A link index that has not raised its price since 2019

Majestic does one job. It crawls the web for links, scores them, and lets you query the result. You get no keyword volume database, no site audit, no content grader, and no AI writer bolted onto the side. Ahrefs and Semrush have grown into full marketing suites. Majestic is the last of the big link indexes that is still sold as just a link index.

It is also priced as if nothing has happened since 2019. Lite is $49.99 a month, Pro $99.99 and API $399.99, checked on the pricing page on 9 October 2026. Every Wayback Machine snapshot of that page from May 2019 to December 2025 shows the same three numbers.

The company behind it is Majestic-12 Ltd, registered in Birmingham, England. It was founded in 2004, sold the index as "Majestic SEO" from 2008 until 2014, and moved its head office to the iCentrum building in Birmingham in March 2026. Its crawler, MJ12bot, runs on a distributed network, and that comes up again in the reviews. The price has held. What Pro is supposed to buy you has not, and that is the part of this review worth reading before you subscribe.

Check Majestic's current plans

Trust Flow and Citation Flow: why people still pay

Majestic's two scores are the reason link builders keep an account even when they already own Ahrefs. Citation Flow is, in Majestic's words, "a score between 0-100 which helps to measure the link equity or 'power' the website or link carries". It measures popularity. Trust Flow starts from a set of seed sites Majestic picked by manual review and measures how closely a site connects to them, so "sites that may have some questionable links would see a much lower score."

The useful reading is the gap between the two. A domain with Citation Flow 45 and Trust Flow 8 has plenty of links and very few from anywhere reputable, which is the usual profile of a bought-link or expired-domain network. A single authority number cannot show you that split, and that is exactly what Ahrefs' Domain Rating and Moz's Domain Authority are.

Topical Trust Flow goes one step further. It sorts that trust into more than 800 topic pools, so a "personal finance" blog whose trust actually comes from gambling sites is visible in a few seconds. If your job is deciding whether a $300 guest-post placement is worth paying for, that is the fastest check on the market.

One caveat. These are Majestic's own metrics. Google does not use Trust Flow, and a site can be gamed into a decent score like any other third-party number.

Pricing and plans

Three published plans, monthly or 12-month billing only. Prices below were checked on 9 October 2026 and exclude VAT. The page detects your currency, so UK visitors see pounds.

The API plan has a units selector offering 300 million and 1,000 million units. The prices beside them appear to be $799.99 and $1,599.99 a month, but the page does not label which price belongs to which tier, so confirm with sales before budgeting. Existing Pro customers can also move to Pro L and Pro XL, which have no published price.

Payment is by Visa, Amex, Mastercard or PayPal. Bank transfer is accepted only on annual Pro plans and above.

The terms that cost money

There is no free trial. Instead, Lite and Pro carry a 7-day money-back guarantee, but only on your first-ever Majestic plan, and you have to ask support for it within those seven days. API plans are not covered at all. Unused allowances do not roll over from one billing period to the next (Terms 6.2), so a quiet month is simply lost. Cancel an annual plan halfway and you get nothing back for the remaining months (Terms 15.2).

The one to watch is what happens when you leave. Once the last paid period ends, every report you generated is locked, then purged "after a period" that Majestic does not specify. Download what you need before the renewal date, not after.

Try it free first

Because there is no trial, use the free tools before paying. The free Backlink Checker on majestic.com and the Majestic Backlink Analyzer browser extension both show Trust Flow, Citation Flow, link counts and referring domains, and the extension needs no account for basic metrics. Access is gated by a reCaptcha that, by Majestic's own description, "doesn't last forever", so expect to re-verify.

What Lite leaves out

Lite gets the parts most link builders need: the Fresh Index, Site Explorer, Trust Flow and Topical Trust Flow, referring domains and subnets, Link Context, the Bulk Backlink Checker and backlink campaigns.

Its limit is getting data out. Lite has no raw data exports, only PDF reports. You can scroll through 5,000 backlinks in Site Explorer, but turning them into a spreadsheet for a disavow file or an outreach list needs Pro.

Pro adds raw exports, Compare Sites, Clique Hunter, Backlink History, Flow Metric History, email alerts, custom reports, the Author Explorer launched in 2024, an experimental rank tracker that reads your Google Search Console data, and the Historic Index. Report units rise from 60 to 300 a month.

Both Lite and Pro are single-user. A three-person agency pays for three Pro accounts, about $300 a month, or moves to API at $399.99 for five users. Lite's own allowance has not grown with the years either: same 1 million analysis units, same 5,000 rows as in 2019. Pro's row limit quietly doubled from 15,000 to 30,000 by 2024, the one place the value improved.

The Historic Index stopped updating in May 2024

Majestic keeps two indexes. The Fresh Index covers roughly the last four months and updates throughout the day. On 9 October 2026 the pricing page footer reported 185,064,500,632 unique URLs crawled between 10 June and 8 October 2026, last updated an hour earlier.

The Historic Index is the Pro-only one, which the glossary calls "the largest index of backlinks available on the web". It holds 4.5 trillion crawled URLs going back to June 2006. The same footer, on the same day, shows its date range ending on 26 March 2024 and "Last updated 03 May 2024". The FAQ still says the Historic Index is "always a few days behind what is happening now". On the day we checked, it was two and a half years behind.

We found no announcement explaining the gap, and Majestic has not said the Historic Index is discontinued. But the practical effect for a Pro buyer is real. Going by the published date ranges, a link that appeared after March 2024 and disappeared before June 2026 is in neither index. If you are rebuilding the timeline of a ranking drop or a lost-link problem from that period, Majestic cannot show it to you. Ask support when the next Historic update is due before you pay double for Pro on the strength of it.

What shipped in 2026

The frozen index is not a sign of a dormant company. Majestic has shipped steadily this year. In January, Advanced Filters came to the whole of Site Explorer, giving the web interface the kind of query filtering that used to need the API. February brought a TLD Checker. In April, the old Keyword Generator was rebuilt as N-grams Near Links, which shows the words that appear around links to a site.

What you will not find is an AI feature. Majestic's 2025 and 2026 blog posts about AI are commentary and training material, not product.

Support and what users complain about

Support runs through a contact form or [email protected], and Majestic says its support tool is the preferred route. There is no live chat, the phone number goes to voicemail, and no hours or response-time target are published on any plan, including the $399.99 API tier.

Review sites give a thin signal. Trustpilot shows 1.9 out of 5, but from only 16 reviews, several of which seem to be about other products. G2 and Capterra summaries sit around 4.3, with a dated interface and the links-only scope as the usual complaints. The one recurring Trustpilot theme that is clearly about Majestic is its crawler: one site owner wrote in August 2025 that MJ12bot "hit my small site thousands of times, using almost 1 GB of bandwidth". That is not your problem as a subscriber, but it explains why some site owners block MJ12bot, and any crawler that is blocked cannot see the links on those sites.

Verdict: who should buy Majestic, and who should not

Buy Lite if you build links, vet guest-post placements or run digital PR, and you already pay for a keyword tool. At $49.99 a month, Trust Flow and Topical Trust Flow are the cheapest serious way to spot a junk link profile, and the Fresh Index is genuinely current.

Buy Pro only if you need raw exports or multi-site comparisons every week. Do not buy it for the Historic Index until Majestic updates it or explains the freeze.

Skip Majestic if you want one tool for keywords, site audits, rank tracking and backlinks. Ahrefs and Semrush cost more but replace Majestic plus two other subscriptions. If you want an all-in-one on a smaller budget, look at Serpstat. If your clients already talk in Domain Authority, Moz Pro will save you a translation step.

Majestic is a specialist that kept its price and its focus for seven years. Lite is still good value. Pro, right now, is selling an index that stopped in 2024.

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