Ahrefs

Ahrefs Webmaster Tools is free for verified site owners and gives you backlink data, a site audit, and organic keyword data for domains you can prove you control. You cannot analyse competitors with it — that requires a paid plan.

Ahrefs discontinued its paid trial years ago. The company's position is that the data is expensive to produce and trials were heavily abused. Webmaster Tools is the intended way to evaluate the data quality on your own site before paying.

Rows of data you view and reports you run consume credits from a monthly allowance that scales with your plan. Heavy exploratory research on the entry plan will hit the ceiling. Plan your research sessions rather than browsing, and export what you need in one pass.

On freshness, yes — AhrefsBot is among the most active crawlers on the web and links are refreshed continuously, so new and lost links surface faster here than anywhere else. Competitors have narrowed the gap on raw index size, but not on how current the data is.

Yes, Rank Tracker handles daily and weekly position checks with device and location segmentation. It is competent rather than exceptional — dedicated rank trackers offer more granularity — but it is sufficient for most sites and avoids a second subscription.

It is a searchable index of billions of pages that you can filter by organic traffic, referring domains, publish date, and social shares. It answers questions like "which articles on this topic actually earn links" — the most useful content-planning question there is, and one keyword tools cannot answer.