The Audit Comparison: Reading Semrush and Ahrefs Site Health Side by Side
Objective: Given a Semrush Site Audit and an Ahrefs Site Audit run against the same domain, reconcile their different issue counts and severities into one prioritized fix backlog, and decide which broken-backlink findings need a developer versus a marketer.
You're the SEO lead at Awfis Space Solutions ahead of a national listings push. Semrush's Site Audit and Ahrefs' Site Audit disagree on issue counts and severity for the same pages, and the dev team wants one ranked backlog, not two reports.
Reconcile both audits into a single severity-ranked backlog, then separately triage the broken-backlink findings by who actually owns the fix.
Before you start
What you'll need
Free path (everything below is enough to finish)
Freemium tier includes a limited Site Audit crawl, enough for a location-page subset
Free, and neither tool natively merges another tool's export
Paid upgrades (optional, faster/deeper)
The free SEMrush crawl plus Ahrefs' free Webmaster Tools tier covers a single-domain audit; upgrade to Ahrefs paid only once you need continuous real-time crawling across a growing multi-location site.
Real-time crawl frequency and the Broken Backlinks report require a paid Ahrefs plan
No access? Use Ahrefs' free Webmaster Tools tier for a single verified domain's backlink and basic crawl data instead of the paid continuous crawl
The process
2 steps
Step 01 of 02
The lesson notes Semrush checks 140+ issue types for depth of audit while Ahrefs crawls continuously for real-time monitoring, so the two tools are built for different jobs and won't produce identical issue lists.
Semrush flags 34 issues as 'Errors' (critical) on the /locations/ pages. Ahrefs' crawl flags only 12 issues on the same pages as critical, but includes 3 issues Semrush didn't catch at all. Which list do you hand to the dev team?
Procedure
- Export both tools' critical/error-level issues for the /locations/ URL set into one sheet
- Match issues by URL and issue type, flag ones both tools agree on as confirmed-critical
- Investigate the 3 Ahrefs-only issues individually, since a tool-exclusive finding isn't automatically wrong
- Rank the merged, deduplicated list by how many pages each issue affects, not by which tool found it
Merged critical backlog (/locations/, 40 pages) Both tools agree: missing canonical tags (22 pages) -> CONFIRMED CRITICAL, top of backlog Semrush-only: duplicate meta descriptions (34 pages) -> confirmed real on manual spot check, kept Ahrefs-only: broken hreflang tags (3 pages) -> confirmed real, added, would have been missed using Semrush alone
Healthy
The final backlog includes tool-exclusive findings after manual verification, not just the overlap between both tools.
Unhealthy
Handing the dev team only Semrush's 34-issue list and silently dropping the 3 real issues only Ahrefs caught.
What this means
Disagreement between two audit tools isn't a bug in either tool, it's a coverage difference, and the fix backlog needs the union of both, verified, not the list from whichever tool ran first.
So what do I do about it?
| Symptom | Action | Effort |
|---|---|---|
| Two site audit tools report different critical-issue counts for the same URL set | Merge and deduplicate by URL and issue type, manually verify tool-exclusive findings before dropping or keeping them | half day |
Step 02 of 02
The lesson highlights that Ahrefs shows broken backlinks instantly, and calls out its real-time monitoring as the reason link-building teams lean on it over Semrush for this specific job.
Ahrefs' Broken Backlinks report shows 14 external links pointing at Awfis URLs that now 404. 9 point at old blog posts, 5 point at a location page that was permanently closed. Who fixes each group?
Procedure
- Export the Broken Backlinks report and group the 14 links by destination URL type (blog post vs. location page)
- For the 9 blog-post links, check whether the content still exists under a new URL, if so this is a 301 redirect, a marketer can request it
- For the 5 location-page links, confirm the location is genuinely closed permanently, if so this needs a developer to set up a redirect to the nearest active location page, not a content fix
- Log both groups with an owner and a target fix date
Broken Backlinks Triage (14 links) Group A (9 links, old blog URLs): content exists at new slug -> OWNER: marketer, action: request 301 redirect, due in 3 days Group B (5 links, closed Koramangala location page): permanent closure -> OWNER: developer, action: 301 to nearest active location page, due in 1 sprint
Healthy
Every broken-backlink finding has a named owner and an action type before it sits in a shared backlog untouched.
Unhealthy
All 14 broken links get filed as one generic 'fix broken links' ticket, and the 5 requiring a developer sit behind marketer-owned redirect requests that never get escalated.
What this means
Broken backlinks group into two different job types, content relocation and structural redirects, and only one of those is a marketer's job to execute directly.
So what do I do about it?
| Symptom | Action | Effort |
|---|---|---|
| A broken-backlink report is filed as one undifferentiated backlog item | Split by whether the fix is a content redirect (marketer) or a structural redirect (developer) before filing | 30 min |
Final deliverable
A single deduplicated, severity-ranked fix backlog merging both tools' Site Audit findings, plus a broken-backlink triage sheet with an owner assigned to each group.
See a reference example
Yatra Online, /hotels/ Site Health Reconciliation (excerpt) CONFIRMED CRITICAL (both tools): 18 pages missing structured data markup Semrush-only, verified real: 27 pages with duplicate title tags Ahrefs-only, verified real: 6 pages returning soft-404s Broken backlinks (11 total): 8 -> marketer-owned 301 redirect requests, 3 -> developer-owned structural redirects for a deprecated city page
Success criteria
You're done when you can:
- Final backlog includes verified tool-exclusive findings from both audits, not just the overlap
- Every broken-backlink group is assigned a correct owner (marketer vs. developer) based on fix type