing up when Google Ads makes sense, it's the first place to look.
Organic SEO and backlinks: where Ahrefs has no rival
On organic search the two tools aren't in the same league. Ahrefs declares 35 trillion records of external backlinks, 286 million domains and an index updated every 15-30 minutes. SpyFu declares over 1 trillion links. Even taking the figures as self-reported, the gap is an order of magnitude.
If you do link building or need to assess a domain before paying for an article on it, Ahrefs has Domain Rating, its metric for estimating the strength of a link profile (we cover it in our guide to domain authority). SpyFu has no domain metric that's as widely used by people who buy and trade links.
The same goes for keyword research: Ahrefs gives difficulty, traffic potential and SERP history for each query, across 217 locations. If that's most of your work, the useful comparison isn't with SpyFu but with the other keyword research tools. Ahrefs also has a crawler for technical site audits, included in the plans.
Rank tracking: what each keyword costs
Here the comparison flips. Both update tracked keywords once a week: for Ahrefs it's the default frequency on all plans, as its help centre says, and for SpyFu it's in the price list ("weekly tracked keyword rankings"). At the same frequency, the quantities are very different.
| Plan | Monthly price | Keywords tracked weekly | Cost per keyword per month |
|---|---|---|---|
| SpyFu Basic | $39 | 5,000 | $0.008 |
| SpyFu Professional | $79 | 15,000 | $0.005 |
| Ahrefs Lite | $129 | 750 | $0.172 |
| Ahrefs Standard | $249 | 2,000 | $0.125 |
| Ahrefs Advanced | $449 | 5,000 | $0.090 |
A tracked keyword costs about 22 times more on Ahrefs Lite than on SpyFu Basic. There's one doubt SpyFu's pricing page doesn't clear up, though: it doesn't say which search engines and locations the rank tracker works on, only "US and international data". The fact that SpyFu collects Google UK data doesn't guarantee you can set up local tracking, say for Manchester. Check it during the 30-day refund window before moving a project over. To work out how many keywords are really worth tracking, see our guide to rank tracking.
Which to choose, case by case
- SEO consultant or agency working on organic search in the UK: Ahrefs, or one of the other suites with a large declared UK database you'll find among the best SEO tools. SpyFu on its own isn't enough.
- If you run Google Ads campaigns and want to understand the competition: SpyFu Basic, alongside the Ads Transparency Center. Bear in mind that Basic only gives you 6 months of history; the long UK archive needs Professional.
- If you need to track thousands of keywords on a small budget: SpyFu, once you've checked the rank tracker covers the market you need.
- Link building and assessing domains: Ahrefs, with no alternative within this comparison.
- SME that only checks its own site: neither. Google Search Console gives you real click and ranking data for free, more accurate than any outside estimate.
In projects where SEO and paid campaigns go together, like those in our Google Ads service, the combination we recommend is a complete organic tool plus a free source for ads. The reason is in our piece on how SEO and Google Ads work together: the keywords that convert in a campaign show which organic pages are worth writing. On the organic side, in the Macropix project in Italy we measured results with Semrush: share of voice on the LED wall cluster reached 25.55%, ahead of Amazon at 18.08%, as we describe in our case study on SEO for manufacturers.
How to test them on the UK market before paying
The most reliable comparison is the one you run on your own data. SpyFu offers a 30-day money-back guarantee on all plans; for Ahrefs the cheapest way to try it is Starter at $29 a month, or Ahrefs Free on sites you can verify as your own. A test you can do in an afternoon:
- Take ten UK keywords from your sector whose real position and clicks you know from Search Console.
- Look up your domain and two direct competitors on both tools, with the United Kingdom selected.
- Count how many of the ten keywords each tool knows, and how far off it is on position.
- For paid search, compare the ads SpyFu attributes to a competitor with the ones shown in the Ads Transparency Center for the United Kingdom.
A tool that can't see half your keywords on Google UK, whatever number it puts on its homepage, isn't the right tool for your market. If you'd rather someone did this for you, it's one of the first things we set up in our SEO service.
Frequently asked questions about Ahrefs and SpyFu
Yes. SpyFu added UK data in June 2008, according to Search Engine Watch, and the United Kingdom is on the list of 32 countries in its help centre, dated March 2026. SpyFu's release notes also record several fixed bugs where UK keywords or UK Ad History returned US data, the latest in 2022.
SpyFu Basic costs $39 a month (about £29.50), or $33 billed annually. Ahrefs Lite costs $129 a month (about £97.50). Ahrefs also has a $29 Starter plan with reduced features. Prices on 10 October 2026, before VAT, converted at the Bank of England rate for 8 October 2026.
Only partly. SpyFu is stronger on analysing competitors' Google Ads campaigns and costs less for rank tracking. Ahrefs is far more complete on backlinks, keyword research and technical audits, with a declared link index of 35 trillion records against SpyFu's 1 trillion plus.
SpyFu, because it was built to reconstruct competitors' keywords, ads and estimated budgets. If you only want to see an advertiser's ads in the UK, Google's Ads Transparency Center is free, but it doesn't show keywords or spend.
According to SpyFu's help centre, organic rankings are updated about once a month on average, more often for high-volume keywords. Keywords you add to the rank tracker are updated every week, as on Ahrefs.
One last observation. The database-size tests we found, SpyFu's included, mostly use US domains. Only one looked at a UK site, a single domain, and it was run by the vendor. In a market where many niche queries get 10 or 20 searches a month, that long tail is where databases really pull apart. Until an independent UK test exists, the number on a homepage counts for less than what you see yourself, with your own data, in the first thirty days.
