Stop Using Ahrefs to Make iGaming Business Decisions

Someone sends you a website.

You open Ahrefs.

DR looks good. Traffic looks good. The right country is showing traffic.

Deal approved.

We’ve become so used to this process that very few people stop and ask the obvious question:

Should we actually trust the data enough to make business decisions based on it?

My answer is increasingly: no.

In fact, when my annual Ahrefs renewal comes around, I don’t think I’m going to renew it.

Not because Ahrefs is a bad product. And this isn’t an anti-Ahrefs rant.

The problem is that Google has changed, search has changed, and more importantly, the way we use Ahrefs in iGaming has become completely disconnected from what the data can actually tell us.

Ahrefs can still be a useful SEO tool.

But Ahrefs should be a datapoint.

It should not be the decision maker.

Some of you are probably thinking: “But we use another tool to estimate FTDs.”

I hate to break it to you, but many of those tools rely on similar third-party data as part of their estimates.

So instead of removing the problem, we may just be adding another layer of estimation on top of it.

The traffic number we all love

The metric I see misused the most is estimated organic traffic.

Well, that and DR.

If you work in SEO, you probably already know that Domain Rating isn’t something you should blindly trust. And that’s probably one of the reasons we’ve shifted so much attention towards estimated traffic instead.

Because traffic is real, right?

It’s incredibly convenient.

Website A has 50,000 traffic.

Website B has 250,000.

Website B must be better.

Except that’s not necessarily true.

That traffic could come from completely irrelevant keywords. It could come from informational searches with zero commercial intent. It could be driven by one news article. It could come from countries you don’t care about.

And sometimes the estimate is simply nowhere near the website’s actual traffic.

We’ve seen some great examples of this in iGaming media.

Companies proudly show their Ahrefs growth charts and traffic numbers. On the surface, they look fantastic.

Then you dig into what they actually rank for, where the traffic supposedly comes from and what commercial value those rankings have.

Suddenly, 500,000 traffic doesn’t look quite as impressive.

That doesn’t mean strong Ahrefs traffic is meaningless. Quite the opposite. It’s usually a positive signal.

But a signal isn’t the same thing as the truth.

And that’s an important distinction when money is involved.

Let me give you three real examples

These are all based on situations I’ve seen in iGaming.

€10,000 for position #1

Operator X is talking to an affiliate on Telegram.

The affiliate says:

“I want €10,000 for first position.”

The affiliate manager takes it internally.

Someone opens Ahrefs.

250,000 organic traffic. Strong T1 visibility.

Looks good.

Deal approved.

Operator X gets the first position.

Result?

5 FTDs.

What happened?

They checked how much traffic Ahrefs estimated the website had.

They didn’t properly check what the website ranked for, the intent behind those searches, which pages generated the traffic, or whether that traffic had any relationship with someone wanting to sign up and deposit at a casino.

Ahrefs gave them a number.

They turned the number into a business case.

Those are two very different things.

Choosing iGaming media for PR

A game provider launches a new slot and wants some industry exposure.

They make a list of iGaming media sites and check them in Ahrefs.

The biggest publications are too expensive, so they choose three or four mid-sized publications with the highest estimated traffic.

Makes sense, right?

Maybe.

But what if most of that traffic comes from a handful of unrelated queries?

What if one publication has 100,000 estimated visits but almost nobody relevant to your target audience reads it?

And what if another has 15,000 estimated visits but is read every morning by operators, affiliates and people actually working in the industry?

Which one is more valuable?

Ahrefs can’t answer that question.

Yet we regularly use it to make exactly that decision.

The market with “10 searches”

Affiliate X wants to expand into new markets.

They start doing keyword research.

Big countries. Small countries. Different languages.

Then they find a smaller market.

Ahrefs says the important keyword has a search volume of 10.

Ten.

Not worth it.

They move on.

Two years later, they’re at a conference talking to another affiliate.

That affiliate entered the same market and is generating 70+ FTDs every month with extremely high player value.

But Ahrefs said 10 searches.

This is where relying too heavily on third-party data becomes dangerous.

The problem isn’t being wrong about a keyword.

The problem is allowing an estimated number to stop you from investigating an opportunity.

Estimated data isn’t first-party data

This is the part I think we’ve forgotten.

Ahrefs doesn’t have access to every website’s Google Search Console or analytics.

It estimates.

That’s completely fine.

Every third-party SEO tool has limitations.

The problem starts when we stop treating estimates as estimates.

If you’re spending €500 on something, maybe that’s acceptable.

If you’re making a €10,000 fixed-fee decision, choosing a new market, valuing an affiliate partnership or deciding where to spend a large PR budget, I think the standard should be considerably higher.

Because bad data doesn’t just give you less information.

Bad data can give you confidence in the wrong decision.

And I’d sometimes rather have no data than a very precise-looking number that I incorrectly believe is accurate.

We’ve done this before

SEO has always had its favourite metric.

When I started working with SEO, Moz was the standard.

Then you had the Majestic crowd.

Eventually Ahrefs and DR became dominant.

And somewhere along the way, DR and estimated traffic became almost like a currency.

“What’s the DR?”

“How much Ahrefs traffic?”

“How much T1 traffic?”

These questions aren’t useless.

But they have become shortcuts.

And shortcuts are dangerous when the underlying question is much more complicated.

The question shouldn’t be:

“How much Ahrefs traffic does this website have?”

It should be:

“Can this website deliver what I’m actually paying for?”

Those are not the same question.

So what should we do instead?

Unfortunately, the answer isn’t another magical SEO tool.

The answer is more research.

If you’re buying a meaningful placement from an affiliate, ask for first-party evidence.

Google Search Console can tell you far more than an Ahrefs traffic estimate ever will.

You don’t necessarily need access to their entire account.

Ask for relevant screenshots or exports showing the trend over time, clicks, impressions, country distribution and, where appropriate, the pages or query categories generating that visibility.

Some affiliates won’t like this.

That’s understandable. There are legitimate reasons not to hand over sensitive Search Console data.

So anonymise it.

Agree on what needs to be shown.

But if someone wants thousands or tens of thousands of euros from you, asking for evidence that the audience actually exists shouldn’t be considered unreasonable.

And when doing market research, don’t let a keyword tool decide whether a market exists.

Use the tools.

Find the keywords.

Look at the SERPs.

Look at competitors.

Check Google Trends.

Check multiple data sources.

But then do something surprisingly powerful:

Talk to people.

When I was researching countries for my AI vs human content experiment , I got what I would consider key market information within about two hours simply by speaking with people who had experience in those markets.

Had I relied exclusively on Ahrefs, several of those opportunities would have looked almost nonexistent.

The tool didn’t necessarily fail.

I would have failed by asking the tool to answer a question it wasn’t capable of answering.

I’m not saying Ahrefs is useless

That’s probably the most important point.

Ahrefs is still useful for many things.

Backlink research. Competitor discovery. Finding keywords. Looking at ranking movements. Getting directional information.

However, I would argue that if you’re flexible and willing to use multiple tools, many of those functions can now be covered by cheaper alternatives.

What I am questioning is the amount of authority we’ve given its metrics.

Especially in iGaming.

Because when you combine Ahrefs with Search Console, analytics, SERP research, competitor analysis, other datasets and actual industry knowledge, you can build a much better picture.

But then we’re talking about a research process.

Not opening Ahrefs, looking at one number and saying:

“Looks good. Let’s do the deal.”

And maybe that’s the habit we need to kill.

We’ve spent years turning third-party SEO metrics into KPIs, sales arguments and decision-making tools.

Google has changed.

Search has changed.

iGaming has changed.

Maybe our due diligence should change too.

Use Ahrefs as a datapoint, not a decision maker.