Majestic Review & 4 Alternatives (2026)

Majestic is a backlink index and nothing else - no keyword suite, no site audits worth the name, just two decades of crawl data and the metrics built on top of it. Majestic-12 Ltd launched the project in 2004 and still runs it from Birmingham, England. Per the live statistics published on its own homepage, the Fresh Index held 226.6 billion unique crawled URLs (756.6 billion found) on a rolling window covering 11 February to 11 June 2026, while the Historic Index holds 4.5 trillion crawled URLs reaching back to June 2006. Its proprietary scores - Trust Flow, Citation Flow and Topical Trust Flow - are the reason it appears in this directory: adult domains get scored like everything else, and Trust Flow has quietly become the default pricing metric in the link-selling business, adult niches very much included. When a marketplace lists a 'TF 30+' placement, this is the tool that number comes from.

There is no Majestic affiliate program. I checked their site, their FAQ and the usual aggregators: nothing on majestic.com offers a referral commission, and third-party write-ups claiming '30% commissions' do not cite a single page on Majestic's own domain - treat those as fiction. The closest thing to a partner scheme is OpenApps, which grants developers temporary API access to build tools on Majestic data; that is a product integration, not a payout. So this listing is a cost line. Pricing as of June 2026: Lite at $49.99/month with 1 million analysis units, Pro at $99.99/month with 20 million units plus Historic Index access, and the API plan at $399.99/month with 100 million units and 5 user seats. Annual billing brings those to roughly $41.67, $83.33 and $333.33 per month respectively. Lite and Pro carry a 7-day money-back guarantee for new customers, and they take cards, PayPal, and bank transfer on annual Pro-and-up accounts.

The day-to-day value is Site Explorer pointed at your own domain, a competitor, or a domain someone is trying to sell you a link from. Trust Flow against Citation Flow is the fast smell test - a CF far above TF usually means volume without quality - and Topical Trust Flow breaks trust down by subject, with dedicated Adult categories (Adult/Business, Adult/Computers, Adult/Regional and so on) in its taxonomy. That topical breakdown is the practical edge for this industry: you can see whether a 'high TF' domain earned its trust in adult-adjacent neighbourhoods or in something irrelevant, and spot mainstream-looking sites whose link profile is actually saturated with adult and gambling links before you put your money or your brand next to them. The Bulk Backlink Checker handles list-vetting at scale, Link Context shows where on the page a link sits, and Pro's Historic Index access digs up links long since removed - handy for expired-domain shopping. The free tier (limited backlink checker, browser extension, Majestic Million) is enough to decide if you need the paid index.

Majestic has been running for 22 years without ownership drama, publishes its index counts live, and the Fresh Index updates continuously - it showed an update within the previous hour when I checked. That is the good half. The blind spots: the Historic Index, one of Pro's headline features, was last updated 3 May 2024 and its data ends 26 March 2024, so as of June 2026 it is more than two years stale - fine for archaeology, useless for anything recent. User reviews consistently flag the dated interface, and a structural complaint matters more: plenty of SEOs block the MJ12bot crawler outright, so Majestic's fresh coverage has gaps Ahrefs does not, and reviewers comparing the two report Majestic missing live links. Add the obvious caveat that Trust Flow, being the link trade's pricing currency, is also its most deliberately manipulated metric. Support is adequate for a tool this size - they don't publish response-time commitments, and the 7-day refund window is the practical safety net.

If you buy, sell or audit links in the adult space, Majestic earns its $49.99/month, because the people on the other side of the deal are quoting you Majestic numbers - you need to see the same data to negotiate, and Topical Trust Flow tells you whether the trust is real and relevant. Expired-domain hunters and PBN auditors get extra mileage from the Historic Index despite its staleness, since old link profiles are exactly what it holds. Agencies running adult clients should pair it with Ahrefs rather than choose: Majestic for trust topology and price-checking the link trade, Ahrefs for fresh coverage and keywords. If your traffic is bought rather than ranked - pops, native, ad networks - skip it entirely; a link index does nothing for a media buyer. And if you arrived hoping to promote it: there is no program, no commission, and nothing to put a tracking link on.