GetCited vs Ahrefs Site Audit

The short version

• Nothing serious was missed. Every error Ahrefs found, GetCited found, with the same evidence: a 404, the three pages linking to it, and short titles on three pages.
• GetCited reported nine things Ahrefs cannot. Four missing modified-date signals, three evidence-density findings, one heading-density finding, and a page that is a JavaScript shell rather than merely short.
• Less to wade through. 24 findings, of which 20 were acted on and 4 dismissed with a written reason, against 37 page-issues of which 8 were worth acting on.
• Ahrefs saw one thing we do not look at: a redirect chain from the insecure entry point, because it started at http:// and we do not.

What both tools found

On the findings that matter most, the two agreed, including the numbers. The 404 at an email-obfuscation URL, reported by both as an error. The three pages linking to it, same three pages. A title of 8 characters on three pages, quoted by both. A meta description of 168 characters on the terms page, flagged by both, with slightly different bounds: GetCited allows 50 to 165, Ahrefs 110 to 160.

Ahrefs lists the 404 twice, under two issue types, which inflates its total but is honest about categories. GetCited files it once, on the exact URL.

What a conventional audit cannot report

Nine findings had no Ahrefs equivalent, and they are all the same half of the problem: whether an answer engine can use the page once it has it.

• No modified date on four content pages. AI engines read modified-date signals when deciding whether a page is current.
• No evidence to quote: 2,174 words on one page with no statistics or quotations. Measured, not guessed at.
• A 398-word run with no heading, which is a chunking problem for a retriever rather than a readability opinion.
• A JavaScript shell: 24 words of HTML behind 12 scripts. Ahrefs has a low-word-count bucket and cannot tell that apart from a genuinely short page. AI crawlers execute no JavaScript, so the distinction decides whether the page exists for them at all.

Four of the 24 were dismissed as inapplicable, each with a reason recorded: an evidence finding on a privacy policy is correct as a measurement and irrelevant as a task.

Where Ahrefs was better

• It followed the redirect chain from http://, because the project was entered that way. We never look at the insecure entry point.
• Its overview is one screen a person can read. Ours is a queue an agent reads, plus the dashboard.
• Its meta-description upper bound of 160 is the better number, and it caught a page at 161 that we allowed. That bound is worth aligning.
• Sitemap membership, social tags and redirect reporting are checks we do not run. Of those, only the sitemap check is worth adding; the rest report deliberate configuration or things that do not affect retrieval.

They are not the same kind of tool

Ahrefs is a research platform for an SEO team

Backlink index, keyword database, rank tracking at scale, competitive research, and a site audit alongside it. If your job title contains the word SEO, you want that breadth, and we do not have it: no backlink index, no keyword database of our own.

GetCited is an operator for a developer who would rather not

The findings are written to be acted on by your coding agent over MCP, in your repo, with the evidence attached. The other half of the product is AI visibility: whether ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini and Google AI Overviews cite you for the prompts you track, and who they cite instead.

Plenty of teams should have both. If you already pay for Ahrefs, the honest reason to add us is the AI-retrieval half and the fact that the work gets done rather than listed.