Ahrefs Unleashes Page Type & Category Control Beyond the UI via API and Exports

Expanding Control: Page Types and Categories Now Accessible Via API and Exports

A significant update rolled out by @ahrefs, as announced on Feb 11, 2026 · 5:00 PM UTC, fundamentally changes how sophisticated users interact with deep site analysis data. Historically, granular insights regarding the type or category of a linking page, or pages within the SERP landscape, were often confined to viewing within the Ahrefs user interface (UI). This limitation posed a hurdle for those relying on large-scale data processing. Now, the platform has opened the floodgates, integrating Page Type and Category data directly into programmatic access points, recognizing that true enterprise-level SEO requires data mobility beyond the browser window.

This expansion is more than a simple feature parity update; it represents a maturation of the Ahrefs ecosystem, moving towards supporting fully automated and customized data pipelines. For power users, agency analysts, and enterprise SEO teams, this means that the crucial context surrounding domains, backlinks, and search result positions—context previously requiring manual extraction or cumbersome screen scraping—is now available directly where the data needs to land: in custom scripts, dedicated databases, or integrated third-party intelligence platforms. The implications for workflow efficiency and strategic depth are profound.

Core Features Unlocked: Where Data is Now Available

The most immediate impact of this release is the inclusion of Page Type and Category fields across the data export infrastructure. This allows analysts to pull comprehensive reports that natively include this vital contextual layer, drastically improving the fidelity of offline analysis.

Enhanced Data Fidelity in Offline Analysis

No longer must analysts run a full report in the UI, manually tag pages based on visible context, and then attempt to reconcile that context with bulk API pulls. Instead, the inclusion of Page Type and Category within standard downloads (like CSVs or database dumps) means that the entire analytical dataset—linking sources, anchor text, target URLs, and the context of the linking page—is perfectly synchronized upon extraction. This eliminates reliance on potentially outdated or inference-based tagging systems.

API Access: Powering Bespoke Reporting

The introduction of Page Type and Category data into the Ahrefs API opens up vast possibilities for custom development. Programmatic access is the cornerstone of modern MarTech integration. SEO teams can now craft bespoke monitoring tools that automatically flag anomalies based on the type of content linking to their assets.

• Custom Integrations: Imagine a system that automatically checks if a product page is receiving links primarily from forum signatures rather than high-authority editorial content.
• Linking External Tools: This context can now be seamlessly pushed into internal Content Management Systems (CMS) dashboards or Business Intelligence (BI) platforms, creating unified reporting views where SEO performance is contextualized alongside sales figures or customer lifetime value (CLV) data.

Marketing Central Platform (MCP) Integration

For those leveraging Ahrefs’ unified data environment, the Marketing Central Platform (MCP) benefits immensely. This context-aware data enriches the holistic view that MCP aims to provide. By pulling in these specifics, MCP can build richer attribution models, ensuring that when an entire marketing campaign is audited, the quality and nature of the surrounding digital real estate are factored into performance scores automatically.

Practical Applications and Automation Benefits

The true value of providing data through these channels is the enforcement of data consistency and the resultant explosion in automation efficiency.

Consistency Across Tools

In a multi-tool environment—where a CMS feeds data to a BI tool, which then pulls SEO metrics from an API—maintaining consistent data definitions is a perpetual battle. When Ahrefs provides the definitive Page Type/Category marker directly via the API, it establishes a single source of truth for that classification. This standardization prevents data drift, ensuring that when a link is reported as pointing from a "Category Page" in Ahrefs, it is classified identically in the in-house CRM. This seemingly minor detail saves countless hours in data reconciliation across quarterly reports.

Automation Efficiency

Auditing thousands of pages or millions of links becomes dramatically faster when contextual data is supplied upfront. Large-scale technical audits often require segmenting findings based on page purpose (e.g., filtering service pages versus blog posts). Previously, this might involve sequential queries or post-processing filtering. Now, these segments can be defined within the API request, drastically reducing processing time and minimizing the load on the analysis environment.

Use Case Examples

Consider the strategic advantage gained by leveraging this granular data in outreach:

• Targeted Outreach Strategy: An outreach team is analyzing competitor backlinks. By filtering the export to only include links pointing to competitor product pages that originate from authoritative resource hubs (Page Type = Resource Hub, Target Page Type = Product Page), they can isolate the most valuable competitor linking strategies to emulate or counter.
• Content Gap Analysis: In SERP reports, segmenting results by Page Type allows analysts to see if their primary competitors are dominating category pages with unique content formats, revealing opportunities where their current strategy might be too focused on standard blog formats.

Technical Availability and Next Steps

The platform confirms that this essential contextual data is now available across the scope of reports relevant to external linking and search visibility. Specifically, users can expect to find Page Type and Category fields integrated into both the Backlinks reports and the SERP reports data sets accessible via the established data pathways.

Users looking to leverage this immediately should review the latest API documentation for the Backlinks and SERP endpoints. Any existing scripts or data connectors utilizing these reports should be updated to include the new optional parameters or data fields specified by @ahrefs. For export users, simply re-running or configuring a new export request within the main interface should now present the Page Type and Category columns as selectable options. This is an invitation to immediately overhaul any outdated data pipelines that have been constrained by the former UI-only limitation.

Source: Ahrefs Post on X