How To Fix 403 Errors Viewed From Ahrefs

Quick summary

Ahrefs Site Audit automatically crawls your website and surfaces 403 errors and other 4xx HTTP status codes so you can identify and fix access-denied issues before they harm your SEO. Once the crawl is complete, you can review each affected URL and export the full error list to a CSV for further analysis.

Steps

1. Go to Ahrefs and click on Site Audit at the top of the dashboard.
2. Click on New Project if you haven't run a site audit before.
3. Import data using Google Search Console to enrich your site audit.
4. If you don't have Search Console access, choose Add manually instead.
5. Enter your website URL, give the project an appropriate project name, then click Continue.
6. Skip the Search Console connection step by clicking Continue if you didn't import data in the previous step.
7. Toggle the crawl frequency setting to schedule future audits.
8. Ensure Run first crawl now is turned ON, then click Continue.
9. The website crawl will begin — note this can take an hour or more to complete.
10. Once the audit is done, open your project to view the results.
11. Click on Client Errors (4xx) under the HTTP status codes distribution section.
12. Review all 4xx errors Ahrefs detected while crawling your website.
13. Locate your specific 403 errors within the error list.
14. Click on any error link to see a detailed error overview for that URL.
15. Click Export to download all 4xx errors as a CSV file for further review.