# Majestic

> Majestic is a link intelligence service run by Majestic-12 Ltd in Birmingham that operates its own web crawler and maintains two separate backlink indexes, a Fresh Index covering roughly the last 120 days and a Historic Index reaching back to 2006, sold self-serve from about £40 or €47 per month and metered by analysis, retrieval, and index item units rather than by report views.

- Category: SEO & Content Marketing (https://saastracker.org/categories/seo-content)
- Website: https://majestic.com
- Starting price: About £40 or €46.99 per month
- Free plan: Free tools without a subscription: limited Site Explorer previews, the Majestic Million top-site list, and free reports on domains you verify ownership of.
- Free trial: No open free trial; a 7-day money-back guarantee on Lite and Pro serves the same purpose
- Founded: 2004, HQ: Birmingham, United Kingdom, Ownership: Privately held and independent; Majestic-12 Ltd, registered in England as company number 05269210
- Profile last reviewed: 2026-08-22
- Canonical profile: https://saastracker.org/products/majestic

## Overview

Majestic is the oldest surviving independent backlink index and, for a long stretch of SEO history, it was the only one. Majestic-12 Ltd was founded in Birmingham in 2004 by Alex Chudnovsky, originally as an attempt to build a distributed search engine using volunteers' spare computing capacity. The search engine never happened. What came out of it instead was a continuously running crawler that has been mapping the link graph of the web for two decades, which turned out to be a more durable business than competing with Google.

The product is deliberately narrow. Majestic does not do keyword research, does not track rankings, does not audit your site, and does not write content briefs. It sells one thing: an answer to the question of who links to what, how much those links are worth, and what has changed. That focus is the reason it survives against Ahrefs and Semrush, which are both larger and better funded, and it is the reason link builders and SEO auditors keep a Majestic subscription open even when their main suite already includes backlink data.

The index architecture is the technical decision that defines it. Majestic maintains two indexes rather than one. The Fresh Index covers roughly the most recent 120 days and is rebuilt continuously, which is what you want when checking whether a link went live or a competitor just acquired something. The Historic Index reaches back to 2006 and is where you go for the long view of a domain's link history, including links that no longer exist. No competitor offers that split explicitly, and it matters more than it sounds: a domain's current profile and its twenty-year profile can tell completely different stories about whether it is safe to associate with.

Around the index sit Trust Flow and Citation Flow, the two metrics Majestic is best known for. Citation Flow scores raw link volume and Trust Flow scores proximity to a set of trusted seed sites, and the ratio between them is the actual signal: a domain with high citation and low trust is usually a link farm. Topical Trust Flow extends this by category, so you can see whether a domain is trusted in the subject you care about rather than trusted in general. These are older metrics than Domain Rating or Domain Authority and, for link-quality work specifically, more informative than either.

## How it works

1. You enter a domain, subdomain, or URL and choose which index to query. The Fresh Index returns what the crawler has seen in roughly the last 120 days; the Historic Index returns everything back to 2006, including links that have since disappeared. Choosing the wrong index is the most common source of confusion for people arriving from Ahrefs, where there is only one.

2. The Site Explorer report returns referring domains, referring IPs and subnets, anchor text distribution, Trust Flow, Citation Flow, Topical Trust Flow by category, and the full backlink list with per-link flow metrics. Every domain in the list carries its own scores, so qualifying a prospect list is a sorting exercise rather than a research project.

3. Usage is metered by three separate unit types that buyers routinely confuse. Analysis Units are spent when you run reports and are the headline allowance, 1 million a month on Lite and 20 million on Pro. Retrieval Units govern how many rows of link data you can pull back, 200,000 on Lite and 5 million on Pro. Index Item Units govern how many distinct items you can add to tracking and campaigns, 5,000 on Lite and 125,000 on Pro. Running out of one does not stop the others.

4. Around Site Explorer sit the comparison and monitoring tools: Clique Hunter for finding domains that link to several competitors but not to you, Link Context for seeing where on a page a link actually sits, Backlink History for charting a profile over years, Bulk Backlink Checker for qualifying hundreds of domains at once, and Campaigns for tracking a link building project against targets. The API, available only on the top plan, is what agencies and tool vendors build on.

## Best for

Link builders, SEO auditors, and anyone who has to make a defensible judgement about whether a domain is worth acquiring a link from, plus agencies who need a second independent index to cross-check whatever their main suite reports.

## Not the right fit for

- Anyone who wants an all-in-one SEO tool; Majestic has no keyword research, no rank tracking, no site audit, and no content features, and it has never pretended otherwise.
- Buyers who need organic traffic estimates or keyword rankings for a competitor, because Majestic does not model organic traffic at all and will not tell you what a domain ranks for.
- Teams that need more than one seat cheaply; Lite and Pro are single-user plans and the multi-user option is the €380 API plan, which is a steep jump for the second person.
- Small businesses whose backlink question is simply whether they have any; Google Search Console answers that for free and Majestic is overkill until link acquisition is a deliberate programme.
- Anyone expecting a modern interface; Majestic looks and behaves like a serious data terminal from a decade ago, and no amount of index quality makes the first hour pleasant.

## Features

### The dual index

The architectural decision that distinguishes Majestic from every competitor.

- **Fresh Index**: Covers roughly the most recent 120 days of crawl and is rebuilt continuously, which is the index to use when confirming a link went live or spotting a competitor's recent acquisitions.
- **Historic Index**: Reaches back to 2006 and includes links that no longer exist, which is the only practical way to audit what a domain's profile looked like before an owner change or a penalty.
- **Own crawler since 2004**: Majestic-12 has run its own continuously operating crawler for two decades rather than licensing a third-party feed, and publishes live index counters on its own site.
- **Index-level comparison**: Because both indexes are queryable, you can compare a domain's current profile against its twenty-year profile and see whether the story has changed.

### Link quality metrics

Trust Flow and Citation Flow, and why the ratio is the actual signal.

- **Trust Flow**: Scores a domain from 0 to 100 by proximity to a manually reviewed set of trusted seed sites, which is a different and generally more informative measure than raw link volume.
- **Citation Flow**: Scores raw link volume and influence from 0 to 100. Read alongside Trust Flow, a wide gap between the two is the classic fingerprint of a link farm.
- **Topical Trust Flow**: Breaks trust down by subject category, so you can see whether a domain is trusted in your vertical rather than trusted in general, which is the version of the metric that actually predicts value.
- **Link Context**: Shows where on the page a link sits, whether in main content, a sidebar, a footer, or navigation, plus the surrounding text. Position is a proxy for editorial intent and most competitors do not report it.
- **Flow Metric history**: Charts how Trust Flow and Citation Flow have moved over time, which turns a static score into evidence of whether a domain is improving or decaying.

### Prospecting and comparison

The workflows link builders actually run every week.

- **Clique Hunter**: Finds domains that link to several of your competitors but not to you, across up to ten competitor domains at once, which is the highest-yield link prospecting report in the tool.
- **Bulk Backlink Checker**: Qualifies large lists of domains against Trust Flow, Citation Flow, and referring domain counts in one pass, turning an outreach list into a prioritised one.
- **Compare domains**: Side-by-side profile comparison across multiple domains, including referring domain growth curves, for pitching or for competitive audits.
- **Link Graph visualisation**: Renders the relationships between linking domains visually, which is more useful than it sounds for spotting a network of sites that all belong to the same operator.
- **Neighbourhood checker**: Examines the other sites sharing an IP address or subnet, a long-standing method for detecting private blog networks.

### Monitoring and campaigns

Turning a one-off audit into an ongoing programme.

- **Campaigns**: Track a link building project against target domains and see acquisitions, losses, and progress over time rather than re-running reports by hand.
- **Backlink History**: Charts referring domain and backlink counts over years, which is how you tell a steady editorial profile from a bought spike.
- **Site Explorer alerts**: Notifies on new and lost links for tracked properties so a disappearing link is noticed in days rather than quarters.
- **Verified categories and Majestic Million**: A free ranked list of the top million websites by referring subnets, published openly and widely used as a research dataset in its own right.

### Access, exports, and API

Where the metering and the seat limits bite.

- **Analysis Units**: The headline meter for running reports: 1 million a month on Lite, 20 million on Pro, and 100 million on the API plan with options to scale to 300 million or a billion.
- **Retrieval Units**: Govern how many rows of link data you can pull: 200,000 on Lite, 5 million on Pro, 20 million on the API plan. This is the meter that actually constrains heavy export work.
- **Index Item Units**: Govern how many distinct items you can add to tracking: 5,000 on Lite, 125,000 on Pro, 500,000 on the API plan.
- **API access**: Only on the top plan at about €380 per month, which also includes five users. There is no cheap API tier, unlike Moz Links API from about $20.
- **Browser plugin and OpenApps**: A browser extension surfaces Flow Metrics on any page you visit, and an OpenApps marketplace lets third parties build tools on the index.
- **CSV export**: Reports export to CSV against the Retrieval Unit allowance rather than an arbitrary row cap.

## Use cases

- **Link builder qualifying an outreach list**: Four hundred candidate domains have arrived from a scrape and a research assistant, and paying for placements on the wrong half would waste the quarter's budget. Outcome: Bulk Backlink Checker scores the whole list against Trust Flow, Citation Flow, and Topical Trust Flow in one pass, and the domains where citation greatly exceeds trust get cut before anyone writes an email.
- **Consultant auditing a site before an acquisition**: A client is buying a website and needs to know whether its link profile is editorial history or a bought network that a previous owner has since cleaned up. Outcome: The Historic Index reveals links that no longer exist, Backlink History charts the acquisition curve, and a spike followed by mass removal tells the story that the Fresh Index alone would hide.
- **Agency cross-checking a competitor's claim**: A pitch rests on a competitor's backlink numbers, and the agency's main suite is the same one the competitor uses, so both parties are quoting the same possibly wrong data. Outcome: A Majestic Lite subscription at about £40 provides an independent second index, and where two independently crawled indexes agree, the number is defensible in a client meeting.
- **In-house SEO running a link programme**: Links are being acquired steadily but nobody can show leadership what was gained, what was lost, and whether quality is improving. Outcome: Campaigns track the programme against target domains, Flow Metric history shows quality trending rather than just volume, and lost-link alerts catch removals within days.

## Pricing

Self-serve subscription in three published tiers, metered by Analysis Units, Retrieval Units, and Index Item Units, billed monthly or annually with a money-back window.

- **Lite**: €46.99 per month, or €39.16 per month billed annually at €469.90. 1 million Analysis Units per month; 200,000 Retrieval Units; 5,000 Index Item Units; Up to 1 million analysable backlinks per report; 1 user, no API. Advertised from about £39.99 in sterling. Enough for regular qualification work on a single client base.
- **Pro**: €94.99 per month, or €79.16 per month billed annually at €949.90. 20 million Analysis Units per month; 5 million Retrieval Units; 125,000 Index Item Units; Up to 20 million analysable backlinks per report; 1 user, no API. Still a single seat. The jump to Pro buys volume, not people.
- **API**: €379.99 per month, or €316.66 per month billed annually at €3,799.90. 100 million Analysis Units per month, scalable to 300 million or 1 billion; 20 million Retrieval Units and 500,000 Index Item Units; Full API access; 5 users included; Up to 100 million analysable backlinks per report. The only plan with API access and the only plan with more than one seat.

Add-ons:

- Higher Analysis Unit allowances on the API plan (Custom, scaling from 100 million to 300 million or 1 billion units per month)

Billing notes:

- Annual billing takes roughly seventeen percent off, equivalent to two months free, and is charged as a single up-front payment.
- Lite and Pro are single-user plans. The second seat effectively costs the jump from €94.99 to €379.99, because five users only appear on the API tier. This is the harshest seat structure in the category, worse than Ahrefs at $40 to $80 per seat and far worse than SE Ranking at roughly fourteen euro.
- Three meters run simultaneously and buyers routinely size for the wrong one. Analysis Units are the headline number, but Retrieval Units are what constrain export-heavy work and run out first for most link builders.
- There is no API on Lite or Pro at any price. If you need programmatic access you are paying €379.99, with no equivalent to the roughly $20 entry point of the Moz Links API.
- A 7-day money-back guarantee stands in for a free trial, so evaluation means paying first and asking for a refund if it does not fit.
- Prices are published in euros and sterling; USD is not shown on the plans page and is converted at checkout, which makes US budgeting slightly awkward.
- Free verified reports on domains you own are genuinely useful and cost nothing, which makes the free tools a real evaluation path for your own site if not for competitors.

Value assessment: Lite at about €47 is one of the best-value single-purpose subscriptions in SEO, provided you understand that you are buying a second opinion rather than a suite. For a consultant or link builder who needs defensible link-quality judgements, an independent index with a 2006 archive and Topical Trust Flow for less than fifty euro is straightforwardly good value, and cheaper than the equivalent capability inside Ahrefs. Pro at €95 doubles down on volume for the same single seat. The value collapses the moment you need two people or an API, because both require the €380 plan, and that jump is severe enough that small agencies frequently keep one shared Majestic login rather than upgrade. Judged per user for a team, it is poor value. Judged per specialist, it is excellent.

## Strengths

- The Fresh and Historic index split is unique in the category and is the only practical way to audit what a domain's link profile looked like years ago.
- Twenty years of continuous first-party crawling since 2004, with live index counters published openly on the vendor's own site rather than quoted in marketing copy.
- Trust Flow, Citation Flow, and especially Topical Trust Flow are better predictors of link value than a single blended authority score, because the ratio and the category both carry information.
- Link Context reports where on the page a link sits, which is a genuine editorial-intent signal most competitors do not surface at all.
- Clique Hunter across up to ten competitors is the strongest link prospecting report available at this price point.
- Independence matters: a second index that was crawled separately is how you verify a number before putting it in front of a client.
- Bootstrapped, privately held, and profitable since 2004, with no repositioning, no acquisition, and no enterprise pivot in two decades.

## Limitations

- Single-user on Lite and Pro, with the second seat only available by jumping to the €379.99 API plan. This is the single worst thing about the product commercially.
- No API below €379.99, where Moz sells Links API access from about $20 and is the only genuinely small-business-priced link API in the category.
- No keyword research, no rank tracking, no site audit, no content tooling. Majestic is a component, never a platform, and buyers expecting a suite will be disappointed within an hour.
- The interface is dated and the three-meter model is poorly explained in the product itself, so new users routinely burn Retrieval Units without understanding why reports stopped returning rows.
- No organic traffic estimates or keyword data at all, so you cannot answer whether a linking domain actually gets visitors from Majestic alone.
- No free trial, only a 7-day money-back window, which means evaluation requires a card and a refund request.
- No AI search visibility features of any kind, in a year when Moz includes AI visibility free, Semrush bundles it from $199, and even Serpstat includes an LLM monitor at $100.

## Comparisons

- **Majestic vs Ahrefs**: Ahrefs' index is larger and better documented and comes inside a full suite with keyword research, rank tracking, and site auditing. Majestic gives you a genuinely independent second index, a Historic archive to 2006, Topical Trust Flow, and Link Context, for about a third of the money. Most serious link practitioners run both: Ahrefs as the daily driver and Majestic as the arbiter when a link-quality judgement has to be defensible.
- **Majestic vs Moz Pro**: Moz Pro is the better all-round purchase for a small business, with Domain Authority, keyword research, rank tracking, a crawler, multiple seats handled gracefully, and AI visibility included at no extra cost. Majestic beats it decisively on link data specifically, and Moz beats it decisively on everything else including the roughly $20 Links API, which is the cheapest programmatic link access anywhere. Buy Moz as your platform; buy Majestic when link quality is the decision.
- **Majestic vs Serpstat**: Complementary rather than competing. Serpstat is a full research suite at $100 for three seats, with a link module that is fine for prospecting and not for judgement. Majestic sells only the judgement. A small agency doing serious link work should run Serpstat for research and reporting and Majestic Lite for link qualification, which together cost less than one Ahrefs Standard plan with two extra seats.
- **Majestic vs SpyFu**: They answer different questions and are often bought together. SpyFu tells you what competitors have targeted and paid for over a decade of search history; Majestic tells you who links to them and whether those links are worth chasing. Neither will substitute for the other, and both are cheap enough that a small agency can run the pair for less than a single seat of a top-tier suite.
- **Majestic vs Semrush**: Semrush is a marketing platform with a backlink module; Majestic is a backlink company. Semrush wins on breadth, AI visibility from $199, and workflow integration, and loses on link index depth, historical reach, and the granularity of link-quality metrics. If your suite is already Semrush, adding Majestic Lite at about €47 is a cheap way to stop trusting one vendor's link numbers unchecked.

## Implementation

- Setup time: Minutes to start querying, because nothing needs installing or verifying to look up a third-party domain. Verifying your own sites for free reports takes another quarter of an hour.
- Learning curve: Steeper than the interface suggests, and almost entirely conceptual rather than mechanical. Understanding the Fresh and Historic split, the difference between the three unit meters, and how to read Trust Flow against Citation Flow takes a few sessions. Once those three ideas land, the tool is straightforward.
- Onboarding: Fully self-serve on all three tiers including the €379.99 API plan, with no sales call required. Documentation and a long-running blog carry the conceptual explanation that the interface does not.
- Migration: Nothing to migrate in, since Majestic works on public crawl data. Coming from Ahrefs or Semrush, expect the raw referring domain counts to differ, sometimes substantially, because the indexes were built by different crawlers with different policies. That divergence is the point of running a second index, not a defect. Exports are CSV and constrained by Retrieval Units rather than row caps.

## Platform, API & security

- Platforms: Web application, Browser extension for Chrome and Firefox, REST API on the top plan, OpenApps third-party marketplace
- API: Full API access only on the €379.99 plan, which includes 100 million Analysis Units and five users, scalable to 300 million or 1 billion units. There is no cheap API entry point, which is a genuine gap against the Moz Links API from about $20.
- Compliance: GDPR, UK data protection registration as Majestic-12 Ltd
- Data residency: United Kingdom based operation and crawl infrastructure.
- SSO: Not offered on the self-serve plans.
- Security notes: Majestic analyses publicly crawled link data and does not require access to your analytics, Search Console, or site. Verifying a domain you own unlocks free extended reports for that domain and is the only place account data touches your property.

## Support

- Channels: Email support, Support ticket system, Direct contact with the team, which remains small enough to reach
- Documentation: A detailed help centre and glossary, plus a long-running blog that explains the Flow Metric methodology in more depth than any competitor documents its own scores.
- Community: Long-standing presence in the SEO community, regular conference appearances, and the freely published Majestic Million dataset used widely in academic and industry research.

## Company

- Founded: 2004
- Founders: Alex Chudnovsky
- Headquarters: Birmingham, United Kingdom
- Ownership: Privately held and independent; Majestic-12 Ltd, registered in England as company number 05269210
- Employees: Roughly 20 to 40
- Funding: Majestic has operated without venture capital, funded from subscription revenue since it began selling link data commercially. An early investment partner was announced but the company has remained independently controlled.

Timeline:

- 2004: Majestic-12 Ltd is founded in Birmingham by Alex Chudnovsky as a distributed search engine project using volunteer computing capacity.
- 2006: The Historic Index begins accumulating, which is why Majestic can still answer questions about what a domain's link profile looked like two decades ago.
- 2009: Steven Pitchford joins as Operations Director as the company shifts fully from search engine ambitions to selling link intelligence.
- 2012: Trust Flow and Citation Flow launch, replacing raw link counts with a trust-versus-volume pair that becomes the industry's standard way of spotting link farms.
- 2014: Topical Trust Flow adds category-level trust scoring, making it possible to ask whether a domain is trusted in your vertical rather than trusted in general.
- 2018: Link Context launches, reporting where on a page a link physically sits, a signal competitors still largely do not surface.
- 2026: Still independent and still bootstrapped after twenty-two years, with the Fresh Index covering roughly 120 days and the Historic Index reaching back to 2006.

## Integrations

Google Search Console for domain verification, Chrome and Firefox browser extensions, Google Sheets via third-party connectors, REST API on the top plan, OpenApps marketplace of third-party tools built on the index, CSV export into any spreadsheet or BI tool

## FAQ

### What is Majestic?

Majestic is a link intelligence service that runs its own web crawler and sells access to two backlink indexes: a Fresh Index covering roughly the last 120 days and a Historic Index reaching back to 2006. It reports referring domains, anchor text, and its own Trust Flow and Citation Flow quality metrics. It does not do keyword research, rank tracking, or site auditing.

### How much does Majestic cost?

Lite is €46.99 per month, or about £39.99, with 1 million Analysis Units and 200,000 Retrieval Units. Pro is €94.99 with 20 million Analysis Units and 5 million Retrieval Units. The API plan is €379.99 with 100 million Analysis Units, API access, and five users. Annual billing saves roughly seventeen percent. Lite and Pro are single-user plans.

### What is the difference between the Fresh Index and the Historic Index?

The Fresh Index covers roughly the most recent 120 days and is rebuilt continuously, so it is what you use to confirm a link went live or to spot a competitor's recent acquisitions. The Historic Index reaches back to 2006 and includes links that no longer exist, which is the only practical way to audit a domain's link history before an ownership change or a penalty. No competitor offers this split explicitly.

### What are Trust Flow and Citation Flow?

Citation Flow scores a domain from 0 to 100 on raw link volume and influence. Trust Flow scores it from 0 to 100 on proximity to a manually reviewed set of trusted seed sites. The ratio between them is the actual signal: a domain with high Citation Flow and low Trust Flow is usually a link farm. Topical Trust Flow extends this by subject category so you can check whether a domain is trusted in your vertical specifically.

### How does Majestic's metering work?

Three separate meters run at once. Analysis Units are spent running reports and are the headline allowance, 1 million a month on Lite. Retrieval Units govern how many rows of link data you can pull back, 200,000 on Lite, and this is the meter that usually runs out first on export-heavy work. Index Item Units govern how many items you can add to tracking, 5,000 on Lite. Exhausting one does not affect the others.

### Does Majestic charge for extra users?

Effectively yes, and painfully. Lite and Pro are single-user plans, and the only plan with more than one seat is the €379.99 API tier, which includes five. So the second seat costs the jump from €94.99 to €379.99. That is the harshest seat structure in the category, worse than Ahrefs at $40 to $80 per additional seat and far worse than SE Ranking at roughly fourteen euro per seat.

### Does Majestic have an API and what does it cost?

Yes, but only on the €379.99 plan, which includes 100 million Analysis Units and can be scaled to 300 million or a billion. There is no cheaper API tier. If you need programmatic link data on a small-business budget, the Moz Links API from about $20 is the only realistic option in the category, and Majestic has no answer to it.

### Does Majestic track keyword rankings or audit my site?

No, to both. Majestic has no keyword database, no rank tracker, no site crawler, and no content tools. It is a single-purpose link intelligence product. You will need something else for research and tracking, such as Serpstat or SE Ranking, and something else again for technical crawling, such as Sitebulb or Screaming Frog.

### Does Majestic offer AI search visibility tracking?

No. There is no AI visibility feature of any kind, which is a notable gap in 2026 given that Moz includes AI visibility at no extra cost, Semrush bundles it from $199, Ahrefs sells Brand Radar from $199 to $699, and Serpstat includes an LLM brand monitor from $100. If AI visibility is a buying criterion, Majestic will not be the tool that satisfies it.

### Is there a free trial of Majestic?

There is no open free trial. Lite and Pro carry a 7-day money-back guarantee, so evaluation means subscribing and requesting a refund if it does not suit. Free tools are available without a subscription, including limited Site Explorer previews, the Majestic Million top-site dataset, and full free reports on any domain you verify ownership of.

### Who owns Majestic?

Majestic is the trading name of Majestic-12 Ltd, a privately held British company registered in Birmingham as number 05269210 and founded in 2004 by Alex Chudnovsky, who remains Managing Director. It has never been acquired and has operated on subscription revenue rather than venture capital for over two decades, which is unusually stable for this category.

## Editorial verdict

Majestic is the arbiter, not the platform. If your job involves deciding whether a link is worth acquiring, whether a domain's history is clean, or whether the number your main suite just reported is real, Majestic Lite at about €47 is the cheapest way to have a genuinely independent second index with a 2006 archive behind it, and Topical Trust Flow plus Link Context give you signals nobody else reports. Buy it as a component alongside a research suite and a technical crawler, and it earns its keep in a single avoided bad placement. Do not buy it expecting a platform: there is no keyword data, no rank tracking, no crawler, and no AI visibility. And go in clear-eyed about the seat structure, which is the worst in the category: the second user costs a jump from €95 to €380, and many small agencies quietly solve that with one shared login rather than upgrading, which tells you what they think of the pricing.

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Source: SaaSTracker (https://saastracker.org), an independent editorial project. This profile is compiled from public information, carries no peer reviews or paid placement, and was last reviewed 2026-08-22. Awards are judged on published criteria: https://saastracker.org/methodology