Ahrefs remote MCP connector

The Ahrefs remote Model Context Protocol (MCP) connector in Mark (Optimizely Agent Platform) brings your Ahrefs search engine optimization (SEO) data into Mark. Use Mark chat, agents, and workflows to analyze organic and paid traffic, rankings, backlinks, keywords, and AI search visibility from natural-language requests.

First, a Mark administrator must connect the Ahrefs remote MCP to Mark. After the administrator adds the MCP server, individual Mark users and agent builders log in to Ahrefs to access their data from Mark. Administrators only need to add the Ahrefs remote MCP once.

The following use cases show how you can use Ahrefs connector tools in Mark to track AI search visibility, find keyword opportunities, diagnose traffic drops, prioritize tests, and build link targets.

Goal – Find out whether your brand appears when buyers ask AI assistants for vendor shortlists.

Weekly AI search visibility report – Use the AI search tools to pull your share of voice and mentions against named competitors. The cited pages and cited domains results show which URLs the assistants quote, and the AI responses results show the questions where competitors appear and you do not. Mark then runs a content score on your weakest pages to check how easy they are for AI to read and quote.

You get a weekly report with your share-of-voice trend, the gap questions, and the three to five pages to fix first.

Example prompt: Compare our AI share of voice with Adobe and Contentful in ChatGPT and AI Overviews this month. List the questions where we're missing and the competitor pages getting cited.

Goal – Target keywords that competitors already win, instead of guessing at topics.

Keyword gap analysis – Mark finds your organic competitors and compares their keywords with yours. It sizes each gap by search volume, keyword difficulty, and traffic potential, checks who ranks now, and lists the topics a winning page must cover. Mark then writes the brief directly into a Content Marketing Platform (CMP) task with the target keyword, outline, required topics, and the pages to beat.

You get a ranked list of opportunities and ready-to-assign briefs in CMP.

Example prompt: Find 10 keywords our top 3 competitors rank top-5 for that we don't rank for at all. Difficulty under 40. Create CMP briefs for the top 3.

Goal – Explain why organic sessions fell, not only that they fell.

Traffic drop investigation – When Google Analytics 4 (GA4) flags an organic drop, Mark compares the two periods in Ahrefs to see which pages lost traffic, which keywords lost position, and how the overall keyword trend moved. It checks who took the top spots for those keywords and whether you lost backlinks or have new broken ones. This helps you separate a real anomaly from a known cause, such as an algorithm update or a competitor launch. This use case fits into the GA4 anomaly job of the Marketing Analyst Virtual Teammate.

You get a root-cause section in the anomaly report with the affected pages, the lost keywords, the competitor that gained, and suggested fixes.

Example prompt: Organic sessions fell 18% week over week. Which pages and keywords lost ground, and who replaced us?

Goal – Run conversion tests on pages with enough valuable traffic to reach a result quickly.

Test backlog – The top pages report estimates how much organic traffic each page gets and what that traffic would cost in ads. Mark combines this with GA4 conversion rates to find pages with a lot of valuable traffic but weak conversion. Competitors' paid landing pages add ideas for messaging. Mark then writes test ideas, scores them with the Optimizely win-probability scoring, and checks how long each test needs to run.

You get a ranked test backlog tied to traffic value, ready to build in Optimizely Web Experimentation.

Example prompt: Find our 5 pages with the most organic traffic value but conversion below the site average. Suggest and score 3 test ideas for each.

Goal – Replace gut feel and manual research with a prioritized outreach list.

Outreach list – Mark finds broken links that point at your site, which are quick wins to fix with redirects. It lists the sites that link to several competitors but not to you, and compares Domain Rating and referring domains across competitors in one pass. It also adds the third-party sites that AI assistants cite most in your category, because coverage there improves both search and AI visibility. Mark adds the outreach list to CMP tasks or Slack.

You get a prioritized outreach list with a reason for each target.

Example prompt: Find broken links pointing at us, plus sites linking to 2 or more of our competitors but not us. Rank them by Domain Rating and send the top 25 to #seo.

The first person to connect a third-party service to Mark should be an administrator of that service. Administrator access installs the complete set of tools, so Mark adds every available tool. If a non-administrator connects the service first, Mark installs only the tools that account can access.

As a Mark administrator, complete the following steps:

A confirmation message displays, and you can close the pop-up window.

After adding the Ahrefs connection, Mark prompts you to select which tools to enable and optionally customize their display names.

As a Mark administrator, complete the following steps:

The Ahrefs tile displays Connect on the Connectors tab for Mark users to authenticate with their personal accounts.

To update the available tools or names, see Update tools.

Each Mark user and agent builder logs in to Ahrefs individually to access their data from Mark. User-level authentication ensures you access only the data your Ahrefs account is authorized to view.

Before you begin, confirm that a Mark administrator has connected the Ahrefs remote MCP to Mark. Until an administrator connects it, the Ahrefs tile displays Contact admin instead of Connect and you cannot select it.

To authenticate, complete the following steps in Mark:

After you log in, the Ahrefs connector tools are available in Mark chat, agents, and workflows.

The Ahrefs remote MCP provides more than 100 tools, and the available tools depend on which tools your administrator enabled. For the full list of tools, see the Ahrefs MCP documentation.

The Ahrefs connector tools are grouped into the following categories:

Ahrefs also provides its own charts and tables, so Mark can return results as visuals.

To rename, add, or remove tools, a Mark administrator must delete the Ahrefs tools registry and re-add it. Complete the following steps: